One of the Air Force’s most powerful bombers recently flew to the Arctic to test out its ship killing bomb earlier this month. A B-2 Spirit bomber flew with planes from the Norwegian Air Force in a test of the military’s “Quicksink” munition, taking out a floating target.
Rather than the massive bunker buster bombs B-2s dropped on Iranian facilities earlier this summer, this test involved a 2,000-pound-class GBU-31 Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM. It was the third test of the Quicksink, a large JDAM specifically modified to take out enemy ships in a single strike. The test took place on Sept. 3, although both the American and Norwegian militaries did not announce the exercise until a week later; flight trackers did notice a B-2 en route to Norway around that time however.
The bomber, from the 72nd Test and Evaluation Squadron assigned to the 53rd Wing, flew alongside four Royal Norwegian Air Force F-35 Lightning IIs and a P-8 Poseidon. The bomber dropped the munition on what the Air Force described only as a “surface vessel” set up near Andøya, Norway, sinking it.
The initial Quicksink munition weighed around 2,000 pounds. Earlier this year, the Air Force debuted a new 500 pound variant of the Quicksink bomb, meant to expand the Air Force’s ability to target enemy ships. According to the Air Force Research Lab, which developed the munition, it is envisioned as a “low-cost” option for taking out enemy vessels, although the use of a B-2 in this test points to some costly uses outside of the weapon. The Air Force has a grand total of 19 B-2 Spirit bombers, all based out of Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri.
“Quicksink offers an affordable, game-changing solution to rapidly and efficiently sink maritime targets,” Col. Dan Lehoski, commander of the 53rd Wing said in a release in June. “AFRL’s 500-pound Quicksink variant adds options for the warfighter and enhances operational flexibility.”
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The Air Force has used its Quicksink bomb in these kinds of exercises in the past. In 2022, during the massive Rim of the Pacific exercise, the Air Force blew a cargo ship into two pieces, dropping it quickly beneath the waves. Two years later in the came exercise, the Air Force tested out a 2,000 pound version of the Quicksink, again dropped from a B-2.
The B-2’s flight to Norway comes after the 53rd Wing at Whiteman Air Force Base had been noticeably busy last year. The bombers struck Houthi targets in Yemen last October, forward deployed to the military’s base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and carried out part of the strikes in Operation Midnight Hammer against Iran in June. Last month two B-2s were sent to Alaska for the Northern Edge 2025 military exercise. One of those bombers flew over Russian President Vladimir Putin when he arrived at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson for a summit with President Donald Trump.
