The U.S. Air Force publicly confirmed this week that its B-2 Spirit stealth bomber can now hunt and sink enemy warships, a capability demonstrated during a live-fire exercise in the Western Pacific that sent a decommissioned Navy vessel to the bottom of the Philippine Sea.
The disclosure marks the first time the Air Force has acknowledged the B-2 can carry and fire the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, or LRASM. The revelation came after Exercise Valiant Shield 26, during which a B-2 launched the weapon at the former USS Juneau north of the Mariana Islands, more than 200 nautical miles off the coast of Guam.
The timing is no accident. The Pentagon’s own projections show China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy growing from more than 370 battle force ships today to roughly 435 by 2030. The U.S. Navy, by contrast, operates about 291. That gap is widening, and the Air Force just signaled it intends to help close it, from the air.
The sinking exercise unfolded over June 27 and 28. U.S. and partner-nation forces hammered the decommissioned Juneau with coordinated air, surface, and subsurface strikes. A Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force submarine delivered the final blow with a torpedo, Fox News reported, citing a Navy press release.
The Juneau had a long service record. Commissioned in 1969, the amphibious transport dock saw action in both the Vietnam War and Operation Desert Storm before being decommissioned in 2008. Its last mission was serving as a target, a role that let the military rehearse exactly the kind of coordinated kill chain it would need in a real fight against a peer navy.
Pacific Air Forces confirmed to The War Zone that the B-2 fired the anti-ship missile at the Juneau during the exercise. Fox News Digital reported that PACAF could not immediately be reached for additional details.
Gen. Kevin B. Schneider, commander of Pacific Air Forces, framed the demonstration in direct terms. In a statement, Schneider said:
“The B-2’s impressive performance underscores the U.S. military’s commitment to adaptability and flexibility in the face of emerging security challenges.”
He went further, tying the exercise explicitly to the broader strategic competition in the Pacific:
“By prioritizing counter-maritime strike operations, we can maintain a decisive edge over adversaries, protect our national interests and ensure the free and open Pacific that underpin our global security.”
That language, “counter-maritime strike operations”, is worth pausing on. The B-2 was designed during the Cold War primarily as a nuclear-capable deep-penetration bomber. Its conventional role expanded over the decades, but its public profile has centered on land-based targets: bunkers, air defenses, hardened facilities. Arming it with a ship-killing missile represents a meaningful expansion of its mission set.
The B-2 already proved its versatility in recent months. During Operation Midnight Hammer, B-2s flew from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to strike Iranian nuclear facilities, dropping 30,000-pound GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs, the weapon’s first combat use. That operation demonstrated the bomber’s global reach and its ability to destroy deeply buried targets that no other platform could touch.
The strikes on Iran drew both praise and political resistance at home. Global leaders praised the resulting peace agreement as it moved toward a signing in Switzerland, but the path there was contested.
Congressional Democrats pushed back repeatedly on the military campaign. Senate Republicans defeated five separate Democratic efforts to end the Iran operation, a reminder that maintaining military readiness requires political will as much as hardware.
The broader Iran strategy included a naval blockade that targeted Tehran’s oil revenue and military funding. That blockade, combined with the precision of strikes like the U.S.-Israeli operation against senior Iranian leadership, underscored how seriously the administration took the threat, and how effectively it used force to reach a diplomatic outcome.
The LRASM is purpose-built for exactly the kind of fight the Pentagon is preparing for in the Western Pacific. In a conflict with China, the challenge is not finding targets on land. It is finding and destroying warships spread across millions of square miles of open ocean, defended by layered air defenses and operating under the cover of China’s growing anti-access capabilities.
A stealth bomber that can fly undetected deep into contested airspace and launch precision anti-ship missiles changes the math. It means a single B-2 sortie from a base thousands of miles away could threaten Chinese surface combatants without ever entering the range of their shipboard defenses. That is a problem Beijing’s naval planners have to account for, and accounting for it costs resources, attention, and operational flexibility.
The numbers tell the story plainly. China’s fleet of more than 370 warships already outnumbers the U.S. Navy’s 291. Pentagon projections put the Chinese fleet at roughly 435 by 2030. Building enough American ships to match that total is a decades-long endeavor. Arming existing bombers with ship-killing missiles is something the Air Force can do now.
The B-2 will not carry this mission alone forever. The B-21 Raider, the Air Force’s next-generation stealth bomber, is expected to begin entering operational service in 2027. While the specific weapons the B-21 will carry have not been fully disclosed, the platform is being designed with the Indo-Pacific theater firmly in mind.
China, for its part, is developing its own stealth bomber, the H-20, though its current operational status remains unclear. The race to field long-range, survivable strike platforms capable of shaping a naval conflict is well underway on both sides of the Pacific.
The naval blockade strategy tested against Iran offered a preview of how the U.S. might leverage combined air and sea power in a future crisis. The Western Pacific would demand that approach at a far larger scale, and with far less margin for error.
Several details remain undisclosed. The Air Force has not said how many B-2s participated in Valiant Shield 26 or which allied nations beyond Japan took part. The full scope of the B-2’s anti-ship weapons integration, how many LRASMs a single sortie can carry, how the targeting chain works in a contested electromagnetic environment, has not been publicly detailed.
Those gaps are understandable. Operational security matters. But the decision to go public with the capability at all was itself a strategic choice. The Air Force wanted this known. It wanted Beijing to see a stealth bomber putting an anti-ship missile into a warship in the Philippine Sea, the same waters where a real conflict would likely unfold.
That is not posturing. That is preparation, made visible on purpose.
When your adversary is building ships faster than you can, you make sure every platform you already own can sink them. The Air Force just showed it got the memo.
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