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B-52, Where Are You?Why the Pentagon doesn't want you to know its bombers finally work.

By Gregg EasterbrookPosted Monday, April 2, 2007, at 7:05 AM ET

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In 2003, Gregg Easterbrook previewed the use of JDAMs in Iraq. Fred Kaplan argued that super-accurate weapons have made military planners overconfident. Dan Kois gave a primer on how to pilot a drone. William Saletan pondered how remote-controlled killing is changing the practice—and the morality—of warfare. Daniel Engber explained how to aim a rocket.

Yet the Pentagon plans a breathtaking new investment in fighter planes, while doing naught but study what type of bomber might be built decades in the future. One reason is that the emergence of the accurate bomber just wasn't in anyone's playbook. From Air Force pioneer Billy Mitchell on, air-power advocates kept promising high-altitude bombing would win wars, allow "surgical strikes," and so on. When this hadn't happened by the 1990s, the Air Force seemed to admit defeat and gave up on bombers for conventional war. Suddenly, precision bombing works, but the message has yet to sink in.

There are other factors at play. One is that almost two decades of lobbying and logrolling stand behind that $320 billion fighter purchase plan. The fix is in with key congressional committees, and the pork has been elaborately scheduled for division among constituents and congressional districts. The aerospace contracting lobby does not want any change in the copious money flow now authorized for new fighters.

Air Force senior leadership is thick with former fighter jocks, who find the new F-22 superfighter and its companion multiservice F-35 sexier than bombers. Piloting modern bombers is not meaningfully different from flying Boeing 737s for Southwest Airlines—there's no nailed-to-your-seat maneuvering, no sense of rocketing through the sky. Air Force leaders know that a new bomber designed for satellite-guided weapons would likely be a vanilla aircraft—a modified Boeing airliner could fill the role. In Afghanistan and the second Iraq campaign, bombers have mainly "orbited," or turned lazy circles, until the time came to release self-guided munitions. Maybe a remote-controlled drone platform could do that, and the Air Force is not eager to hasten the replacement of pilots by data links.

It's true that the Pentagon does need some new fighters with updated technology. The F-22 is head and shoulders better than any other fighter ever built, while the F-35 would allow three services to replace their radar-visible fighters with a stealthy plane. But after $320 billion is spent building hundreds of F-22s and thousands of F-35s, how would they be used? Only a few would be employed in the interceptor role of shooting down enemy fighters, since no adversary nation is even attempting to manufacture fighters or air-to-air missiles capable of contesting those the United States already has. Plans call for the majority of the new F-22s and F-35s to be employed mainly for dropping smart bombs from low altitude. That is, they will do at fantastic expense what new satellite-guided devices from bombers can do relatively cheaply. This is why the Pentagon has not been crowing much about the success of its bombers above Afghanistan and Iraq: If that were understood, the case for spending $320 billion on smart-bombing fighters would fade.