Key Points and Summary: The US “Operation Midnight Hammer” strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, involving 125 aircraft including B-2 stealth bombers, highlights two critical lessons for the Pentagon.
-First, the qualitative advantage of sophisticated, high-tech platforms like the B-2 is essential for complex missions against heavily defended, hardened targets, demonstrating a level of integration that only the US can achieve.
-Second, and more pointedly, numbers still matter.
-The B-2 and F-22 programs were drastically cut after the Cold War, leaving the US with “woefully under-equipped” fleets to face simultaneous threats from Iran, Russia, and China, underscoring the urgent need to procure new platforms like the B-21 in sufficient quantities.
Why the US Needs More B-21s: The Lesson of ‘Midnight Hammer’
There are numerous takeaways from this past weekend’s daring 30+ hour raid by 125 aircraft, including B-2 Spirit stealth bombers and tactical aircraft, supplemented by cruise missiles, on what have been previously identified as the major Iranian nuclear weapons research facilities.
Dubbed “Operation Midnight Hammer”, the plan was characterized by US officials as a “precision strike” that “devastated the Iranian nuclear program.”
The extent of the damage to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, as well as how much of the research and development centers dedicated to the development of a nuclear weapon, are still functional.
“BDA [battle damage assessment] is a tricky proposition in this kind of a situation,” said a NATO-nation intelligence analyst with experience in analysing developments in Iran. “It is particularly so when the capabilities you are trying to wipe out are located so deep beneath the surface of the earth. We may never know just how effective this raid was.”
Despite a plethora of imagery and other evidence to the contrary, Iranian spokesmen are denying that any severe damage was done to their nuclear program and that its uranium enrichment program will continue.
They say only above-ground structures were damaged, and they have pledged retaliation.
But, speaking to the Washington Post, a senior Israeli official stated their early assessment is that the site in Isfahan, one of the three nuclear weapons centers targeted, was “annihilated.” The other two targeted facilities at Fordow and Natanz were “severely damaged,” said the same official speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the intelligence means used to gather those assessments.
The Importance of Qualitative Advantage
Looking at the attack on Iran itself, how it was carried out, and the effectiveness of the weapons platforms employed, there are some lessons learned that should inform future US actions – both in the Middle East region and other theatres, as well as in Washington, where procurement decisions are made.
One is that, for all the many complaints over the years about the cost of sophisticated weapons, the qualitative advantage of these US systems is what makes the difference in modern warfare.
Some of this has been seen in Ukraine, in which smaller units with far fewer resources have been able to use superior-performing US weaponry to fight the Russian military to a standstill and to inflict on it more losses of more than 1 million dead, wounded, and missing.
The importance of sophistication in US technology also extends to major high-end platforms like the B-2 stealth bomber. These “big-ticket” items in the US arsenal not only performed flawlessly, but in the words of the Chairman of Joint Chiefs, US Air Force (USAF) Gen. Dan Caine, “the B-2s linked up with escort and support aircraft in a complex, tightly timed maneuver requiring exact synchronization across multiple platforms in a narrow piece of airspace, all done with minimal communications.”
“This type of integration is exactly what our Joint Force does better than anyone else in the world,” he continued.
Multiple military analysts assess the number of combat aircraft joining up from multiple take-off points, coordinating with one another, plus airborne tankers, submarines, and naval vessels, as representing an unprecedented synchronization that only the US military could carry out.
Numbers Are Still Paramount
Listening in the previous week to the small army of military and political leaders who attended the Paris Air Show at Le Bourget Aerodrome there is a consistent message: the decades since the Cold War have seen a near-catastrophic contraction in defense production by the allied nations. Now, there is a frantic effort underway in playing “catch-up.”
This unfortunate tendency is ironically seen with the aircraft that was the star of this operation, the B-2 stealth bomber.
The B-21 Raider: The Bomber Can’t Be Cut Like B-2 and F-22 Raptor
As one retired USAF General who participated in developing the requirements for the aircraft pointed out when speaking to National Security Journal, “we were supposed to have 100 of the B-2s built, but that was cut back to 21, which we are finding out today is not enough. We thought the Russians were finished with threatening to invade half the world, and that this number was more than enough in a post-Cold War world. This was clearly not true, and now we have a handful of bombers in a 100+ bomber requirement world.”
In the same vein, “after having spent billions to develop it, the total buy for the F-22 fighter was progressively reduced from an initial program planned 750 to only 188, which again today is not enough,” he continued.
“If there is a larger lesson here it is that numbers really matter,” he concluded. “If we are going to keep rogue nations like Iran from going nuclear, support NATO in the fight with Russia, and also be prepared to defend Taiwan. Well, we are more than woefully under-equipped to take on all three of those endeavours at once. So, when the USAF now says they need 100 or more of the new B-21, or that they need more F-47s than to just replace the F-22s with them one-for-one, someone needs to take them at their word.”
About the Author:
Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw. He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments and the Australian government in the fields of defense technology and weapon systems design. Over the past 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.
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