The US military struck five underground weapons facilities in areas of Yemen controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia on Wednesday, using warplanes that included B-2 stealth bombers in an attack that could also serve as a warning to Iran.
Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said President Joe Biden had ordered the strikes to “further degrade the Houthis’ capability” to attack ships and disrupt the flow of commerce in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Austin made no mention of Iran, but the rare use of the B-2, the only plane capable of striking Iran’s deeply buried nuclear facilities, against the Houthis was notable at a time of tensions between Israel and Iran that threaten to spill into full-blown war.
“This was a unique demonstration of the United States’ ability to target facilities that our adversaries seek to keep out of reach, no matter how deeply buried underground, hardened or fortified,” Austin said in a statement. “The employment of US Air Force B-2 Spirit long-range stealth bombers demonstrates US global strike capabilities to take action against these targets when necessary, anytime, anywhere.”
A statement from US Central Command on Wednesday night said that US Navy “assets” also took part in the attack, which the unit, based in Tampa, Florida, said was launched against “various advanced conventional weapons used to target US and international military and civilian vessels navigating international waters.”
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Attacking so-called hardened buried sites generally requires the use of specially built bombs that have much thicker steel cases and contain a smaller amount of explosives than similarly sized general-purpose bombs. The heavy casings of such “bunker buster” bombs allows the munition to stay intact as it punches through soil, rock or concrete before detonating.
The B-2 is the only warplane that can carry the largest of this class of weapon in the Pentagon’s inventory: A 30,000-pound GPS-guided munition called the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP, that contains the equivalent of about 5,600 pounds of TNT. A Pentagon spokesperson declined to say whether that weapon was used in the attack on Wednesday.
The US air force had only acknowledged building 20 such bombs as of 2015, according to publicly available documents, and five were expended in testing at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in 2012. According to a US air force site, the weapon is capable of reaching targets up to 200ft underground before exploding.
The US arsenal also includes 5,000-pound and 2,000-pound penetrator bombs that can be dropped by other warplanes.
The US air force is believed to have just 19 operational B-2 bombers, all of which are permanently based at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, though the Pentagon has occasionally deployed some for exercises in the Pacific and Indian Ocean.
Wednesday’s deployment marked the first time since January 2017 that the wing-shaped stealth bomber has flown a combat mission, according to Bloomberg. Back then, two B-2s flew 30-hour round-trip mission to bomb an Islamic State training camp in Libya.
For B-2 bombers to take part in Wednesday’s attack, the aircraft would have either had to fly round-trip from Missouri to Yemen and refuel mid-air, or take off from a base much closer to their targets.
“Due to operational security, we won’t discuss our operating locations within the region,” Maj Gen Patrick S Ryder, the Pentagon spokesperson, said in response to a question about where the B-2s were launched for Wednesday’s attack.
The Houthis started targeting civilian tankers and cargo ships at sea in solidarity with Hamas last year. US forces have shot down dozens of Houthi attack drones and anti-ship missiles launched at commercial merchant vessels since mid-November and have also frequently launched air strikes against Houthi missile and radar sites.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. – Additional reporting Bloomberg