New Plan: Ditch Next Gen U.S. Bomber Hopes. Drones and Missiles Work Fine.

James Hasik

Security, United States of America

The Long Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B) isn’t coming soon, and it isn’t needed now.

Seven years ago, Robert Haffa and Michael Isherwood of Northrop Grumman’s Analysis Center argued that the U.S. Air Force urgently needed a new bomber—indeed, by 2018. Enemy missiles, they thought, could shut down the remaining forward airfields from which American fighter-bombers could fly. Those fighters were already fewer in number, and thus not so available to escort B-52s and B-1s. Rumors of forthcoming Chinese stealth fighters seemed threatening enough at the time. The strategic situation hasn’t improved since then, but is the USAF’s planned Long Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B) still urgently needed? Whether or not it is, it’s not coming soon, but some useful stopgaps should be.

This question of urgency has been around almost as long as some of those aircraft. As Congressmen Randy Forbes and Chris Stewart argued in the National Interest two years ago, the existing bombers are old. The average age of a B-52H is fifty-three years, a B-1B twenty-eight years, and a B-2A twenty years. All the same, as Julian Barnes of the Wall Street Journal was reporting even then, the Air Force has long been advertising that it can keep the older bombers flying until 2040, and the B-2s longer yet. Even the B-52s are not really half-century airplanes—during the Cold War, when not flying for training, they mostly waited on strip alert. And since then, the wings, the fuselages, the engines, the cockpits—almost every part of the aircraft—have been replaced.