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It's come to my attention that in addition to the F-117 everyone acknowledges that they had shot down, Serbian military records list a shoot-down of a B-2 , which crashed in Croatia, using a similar method - booting up the radar extremely briefly during a NATO bombing mission. Saw loads of targets - one of them was ~ 15km away, looked very peculiar. Fired two S-125 missiles at it. The plane immediately started evading but was damaged by either or both 60 kg blasts, and then crashed just outside of Serbia, in Spačva basin.
Here's the fairly pretty interesting in-depth account on how it supposedly went down. It opens up with claiming that after may 20, 1999, all B-2 bombing missions of Serbia ceased, that the Spirit of Missouri was withdrawn from combat operations on May 20 and also presents a possibly verifiable claim that a section of near border woods in Croatia had an unusually heavy military presence.
At the end is they also present a Serbian hypothesis that the 2008 crash of B-2 in Guam was staged by crashing a remote-controlled B-2 test article that was secretly assembled at Guam, crashed via stall at takeoff and then passed off as the plane lost in '99.
Found this interesting bit of information on Quora, from a Serbian.
/images/1751914589569709.webp
EDIT: interesting info on in New York Times from 1991.. Full article.. I was previously unaware B-2 was ever found insufficiently stealthy in tests.
While we're discussing the (possibly) hit B-2 it's worth mentioning the second F-117 that was hit by the Serbians and "covered up" (not acknowledged) by the USAF.
Edit to add – the Spirit of Missouri is still active. Wikipedia has a picture of it overflying an airshow in 2018. If it was hit, then it was repaired, or an extremely convoluted plot as suggested by the Serbians was put into place to cover it up (frankly it would have been much easier just to say that it crashed due to pilot error back in 1999, I don't understand why one would wait for nearly a decade to finish the coverup).
According to the substack, that's probably repainted 'Spirit of Kansas'.
The guy who wrote the theory mentioned in the substack(some intel guy) suggests something like:
May 20, '99: Spirit of Missouri is damaged, loses engine power and crashes in Croatia. USAF is short one B-2.
After that: Spirit of Kansas is occassionally repainted as Spirit of Missouri and doubles as it at times (are there high def photos of both plantes at the same time, or all of them together?)
2008: USAF fakes the crash of Spirit of Kansas using a (probably remote control) flyable prototype mocked up to look like the real thing. B-2 inventory is officially -1.
After that: The ex-Spirit of Kansas that doubled as Missouri is now Spirit of Missouri permanently and inventory shortage is rectified.
Why would you crash a perfectly flyable prototype when you could use it (as a decoy, if nothing else)? Strong "fake the moon landing on the moon" vibes.
How exactly do you propose you would use an aircraft specifically designed to be stealthy as a decoy? The whole point is that the real thing is nigh-on undetectable. Either your decoy is also stealthy, and therefore is a shit-ass decoy because nobody notices it, or your decoy isn't stealthy and therefore obviously isn't the real thing.
You might recall during the last high profile stealth bombing strike operation about two weeks ago that some of our stealth bomber fleet was used as decoys for the rest of our stealth bomber fleet. If you had a flying decoy that looked good enough to fool peer adversaries you could fly it around, park it on the ramp in Diego Garcia, etc. etc. to fool enemies about our real movements and make it less likely that they actually hit valuable military hardware during an attack.
See my response to a different commentator here, I misunderstood.
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I don't see why your argument wouldn't also apply to the most recent operation where they used B2s as decoys for other B2s.
Ah, different kind of decoy. I was thinking "thing they'd shoot at instead of the real thing", rather than "thing that will confuse people looking at transport logistics".
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