WHITEMAN AIR FORCE BASE, Mo. — A secret mission to deal what the Secretary of Defense called a significant blow to ISIS took off and landed just over an hour outside of the metro.
A pair of stealth B-2 bombers from Whiteman Air Force Base took out 80 militants at camps in Libya.
Knob Noster’s Tom Taylor doesn’t see them coming, but he’s used to hearing B-2 Spirit bombers after they’ve flown over his home for training missions.
This week however, he said the bomber rattled his trailer in a way it hadn’t in probably five years.
“You can tell when they are fully loaded and they are going on a long mission, you can definitely tell that,” Taylor said.
Video provided to FOX 4 by the U.S. Air Force shows a B-2 pulling out of it’s hangar at Whiteman Air Force Base and then taking off for a stealth mission more than 6,000 miles away.
U.S. Intelligence officials discovered ISIS militants carrying rocket-propelled grenades at a pair of camps in Libya.
In one of his final moves in office, President Obama authorized the attack. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter says commanders chose to put two of their fleet of about 20 billion-dollar bombers into combat for the first time since 2011 so they could loiter undetected.
The bombers needed multiple re-fuelings during the mission that spanned more than 30 hours.
The defense department is still analyzing video, but Carter says the mission seems to have been a success, taking out at least 80 ISIS militants who were actively planning attacks. He said the bombings should serve as a reminder to terrorists everywhere, that the U.S. can strike from anywhere.
It’s the kind of bombing run that makes Knob Noster’s Taylor proud that Whiteman Air Force Base is the exclusive home to the stealth bombers.
If they go all the way from here all the way over there, it’s amazing that they get there undetected do their mission and get home safe, that’s the main thing getting home safe,” Taylor said.