Last week Air Force officials appeared on Capitol Hill to discuss the weapons programs they want to fund in 2016. As usual, details about one of the biggest programs, the Long-Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B), were few and far between. The Air Force wants to keep potential adversaries guessing about the bomber’s capabilities, so all it has said is that it plans to buy 80-100 strike aircraft at a cost of $550 million each with initial fielding in 2025. The only new information last week was that the contract to develop the bomber will be awarded to one of two competing teams this summer, and that it will not be a fixed-price contract owing to the difficulty of projecting costs for cutting-edge technology.
Despite all the secrecy, though, it’s pretty easy to figure out some of the basic features of the new bomber, based on what the Air Force has said about why it is needed. For instance, everybody knows it will be stealthy, incorporating an array of “low observable” technologies that will prevent adversaries from tracking or targeting it with their air defenses. Beyond that, the fact the Air Force has made cost a requirement that will drive the plane’s design dictates that some nice-to-have features won’t be affordable. Thus, if you read through the open-source literature about what technology is likely to be available within the Air Force’s specified timeline, the outlines of this supposedly secret program come into view pretty clearly. Here are some details you can take to the bank.
1. It will have an unrefueled range of over 5,000 nautical miles. The new bomber must be able to reach targets located deep in the interior of Russia and China. Mark Gunzinger of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments says both countries can be covered by a bomber with a combat radius — a one-way range — of 2,000-2,500 nautical miles (nautical miles are 15% longer than statute miles). However, it isn’t enough to be able to fly from Point A to Point B; the bomber has to be able to fly back to where it came from, or to some alternate site. It has to be able to fly around heavy threat concentrations rather than flying in a straight line to its intended targets. It needs sufficient endurance to search for mobile targets once it is in enemy air space. And if it is refueled in the air, that has to occur outside the range of hostile radars. Factor in all those requirements, and you’re talking about a minimum unrefueled range of over 5,000 nm.
2. It will carry less payload than previous bombers. The cost of a bomber rises roughly in proportion to the size of its payload, so the imposition of a firm unit cost ceiling will tend to drive designs toward payloads much smaller than the 40,000 pounds on the very pricey B-2, the only stealthy long-range bomber currently in operation. But even at half the payload of the B-2, the LRS-B could still destroy dozens of different targets in a single flight (“sortie”) due to the advent of lightweight smart bombs. In fact, a force of two dozen such aircraft could precisely target a thousand separate aim-points every day. Few adversaries could withstand that kind of pounding for very long. By opting for a smaller payload on each plane, the Air Force can hold down the cost of building and operating the bombers, thereby making it easier to buy additional aircraft.
The B-2 bomber developed by a Northrop-Boeing team in the 1980s exhibits some of the features the Air Force wants in its Long-Range Strike Bomber, but the future bomber will probably be smaller, more agile, more networked and more maintainable. (Retrieved from Wikimedia)
4. It won’t contain breakthrough technologies. The B-2 bomber developed by a Northrop-Boeing team during the Cold War was a revolutionary aircraft designed to hunt down Russian mobile missile launchers in the midst of a nuclear war. In order to accomplish that task, it incorporated a host of innovations that made the plane horrendously expensive to build and operate. For instance, its stealthy skin requires 18 hours of maintenance for every hour of flight, and is often wrapped in heavy-duty cellophane for protection. The Air Force isn’t going to go that route on the B-3, the likely designation for its new bomber. Everything from its low-observable technology to its landing gear to its on-board software will likely be adapted from other programs in order to hold down costs and speed the path to production. The aircraft that results will be cutting-edge, but not in the sense that key features will have to be invented from scratch.
5. It won’t be supersonic. Although there are some warfighting scenarios in which being able to exceed the speed of sound might be useful, aircraft traveling at that speed generate heat and acoustic signatures that compromise stealth. Since the aircraft isn’t likely to outrun an enemy fighter or missile, it is more important to remain undetected once in hostile airspace. In addition, supersonic flight entails propulsion and fuel-carrying requirements that drive up costs. If the Air Force had sufficient margin within its program budget to contemplate adding nice-to-have features, it would probably opt for more on-board electronic warfare equipment rather than a supersonic dash capability
6. It won’t be unmanned. The Air Force’s fiscal 2016 budget summary describes the Long-Range Strike Bomber as “nuclear capable” and “optionally manned,” but don’t count on either of those features being available the day the plane debuts. Nuclear-capable B-52s and B-2s will remain in the fleet for many years after 2025, and any bombers with the ability to deliver nuclear weapons must be counted against arms-control limits. As for the optionally-manned feature, it’s hard to see what value there would be in penetrating hostile air space without human pilots on board to make snap decisions about targeting options or the need to take evasive action. The idea of fielding a long-range strike aircraft that might be both nuclear capable and unmanned sounds so controversial that the Air Force is likely to forego the optionally-manned feature entirely, saving the money for other purposes.
7. It will look different from the B-2 bomber. Many experts have speculated that the new bomber will be a “flying wing” design similar to the existing B-2, because the fuselage and rear stabilizers on conventional aircraft generate radar returns that defeat the goal of eluding detection. However, the B-2 was conceived in the 1970s, and new generations of stealth aircraft have since been developed. There have been repeated reports of the B-2′s susceptibility to detection by long-wavelength search radars due to the peculiar correspondence between its dimensions and the radar waveform. In addition, the B-2 was conceived mainly to operate at night, and the Air Force wants its next bomber to be more operationally flexible. So even though the new bomber will probably lack a fuselage, it is not likely to be mistaken for a B-2.
8. It will rely more on off-board capabilities. The B-3 bomber will be the first information-age bomber the Air Force has developed. All of the legacy bombers in the current fleet were designed before networking became a central feature of warfighting, and in the case of the B-2 the absence of connectivity was dictated by a need to be stealthy across the lower reaches of the electromagnetic spectrum. The B-3 will likely be designed with a different philosophy, because the Air Force has described it as part of a family of systems, and some parts of that family such as orbital reconnaissance assets will be crucial in enabling the bomber to do its job. In other words, it will need to stay connected despite its low-observable design. In addition, the desire to limit the cost of each plane encourages relying on off-board assets for some functions such as the collection of targeting data and the generation of electronic countermeasures
9. There will be more than a hundred. The Air Force says it wants 80-100 Long-Range Strike Bombers, but by the time that number of planes is produced, it will be contemplating retirement of all the bombers currently in its fleet. Those bombers are already facing a host of age-related maladies such as metal fatigue, corrosion and parts obsolescence, so come 2040 they will be looking like candidates for the Smithsonian Institution’s aviation annex. If the B-3 has satisfied its key performance parameters and proven to be more maintainable than Cold War bombers, then chances are the Air Force will just keep buying it and recapitalize the whole fleet. At that point, even the newer B-2 will be nearly half a century old, and a real challenge to keep mission-capable.
10. It will be built by Boeing. Two industry teams are vying to build the B-3 bomber: one led by Northrop Grumman the other led by Boeing (Boeing and team-mate Lockheed Martin contribute to my think tank; Lockheed is a consulting client). These teams are not evenly matched. Boeing and Lockheed delivered over 300 military aircraft last year, including some of the stealthiest fighters in the world; Northrop Grumman delivered nine aircraft, none of them stealthy. Between the two of them, Boeing and Lockheed have been prime contractors on 95% of the Air Force’s fighters and bombers over the last 30 years, at a time when Northrop Grumman was publicly declaring its intention to cease being a prime contractor on military aircraft. So as industry analyst Byron Callan observed earlier this year, it’s questionable whether Northrop Grumman has “the infrastructure in place to manage as complex a program as LRS-B may turn out to be.”
Having already stipulated a demanding unit cost and development schedule for the new bomber, it isn’t likely the Air Force will want to add further risk to its plan by selecting a prime contractor that brings far less financial resources to the table than the competing team. When the Air Force’s top acquisition official told Congress last week that it is hard to project costs on cutting-edge programs like the bomber, he was in effect warning contractors they had better show up with deep pockets. They’ll make money in the end, but the early years could involve significant financial sacrifice — sacrifice that the Boeing-Lockheed Martin team looks far better positioned to absorb. LINK
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