Starting next year, B-2 bombers will begin regular worldwide training deployments to each of the US combatant command’s areas of responsibility, according to 8th Air Force Commander Maj. Gen. Stephen Wilson. “Our B-2s will rotate to forward operating locations all over the world in small numbers for a few weeks at a time, a couple of times a year,” Wilson told the Daily Report in a Nov. 7 interview. Air Force Global Strike Command pulled B-2s out of the recurring bomber rotations to Anderson AFB, Guam, in 2010 after a serious engine fire with one B-2 earlier that year at Andersen and the loss of another airframe in 2008 in a crash at the Pacific air hub. Instead, “we’re going to put them into the ‘new normal,'” beginning with a short Pacific deployment for an exercise next year, said Wilson. “We’re doing that with all the geographic combatant commanders,” including those in Central and South America, Southwest Asia, and Europe in addition to the Asia-Pacific, he said. Since the US commanders for these regions have no permanently assigned bombers, “they want to exercise and train with them regularly,” he said. As a result, “both of us will get better,” concluded Wilson.
The Senate voted Nov. 10 to approve a stopgap funding bill that would reopen the federal government and keep it funded through January, a significant step toward ending the longest shutdown in U.S. history.
