Isn't is curious why the US has sent its B-1B bombers back to the US rather than to Diego Garcia? DG is about the same distance, give or take a few hundred kilometers, to Tehran, compared to RAF Fairfield.
So this got me thinking, maybe there's something more to this: The high operational hours were pushing the aging airframes up against their annual 300-hour operational ceiling. See, for every mission out of SD/TX, the B1-Bs would be adding an additional ~8 hours of back and forth flight.
So, were the B1-Bs rotated out of service under the guise of security threats? I think so.
I tore through 8 of #GoogleGemini's arguments before it finally decided that I might be right. :thinkerguns:
