Only nineteen exist. Each has a name of its own, like ships. Spirit of Missouri, Spirit of Texas, Spirit of Georgia. Nineteen stealth bombers operating from a single base, Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, crewed by two people each, capable of flying from the centre of the United States to any point on the planet, delivering eighteen thousand kilograms of nuclear or conventional ordnance, and returning without refuelling. Nineteen aircraft that cost upwards of two billion dollars apiece (considerably more, classified info). Nineteen aircraft that, together, give a single country the ability to destroy any target on Earth without being detected.
The B-2 Spirit is, quite possibly, the most extraordinary war machine in existence.
A Wing That Flies
The first thing that strikes you about the B-2 is that it doesn’t look like any other aircraft. It has no fuselage in the conventional sense, no tail, no vertical surfaces. It is a pure flying wing, a shape that seems more biological than mechanical, like a manta ray with a wingspan of a hundred and seventy feet. The reason for that shape is stealth: every angle, every surface, every curve of the B-2 is designed to absorb or deflect radar waves. The aircraft is not invisible, but its radar cross-section is so small that air defence systems mistake it for a bird or fail to register it at all.
Northrop Grumman developed the B-2 starting in the late seventies, under a classified programme called the Advanced Technology Bomber. The idea was to build a bomber capable of penetrating Soviet air defences, the densest and most sophisticated in the world, and delivering nuclear weapons on strategic targets. Jack Northrop, the company’s founder, had experimented with flying wings since the forties, but the technology of the time could not solve the stability problems the configuration presented. It was the fly-by-wire computers of the eighties that made possible what aerodynamics alone could not: a stable, controllable flying wing.
The first flight was on July 17, 1989. The Cold War ended two years later.
Too Expensive to Exist
The original plan was to build a hundred and thirty-two B-2s. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Congress decided a nuclear penetration bomber was no longer needed at that scale. Production was cut to twenty-one units. But because the development costs were already sunk, the per-unit price shot up to figures that seem invented: upwards of two billion dollars per aircraft, in dollars of the time. It is the most expensive aircraft ever built, by an enormous margin.
The decision to cut production was rational at the time, but it had consequences that resonate to this day. With only twenty-one aircraft, then twenty after the accident in Guam in 2008, and now nineteen after another loss in 2022 that was deemed uneconomical to repair, every B-2 lost is irreplaceable. The production line closed more than twenty years ago. The tooling was destroyed or reassigned. Rebuilding it would take years and cost billions. When the Spirit of Georgia suffered a landing gear collapse in 2021, the Air Force spent four years and twenty-three million dollars repairing it, because the alternative was losing another aircraft from a total you can count on your fingers.
Nineteen aircraft to cover the entire planet. It is a “high-value, low-density” fleet, in Pentagon jargon, which is an elegant way of saying there are too few and each one matters too much.
Operation Midnight Hammer
For years, critics of the B-2 questioned whether a bomber designed for the Cold War was still relevant. The aircraft had seen action in Kosovo in 1999, in Afghanistan in 2001, and in Libya in 2011, but always against adversaries with rudimentary air defences. The question was whether the B-2 could do what it was supposed to do: penetrate serious defences and destroy hardened targets.
In June 2025, the question was answered.
Operation Midnight Hammer, the American strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, was the largest combat operation in the B-2’s history. Seven bombers flew the mission, with another six acting as decoys flying in the opposite direction. Crews flew for thirty-seven hours, with multiple aerial refuellings, from Whiteman and possibly from Diego Garcia. The B-2s employed penetration munitions designed to destroy reinforced underground facilities, exactly the type of target they had been conceived for forty years earlier.
The result was the significant degradation of Iran’s nuclear programme. President Trump described the operation before the Israeli Knesset as proof of the bomber’s continued relevance, and announced plans to expand the fleet, though the Pentagon did not confirm any new production programme. Most likely he was referring to modernisations of the existing aircraft or, perhaps, to the B-21 Raider programme, the B-2’s successor being developed by Northrop Grumman.
But beyond the military results, Midnight Hammer demonstrated something Pentagon planners always knew and sceptics underestimated: the combination of stealth, global reach, and payload capacity the B-2 offers has no equivalent. No other weapons system can do what the B-2 does. A cruise missile can destroy an individual target. A fighter can dominate an airspace. But only a stealth bomber can fly from the continental United States, penetrate the most sophisticated air defences in the world, destroy multiple hardened targets with precision munitions, and fly home. All without putting a single American soldier on enemy soil.
What It Means
The B-2 Spirit is an almost perfect illustration of an uncomfortable truth about the contemporary world: American military power has no peer, and that asymmetry is, to a great extent, what sustains a functional global order.
There is exactly one country that can, within hours, project precision destructive force against any target at any point on the planet. It is the same country that guarantees the security of Europe through NATO, that deters Chinese aggression in the Western Pacific, that keeps global sea lanes open, and that, when a state decides to develop nuclear weapons in violation of international agreements, has the capacity to stop it.
This is not triumphalism. It is a description of reality. Global peace, to the extent it exists, is not sustained by UN resolutions or multilateral good intentions. It is sustained by the capacity and the willingness of the United States to use force, and by its adversaries’ perception that that capacity is real. Nineteen aircraft stationed in Missouri are a small but fundamental part of that equation.
The B-2 will eventually be replaced by the B-21 Raider, which promises to be cheaper to operate, easier to produce in larger numbers, and adapted to the threats of the twenty-first century. Northrop Grumman conducted the B-21’s first flight in 2023, and the Air Force plans for it to reach full operational capability around 2032. When that happens, the surviving B-2s will retire after nearly four decades of service.
But during those four decades, nineteen aircraft named after spirits maintained a capability no adversary could match and no ally could replicate. That is the definition of supremacy. And it is also the definition of American power in its purest expression: silent, invisible, absolutely devastating, and based out of a cornfield in the Midwest.