B-1B Lancer bombers, like those based at Ellsworth Air Force Base, have played a key role in the war in Iraq, according to Pat McElgunn, director of the Ellsworth Task Force for the Rapid City Area Chamber of Commerce.

The B-1, launched in the mid-1980s as a long-range, high-speed, low-altitude penetrating bomber, sat out the first Gulf war in 1991.

But beginning in the mid '90s the Air Force began retrofitting it to become a conventional bomber.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the B-1 is being used to deliver precision close-air support for troops on the ground, often from 20,000 to 30,000 feet, McElgunn said.

In March of 2007, the Air Force declared the B-1 the most valuable plane of the Iraq war.

At that time, B-1 bombers had flown more than 2,600 sorties over Iraq.

McElgunn said B-1s were flying about 20 percent of all the U.S. air missions in Iraq but were delivering about 80 percent of the total tonnage of bombs.

Air Force officials say the B-1 is the weapon of choice in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars because it so efficient, according to McElgunn.

That's because a B-1 can take off and fly to Iraq, getting its fuel tanks topped off mid-air on the way, and orbit the country for hours while it waits for troops on the ground to call up with targets to hit, McElgunn said. It then needs only one refueling to return to base.

A single B-1 can move from one side of the country to another very quickly and deliver bombs to a precise target, he said. A B-1 can carry up to 24 tons of bombs.

"When you take a fully loaded B-1 above the whole country and orbit it, it becomes basically a mobile base for close-air support," McElgunn said.

That's important to coalition troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan because they don't have artillery, McElgunn said.

The B-1 carries an array of sophisticated precision bombs. When the pilot "acquires" a target from ground forces, he or she flies into a large aerial "window" from which the bombs can be released. Meanwhile, the offensive weapons systems officers plug the target information into global positioning systems on the bombs.

The GPS system guides the bomb to the target. "After the bomb is released, it knows where it is and where it needs to go," he said.

McElgunn gave an example of how wide a window a pilot has for dropping bombs:

He said a B-1 flying over Hermosa could release a bomb aimed at a particular corner of a house in Rapid City, and the bomb would guide itself to that spot. Meanwhile, after releasing the bomb, the B-1 could turn east, kick in its afterburners and be approaching the Missouri River by the time the bomb hit.

That's how a B-1 from Ellsworth could drop a bomb on a particular house in a Baghdad suburb where Saddam Hussein was reported to be located in 2003.

McElgunn said the Air Force has been rotating the two combat B-1 squadrons at Ellsworth and one squadron at Dyess Air Force Base in Texas to the Middle East for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He said there are probably fewer than a dozen B-1s based in the Middle East at any one time.

Meanwhile, flight crews, maintenance crews and support personnel from the two bases have also been rotating in and out of the theater of operations, McElgunn said.

"For all practical purposes, there will always be a B-1 unit of some size located in the Persian Gulf," McElgunn said.

Contact Steve Miller at 394-8417 or steve.miller@rapidcityjournal.com