The B-52 Stratofortress may be old enough to buy a senior ticket at the movies, but the legendary long-range strategic bomber is still pushing the envelope: On Dec. 12, Resolute Support commander Brig. Gen. Lance Bunch announced that a B-52 conducting bombing sorties out of Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, dropped the most precision munitions ever deployed from the airframe during a combat mission, an encouraging sign of what Air Force’s expensive modernization timeline holds for the tried-and-true airframe.

This article first appeared in 2017.

This particular B-52 has been flying combat missions as part of both Resolute Support and Operation Inherent Resolve since April 2016. But the new milestone comes thanks to a critical upgrade, the brand-new Conventional Rotary Launcher (CRL) — a munitions system designed around an expanded payload of GPS-guided ordnance and other “smart” bombs. According to Air Force personnel, the inclusion of new CRLs will boost the B-52’s weapons capacity by a whopping 67%.

“Before these launchers, the B-52 was not capable of carrying smart weapons internally,” Air Forces Strategic (AFSTRAT) Armament Systems manager Master Sgt. Adam Levandowski said in November. “Now each CRL allows for internal carriage, which adds an additional eight smart bombs per aircraft.”

The impact of the ordnance upgrade was immediately apparent, according to the Air Force. The new CRL system was flown from Barksdale AFB to Al Udeid on a C-5M Super Galaxy on Nov. 6, and declared combat-ready two weeks later on Nov. 20 — meaning that, amid the high operational tempo that characterizes airpower operations run out of Al Udeid, the B-52 shattered the airframe six-decade-old bombing record in just over a week.

“So far, we’ve used B-52s with their new conventional rotary launcher,” Bunch told reporters gathered at the Pentagon in a Dec. 12 video conference from Kabul. “Of note, it was the… largest number of precision munitions ever dropped from a B-52.”

Air Forces Central Command spokeswoman Capt. AnnMarie Annicelli toldMilitary.com that, in the campaign’s first night alone, B-52s deployed some 19 bombs upgraded with the Department of Defense’s preferred Joint Direct Attack Munition guidance kits against a critical Taliban narcotics hub in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. Annicelli said that the first release of munitions took place against ISIS fighters in Iraq on Nov. 18, days before the official announcement of the CRL-equipped B-52’s combat readiness, but the Helmand sortie “was the first use of the CRL in a major, deliberately planned operation.”

AFCENT officials told Military.com that B-52s have deployed around 1,500 weapons since the beginning of 2017, half of them unguided. AFGSC, AFCENT, CENTCOM did not immediately respond to requests from Task & Purpose for details regarding sorties flown and munitions deployed by B-52s in the CENTCOM area of operations in November 2017.

This article by Jared Keller originally appeared at Task & Purpose. Follow Task & Purpose on Twitter. This article first appeared in 2017.

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