Spirit

This is a picture of a B2-Spirit Stealth Bomber : the most expensive aircraft in the world. Ugly? This is what 2.2 billion US dollars looks like. This project was begun by the US in the 1980s to combat an enemy that now no longer exists (Third world war? Communist Soviet Union?), but I guess that if you had such a weapon your enemies would be fools to consider fighting you, and ultimately that achieves your objective anyway.

This bomber has seen action in three conflicts so far : Kosovo, Iraq, and recently in Afghanistan. The B2 has the longest reach of any aircraft in the world -> the bombing raids on Iraq were launched from US bases itself, the aircrew flying for anywhere between 40 to 50 hours... literally a trip around the world.

Weapons capability? Well this bomber has a range of roughly 11,000 miles with a single mid air refueling, and can carry 8 nuclear tipped cruise missiles with a range of 1,500 miles each. A single B2 bomber could literally get to any country in the world in hours and wipe out 8 of their largest cities in a single blow. Scary. The US originally planned to build 120 of these bombers, but right now production has stopped at 21. (wow that's alot of money)

And of course, this is a Stealth Bomber so it's unlikely to be even detected until the bombs start exploding. Stealth technology was first demonstrated in the Iraq-Kuwait conflict, as the first generation stealth aircraft (F117s) were used to penetrate the french designed KARI air defense network used by Saddam. The primary method of detecting aircraft is by radar - measuring the radar pulse echoes returned from the airframe -> and a measure of radar visibility is the Radar Cross Section (RCS). Older aircraft such as the F-15 Eagle have a RCS of about 400 square meters. Newer generation fighters such as the F-16 Falcons have RCS of 5 square meters, as designers realise the importance of detection and stealth. In contrast, a dedicated stealth aircraft like the B2 Spirit bomber has an estimated RCS of 0.0015 square meters... which really, lies in the realm of non detectability. A bird has an RCS of 0.01 square meters and large insects have RCS of 0.001 square meters.

Overkill? Yes. And also useless. Instead of nuclear tipped warheads it carries 40,000 pounds of bombs to dump on targets in defenseless Afghanistan, which any aircraft could have easily done. But no one can predict how history would have turned out had the US not embarked on such an ambitious set of military technologies. But still, there's the deadly beauty in building the best, most advanced, most capable machine, and I'm sure the engineers are proud of themselves.