Posted on 07/16/2024 8:07:54 AM PDT by whyilovetexas111
At this moment, nearly every major Department of Defense program seems to be struggling. Technological bottlenecks, industrial capacity problems, workforce issues, and general bureaucratic confusion have produced delivery delays and cost overruns, even as the entire defense industrial base faces the challenge of competing with Russia and China.
The major exception to these problems appears, surprisingly enough, to be the B-21 Raider. The purpose of the B-21 program was to produce a new generation of strategic bombers to replace the B-1B Lancer and the B-2 Spirit. The subsonic B-21 is designed to use stealth to penetrate enemy air defenses and deliver conventional or nuclear payloads. The Raider was needed because of the age and technological obsolescence of the B-1B fleet (designed and built in a different technological reality) and the cost and small size of the B-2 fleet.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalsecurityjournal.org ...
“...designed and built in a different technological reality...”
B-52s still seem to be flying through the same atmosphere and EM waves.
Yes, I wonder why if the B-52 can still do its mission, why we don’t simply build new ones, same with the A-10. Sure, with new existing technology, and save the invention of new solution to research projects.
Who knew that allowing the death of American industry would mean that you can no longer build weapons systems? Our garbage ruling class certainly didn’t.
Bring back the B-52 tailgunner, but with laser cannons!
B-52’s use stand off weapons, never really get close to IAD’s, or have mostly been used against enemies with no significant air defense systems.
Drones are doing a lot, and will be doing a lot more going forward. But its probably going to be awhile before we take the man out of the nuclear weapon deliver loop.
It can only do its mission in uncontested airspace.
“It can only do its mission in uncontested airspace.”
It might still have utility as a long-range missile bus, but its days as a bomb-dropper are probably over.
I think they will still build the B-21. Reason: though the USAF won’t admit it, the B-52, B-1 and in a way the B-2 are getting up there in age and they can only do so much to upgrade these planes. A 150-170 plane final production run will allow the older bombers to be retired, especially since with 150-170 planes built, the production cost per plane will ber much lower.
i’m thinking F-35
Did Defense contractors design it to work? Or design it to have lots of very expensive upgrades and repairs?
Probably, but maybe glide bombs?
“why we don’t simply build new ones, same with the A-10”
I’d say good idea if you can make them stealthy. Perhaps reshaping the exterior panels and using anti-radar-bounce coatings. The aerospace people can find ways to make that cost billions of dollars.
By the time the Air force has drones doing the job of manned aircraft, the drones will cost as much as the manned aircraft.
One major reason for all the struggles is the US defense budget is only 4% of GDP ans Biden wants to cut further. There are others of course.
The B-21 can be flown remotely and also can control drones. Remote links to satellites would be the first to go in a shooting war in the Pacific.
It seems unlikely that the Congressmen voting on this expensive project can have any confidence that by the time it is fielded (and all of our projects are painfully slow to develop and field), it will be functionally stealthy against the most modern adversary air defenses. It’s a lot of money to make that bet on. To me, the technological trend is towards ever greater transparency of the sky and water surface, and therefore hypersonic seems a better bet, perhaps combined with glide bombs released at a long distance.
Jigs, dies and expertise are long gone. They were built using slide rules, not calculators.
I worked for a major defense contractor for many years as a quality engineer. From my experience the effort to solely blame the contractors is misdirected. Sure there have been bad design over time but...
I would like to state categorically that the BS government bureaucracy did a hell of a lot more to inflate costs, delay production and inhibit innovation and necessary engineering changes than we ever did as a manufacturer.
Every thing we did had to go through multiple review boards (PDR, CDR, PRR, ERB boards) before we could even begin production or try anything new. Every government entity there had to justify their existence by adding bells, horns and whistles and new hoops to jump through. That alone added many hundreds of man hours and costs to accommodate the change process and of course, delayed deployment.
They never let us use off the shelf avionics. Everything had to be mil-spec even though the items were not mission critical and on the shelf for commercial aerospace manufacturers.
I am a child of the 50's where new and innovative designs were coming out almost monthly. The government, at that time just said "Build it and send it to Edwards for testing". Some worked, some didn't but we experienced the biggest and most productive learning curve in aviation history, from P-51s to SR-71s in a decade.
The defense industry went woke just like the military leadership. White engineers with experience got replaced by DEI hires. They know pronouns better than applied physics.
If the plane was worth it, it would have a subdued rollout if one at all.
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