“Perhaps we ought to do it like the Russians Sir. Build the engines cheap and throw them away after seven hundred hours.”

“The Russians don’t get seven hundred any more than we get a thousand. And we can’t just throw old engines away, we’re too short of replacements. Even with the government buying every engine Pratt and Westinghouse can turn out, we’re still short. They don’t even build a lot of the engines we need any more. And as for them..” Cochrane gestured at the row of B-2 Spirit bombers parked on the hard stand.

His aide knew what his General meant. If the problems were bad on the conventional aircraft, they were many times worse on the B-2. The aircraft had been designed for operations in very hostile air environments where it would be the target for multiple batteries of surface to air missiles. It was built so that it would be near-impossible to see on radar and that was a great achievement. Only it was one that had turned out to be completely useless, the Baldricks in Hell hadn’t had a single anti-aircraft system to their name and human aircraft flew their missions without any kind of serious opposition. Only, the same dust that wrecking engines destroyed the delicate anti-radar materials that gave the B-2 its evasive capability. B-2 serviceability had never been good, now it was abysmal. Of the twenty B-2s operated by the 509th Bomb Group, only one was operational.

“We need the C version like yesterday.” Colonel Harmsworth spoke glumly. As aide to General Cochrane, one of his jobs was tracking the efforts Northrop were making to produce a B-2 that was built of conventional materials but it was harder than it seemed. Effectively it meant an entirely new aircraft.