I wouldn’t expect money for a new bomber to be well spent. You see, daddy can’t program manage. 80-100 large bombers most likely means 2 that are unflyable before it is cancelled in an effort to top the U.S. Navy’s A-12 program
Donely, Schwartz and their staff were a big hit on the Hill. They piled out of a little clown car tripping all the way up the steps with their over-sized shoes. The tourists loved it.
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So, if you don’t like the new bomber, what would you do?
Cancel the F-35, keep building F-16s, and watch the AF slide into something useless?
First step isn’t the weapons system. The first step is to go in the direction of sane project management. Today, the DOD sufferers around $400B just in cost blow-outs of faulty big projects. With less money certainly to come, talking about complex weapon x or y makes little sense when we are repeatedly screwing up less complex programs.
Yeah. this bomber thing is going to get out of control soon. It’ll be $80Billion project for prototype and a $2.5B a piece equipments that the country can afford only buying 2 before being canceled.
And that 2 bombers operational duty in the next 20 years will involved bombing some an obscure african country in who knows what adventure, before being retired.
(I am not saying there shouldn’t be balance of power in the pacific, etc. But for some reason, I don’t think the power that be has clear game plan.)
Oh Boyee, it’s a B-3!! How ‘Broken Arrow’ of them. And that’s why it will fail as a program. Period. Dot.
Ignoring the ludicrous inlet lengths and ‘bent’ stealth planform alignment control issues, the very idea that “We want cruise as standoff ordnance!” proves that this is nothing more than what we already have because _they don’t think it can penetrate either_.
Which means you are looking at 15ft long, 3,250lb, weapons riding a 10ft wide, 20ft long, carriage box sufficient to mount a rotary launcher just like any prior MPRL/CSRL SIOP airframe.
Which is flat out _criminal_ given how little such a mission role is used and how unlikely it is we would go with penetrating delivery by slowmobile if it did become essential.
The reality remains that, even if they do the -smart thing- which is to weaponize ARRMD instead of ‘extending’ AGM-158A-into-B and breaking a couple treaties, they cannot get it to the target _any faster or farther_ than a B-52 can today with modified AGM-86 or 129s
Indeed, the -real- cruise missiles are the only ones you dare trust a B-xx with because they are the only ones which still have ranges on the order of 700-1,200nm instead of ‘less than 300km’, thanks to INF and the MTCR.
Duuh. And how do you effectively TCT put that ordnance into an F2T2EA kill chain if you are losing satellites to laser and HPM and the (cough, Sino) ‘threat of the moment’ has basically created a no-go zone of more than 500nm OFF SHORE, into which, ‘national asset’ RQ-170/4B or followon drones cannot penetrate either?
Unless you have black constellations Waaaaay Out There, riding in dormant mode until the need arises, you don’t have the key tenet of projectionable airpower over the Asian landmass: flexible targeting. You’re just a really slow, horribly unsurvivable, ballistic missile.
Now, presumably, in peacetime, we can take pictures on a LOROP slant of just about anything we want, including hire National Geographic. But if you want to have a cheap regional strike capability as a function of hostaging fixed infrastructural targets, whether for conventional wardets or nukes, then for pities’ sake: USE A VLS OR SLBM TUBE!
While ‘for everything else’, rig up a cross between Outlaw Hunter and the 747 CMCA with ‘CABS options’ like the MC-130W Dragon Spear, using the P-8 (737-800) Poseidon airframe. You can even stick with the minimalist external pylon carriage option of the MMA because Secret Squirrel only carried the AGM-86C this way to a tune of _six total weapons_ during 1991.
Because the rack aerodynamics off the cruise pylon are so messed up that it’s easiest to clear left to right, forward to back with only the rear center carrying.
If you truly have no subs or surface assets in the region, there is still _no need_ for a dedicated standoff cruise carrier.
OTOH, if you want to keep program costs _under control_ then let’s stop kidding ourselves about ‘mature and stable technology’ on a 2020 airframe. I mean /please/.
Look at the B-2. Did we see 200 of those? Was it ‘easy’? We built an entire secure satcomms package for that airframe which _did not work_ because nobody told the contractor that the supporting program had been cancelled!
This winged abortion looks like a scaled Batwing. And it shouldn’t. Because the days when a subsonic, sub-120K, airframe could penetrate hostile airspace _ended_, thanks to the U-2, when Kruschyev made sure the S-75 Dvina (SA-2 to you fine folks) could carry a nuke.
If you are over 100,000ft, you are hypersonic. If you are hypersonic, target penetration routes are laughable in their ‘how oblique do you want to be’ generalities of skipped-stone time zone hopping. There is literally no need to cross the fence, let alone come within a 300nm of target terminal area.
_Why be so predictable_?
And getting up to a high-fast sling shot option, NOW, is about seeing the potential inherent to the XTV-2 which is _skinned in composites_ that can soak a 3,000`F environment without cooling. And so can reasonably use non-cryo fuels on mission endurances of over 10-15 minutes.
Which is IMPORTANT because it means that no longer are you looking at something the size of a Titan missile coming out of CONUS at Mach-25, just like any other ICBM.
We can do Mach 8-10 gentleman. The X-51 has proven it. The X-37 has proven it. The XTV-2 has proven it. And when you can put that kind of _scaled_ capability into an airframe that gets you 4,000-6,000 miles in less than 4hrs, chock to chock, you have the ability to entirely rethink how we _define_ ‘R-Bomber’.
The B-3 is an antiquated notion. The Falcon program will fail because they have reinvented the ICBM at ten times the cost and with half the readiness and hardened reliability.
And THAT is why the followon 2020 Bomber is going to fail. Because the USAF can’t guarantee control over the airframe as the mission turf unless it truly is ‘strategic’. And their concept of keeping it that way requires them to _deliberately retard_ the airframe performance to a level where the B-36 Great Circle Route still seems logical. It’s not. It won’t be even as a sonic cruiser optimized (very low laminars) platform that kisses the Mach.
Which is DUMB all ’round. Since, to put a stick of rods from god over the target once every 4-5hrs with a conventional bomber design requires an inventory purchase of 100-120 airframes, minimum.
While a ‘Strategic’ Hypersonic Platform is going to be NASP/Orient Express/TAV all over again. Built from unobtanium and at least as expensive as the B-2, +40 years worth of inflation. Five billion each? It may compete with the space shuttle. It will certainly compete with carriers.
I truly believe it’s time to take the keys to the budgetary Ferrari away from the children in this. We need an R&D branch that can do more than DARPA does, as a purely ‘technically it’s possible’ engineering techbase investigative works. We need to sit the Jasons down and have them talk about effective doctrine.
And to talk doctrine is to remove the big three services from the mission leads in their own excessively rarefied specialities and talk reapportionment.
It’s specifically time to say: “We need a Pizza Hut delivery capability from any 6-10 bases in the world because the USAF/USN/USMC as we know them today are NOT going to survive as multi-thousand airframe services, even ten years from now.
Robots as UCAV (no peacetime O&S training as billable flight hours) can do the grunt work on tacticals, if it comes to that. But what we really need to look at is something which can stop the next Saddam from sending armor down a coastal highway to begin with. Something that avoids the need for another freakin’ monstrous Desert Storm/OAF/OEF/OIF buildup.
Something that can say: “Here and not one step further!” Quickly, and reactively, at all levels of conventional through sub strategic nuclear response conditions.
And if we can _do that_, with fifty airframes that cost 250 million to 750 million each, we can still save money. By pairing down the equivalent, traditional, (heavy) force postures.
The key is going to be dividing the world up into segments like an orange. So that we can make some major structural as weight trades in going a specific distance while hauling a specific load, and then turning around and repeating the process, 4-5hrs later.
If you can do that, treating each mission as ‘a leg rather than a radius’, thereby getting 2-2.5 missions per day out of your airframe, ‘full depth’, you can hold just about anyone’s military or civilian infrastructure hostages.
Anyone’s.
Considering the track record of first the B-2, the A-12, the Raptor, and now the F-35, really its pretty much certain that they’ll screw this up to.
Canceling the Joint Vaporware Fighter is absolutely required since it will be obsolete and vulnerable once fully developed PAK-FA’s/J-20′s are in production. Just looking at the error prone and glacial pace of the F-35, it will most likely achieve IOC just about the time the other two get in production.
Getting back to the topic, just how a subsonic stealth bomber without enough Raptors to protect it will function in a contested airspace with operational enemy 5th gen aircraft has yet to be explained.
The ultimate strike platform would be a stealth space station loaded with rods of the gods – guided kinetic reentry projectiles. It could be made “space” maneuverable using electric ion propulsion which would give it a decent on orbit lifetime without the need for a large on-board fuel storage and able to attack any point on the globe within hours.
Any Nork or Middle East dictator/mullah that misbehaves can look forward to a highly accurate bombardment of hypersonic projectiles from space with little or no warning. Even deep underground bunkers would give little protection from a tungsten telephone pole size guided projectiles moving at Mach 12. Depending on the projectile size and velocity, the damage inflicted could be anywhere between a small diameter bomb, to an explosion equal to a small yield nuclear device.
Out of the box thinking will be needed to respond to the proliferation of modern area denial weapons now occurring, and a subsonic B-3 is not going to cut it!