Is the Bomber an Obsolete, Stupidly Expensive Investment?

"No, I don't thank you for the fish at all" (notindetroit) 10/05/2015 at 12:25 • Filed to: warlopnik, planelopnik, foxtrot alpha, strategic bomber, lrsb, f-22, f-35

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“...a startlingly low unit cost of $550 million in fiscal 2010 dollars” says Lara Seligman of !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! regarding the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! to replace the USAF’s aging strategic bomber fleet. While $550 million is a bargain compared to the cost of a single B-2A Spirit stealth bomber, let’s think about that figure for a moment - it is enough to pay for (your choice) all of the construction for all the facilities and campuses of a small or medium school district; solar panels and complete energy independence for several dozen average-sized residential developments; cover the entire yearly budget of !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! with money to spare; or depending on what figures and sources you use outfit an entire fleet of Tomahawk cruise missiles or pay for up to five of your choice of F-35 Lightning IIs or !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , either of which is allegedly as stealthy and as survivable, not to mention faster, “self-escort” capable and with greater multi-role ability than what will be inherent in the LSR-B. With all of this in mind, should the USAF really be putting its money in such a large, slow and expensive one-trick pony?

Topshot: Gen. Ellen M. Pawlikowski, head of the USAF Materials Command, gives a keyote speech at a conference about new military weapons acquisition strategy after criticism of the F-35 procurement saga. Official USAF photo.

Four inert/practice dummy versions of the Small Diameter Bomb loaded onto the weapons bay of an F-22 Raptor with an AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM or “Slammer”). The Small Diameter Bomb has increasingly become the ground-attack weapon of choice for the USAF due to its small size and precise attack mode allowing even small tactical aircraft to conduct multiple strikes on protected targets of strategic or tactical nature and multi-objective sorties, with the incoming SDB-II promising further enhanced targeting and “bunker busting” capabilities. Official USAF photo.

The idea of a large or “strategic” bomber more or less officially has its genesis with the revolutionary General William “Billy” Mitchell, a highly influential forward-thinker of what was still then the United States Army Air Corps right after WWI. So highly revolutionary and influential, in fact, that he was repaid by his own service with !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . The court-martial, and the practicality of war, ended up exonerating Gen. Mitchell in the end as one of the greatest minds in the service, and the Army Air Force gave him proper recognition with !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! which in turn helped prove and pave the way for !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . Or so goes the popular story.

For starters, despite the popular folksy misconception of Gen. Mitchell being put on trial as the underdog trying to drag a service still steeped in Victorian-era military practices into the 20th century, his court-martial did not revolve around fears of the proud and romantic cavalry soldier on horseback being replaced by newfangled wood-and-fabric contraptions bombing the enemy from the air in invulnerable, cowardly fashion. Indeed, his court-martial was still a bungled, unfair mess involving ludicrous accusations that any respectable military branch would have immediately repudiated, but Gen. Mitchell was officially raked over the coals for being a scapegoat in the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , not for being an advocate of strategic bombing. Furthermore, he was hardly alone in realizing the military potential of strategic bombing - !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! was the Luftwaffe’s version of Gen. Mitchell and pushed for a large “ Ural Grossbomber ” that as the name implies would be capable of bombing targets deep into Russia, namely Moscow. !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , as his name implies, really liked the idea of literally bombing Nazi Germany into submission - you have him to thank for inspiring Kurt Vonnegut to write Slaughterhouse 5 . Gen. Mitchell’s spiritual successor and later failed Vice-Presidential candidate !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! carried Gen Mitchell’s philosophy to the ultimate conclusion WWII-era technology would allow with the massive B-29 firebombing campaigns over Tokyo, a legacy that ultimately sunk his political career in 1968 with a Vietnam War-weary public having a massive change of heart over what the nature of warfare should be.

Although Gen. Mitchell’s aerial strategic warfighting concepts were revolutionary for the time and proven through the horrors of WWII, like many adopted revolutionary concepts they tended to be treated as static Gospel invulnerable to the changing nature of politics and technology (until the next revolution-turned-static policy comes around). During his court-martial, Gen. Mitchell predicted that the future of warfare would be fought with supersonic airships duking it out like flying battlewagons - eh, maybe half-right if you’re feeling generous. The fact of the matter is, the state of aviation technology for the time (and for decades to come) meant that attacking an enemy’s deep-territory resources necessitated a very large aircraft in order to carry the fuel necessary to make the journey. Due to a lack of precision munitions and the overall primitive nature of munitions period, a large number of them were necessary to demolish a factory into being permanently inoperable. You dropped all of them at once or in a neat little line carpet-bombing style in order to ensure by sheer volume (and hope) that more than a few actually hit the desired target. During WWII (and before, during the Spanish Civil War) just outright bombing the civilian population as a means of slowly killing an enemy nation off outright was also considered a valid means of warfare as advocated by Sir “Bomber” Harris and Gen. LeMay - not to mention by the infamous genocidal tyrants Hitler and Stalin.

Well, guess what, things have changed since then - though the concept of strategic bombing hasn’t quite caught up to the modern day political and technological realities. The biggest issue, of course, being the large nuclear weapons stockpiles built up over both sides of the Iron Curtain and now being obtained by “third party actors” such as Pakistan, India, China and North Korea. The most immediate implication is that a much smaller munitions package - just one bomb, in fact - is now sufficient to obliterate an entire city. In fact, you can even put this bomb on the end of a very large rocket and lob the rocket to whatever city you want without putting any of your own personnel at risk. Moreover on the political implications, it also means that conducting a WWII-style civilian carpet bombing campaign against a nation with nuclear weapons capability will be met with a nuclear response, limiting the options and nations of which such carpet bombing can realistically be conducted against.

Of course, North Vietnam didn’t have nuclear weapons capability, so carpet bomb them with B-52s we did. The B-52 was in the 1960s !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! - yet the carpet bombing campaigns of Rolling Thunder and Linebacker I/II saw them suffer casualties against supersonic MiG-21 interceptors and a new weapon seen as revolutionary as the strategic bomber had been - the Surface-to-Air Missile. The Vietnam experience spurred the USAF to research technology to make the strategic bomber viable in a heavily-defended airspace environment, leading to the supersonic B-1B “Bone” and the stealthy, secretive and ultra-expensive B-2A. But while the technical questions of the strategic bomber’s obsolescence were being addressed, the political obsolescence was not, even when President Nixon’s announcement of bombing campaigns in Cambodia was met with mass protest.

Today, the idea of laying waste to a civilian population is met with extreme public distaste. !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! during Desert Storm would hardly have been newsworthy during WWII, but in 1991 it became a part of a “warmonger” legacy that would hang around Secretary of Defense-turned-Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush a decade later. Specifically avoiding civilian casualties is what made precision attack munitions a political top priority in addition to their raw military efficiency. Meanwhile, the desire to fit a ground attack munition that can be fitted in decent numbers into the constrained weapons bay of the F-22, combined with field experience in Operation Iraqi Freedom that often saw 2,000 lb “bunker busters” ditched in favor of 250 lb. bombs with precision guidance kits or even in some cases inert dummy rounds used in combat to kinetically kill targets, spurred the development of what may very well be the most revolutionary precision-guided munition yet - the GBU-39, most often known simply as the Small Diameter Bomb. The same factory that needed multiples of 8,000 lbs of bombs from an armada of B-17s that also took out the entire city around the factory now can be demolished by a single F-16 lobbing one or two Small Diameter Bombs while leaving any surrounding structures untouched, with the F-16 moving on to different mission objectives with whatever SDBs still remain.

With precision-guided munitions becoming more lethal as they get smaller, it brings into question what use does a large, stealthy strategic bomber have when strategic missions can be conducted by cheaper, supersonic multi-role F-22s equipped with SDBs or larger weapons such as the Joint Direct Attack Munition (or J-DAM). Even the massive !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , often seen as the ultimate Bunker Buster, is happily carried by the F-15E. Really, if anything at least ordinance-wise, the main justification for such large stealth bombers regards having a platform being able to carry the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , a weapon that may or may not have even been tested in combat. Already the Air Force is seeking a smaller, more efficient replacement that can be carried by smaller aircraft.

So is there still a place and necessity for large bomber aircraft capable of lofting ungodly large weapons loads or hilariously-huge bombs, or can the enemy be crippled with deep-strike missions conducted by F-22s and F-35s with SDBs negating the need for what may be an old warfare concept leftover from when civilians were still considered valid military targets?

450X_FTW > No, I don't thank you for the fish at all 10/05/2015 at 12:43

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I’d prefer them spend that money on fixing the VA hospital and actually take care of those that have been injured in wars, rather than just keep preparing for our next war

sebdel > No, I don't thank you for the fish at all 10/05/2015 at 12:49

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it is enough to pay for (your choice) all of the construction for all the facilities and campuses of a small or medium school district; solar panels and complete energy independence for several dozen average-sized residential developments; cover the entire yearly budget of an average-sized city’s public transportation infrastructure with money to spare;

This being oppo, we need another example, it’s enough to buy the Nurburgring and 8 ferrari 250GTOs.

ttyymmnn > No, I don't thank you for the fish at all 10/05/2015 at 14:15

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If you’re going to talk about strategic bombing, you have to mention the granddaddy of strategic bombing theory, Giulio Douhet . It was Douhet and his WWII disciples (LeMay, Mitchell, Trenchard, Wever, among others) who believed you could bomb a nation into submission, only to have his theories thoroughly disproven in practice, starting with the Spanish Civil War. Mitchell was certainly one of his disciples, having met the Italian general in 1922 and circulating translations of his theories in the War Department. What we discovered in WWII is that bombing civilians only strengthens resolve, see: London, Cologne, Dresden, Tokyo, etc.

But closer to your point about ditching the strategic bomber, I think it’s a bit early to sound the death knell just yet. While tactical bombing has certainly come to the fore in the age of ( mostly precision ) weapons, what a big bomber like the B-1 does for you is give you the ability to send a big aircraft into the battle space and remain on station for hours (with refueling if necessary) and carry a whole slew of JDAMs or other weapons that can be dropped in a moment’s notice as the need arises. For the types of conflicts we are fighting today, the B-1 is, in many ways, the perfect weapon, even if it was never really designed for the role. In a large scale shooting war, say with the Russians or the Chinese, it remains to be seen if such a weapon could be useful. But for now, it’s the plane for the job. But I believe you are correct in saying that the theory of strategic bombing as a whole may need to be re-examined.

But for even more radical thought along your lines, there is an interview in this month’s Air and Space Magazine with Robert. M. Farley, a professor at the University of Kentucky’s Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce, and author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force . Farley says that it’s time to get rid of the independent branch of the USAF and roll it back into the Army, as it was in WWII. It’s an interesting read, though I doubt it will get much traction, even if it is being read in many important government circles.

-this space for rent- > No, I don't thank you for the fish at all 10/05/2015 at 14:32

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Deep strike with a fighter? Hope you’ve got some stealthy tankers planned...

vicariousILive > ttyymmnn 10/05/2015 at 14:37

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That was a very interesting article and looks like a very interesting book to read.

I work on Air Force programs and I have worked on Navy programs in the past. Let me tell you the Navy is a well oiled machine compared to the Air Force. The AF is drowning in bureucratic non-sense and everyone seems too afraid to change the status quo. I hear the phrase “my hands are tied” at least once a week.

Also the Air Force has a huge inferiority complex towards the Navy. I was working on a program where we would use common technology and practices with the Air Force program and the Navy program. In our documents and pitches we had to handle very delicately how we presented these ideas to the Air Force.

ttyymmnn > vicariousILive 10/05/2015 at 14:45

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What do you think could be the source for that inferiority complex? Does the AF feel threatened somehow? As I read the interview, I began to wonder about the feasibility of rolling back the AF. The Navy has two basic jobs: surface warfare and aviation, would it be so hard for the Army to do the same? It would seem though, that the Army has simply become too big, but as Farley points out, it was far bigger in WWII, but I would say that it was also far less complex. My guess is that something like this would never happen. The AF would protect its turf viciously, and there just isn’t the political will (i.e. courage) to even suggest such a thing.

vicariousILive > ttyymmnn 10/05/2015 at 15:04

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Lately, when there has been an issue or problem due to whatever, the first question that gets asked is “How does the Navy do it?” Probably 4 times out of 5 times, the solution to the problem was to copy what the navy is doing. Like I was saying the Navy is so much more efficient and when the Air Force is asked to change something they get very defensive, especially when it’s suggesting to do something the Navy’s way. It’s like the Air Force is always screwing and the Pentagon saying “Why can’t you be more like your big brother, the Navy?”

I agree with you, the AF is going to fight tooth and nail to keep from being re-integrated with the Army. That’s a lot of upper brass getting canned.

ttyymmnn > -this space for rent- 10/05/2015 at 15:34

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That’s just it: The more I read about the deep strike doctrine of the early nuclear era, the more I believe that deep strike, at least by airplanes, is dead. And I think this is what NID is getting at, at least for the strategic bomber. Even in the age of stealth. In twenty years, the only deep striking that will be done will be cruise missiles, waves of UCAVs, or, God forbid, ICBMs. Antiaircraft technology is too good, enemy fighters are too good, and the only way you’re going to go deep is if you’ve got air superiority, and then deep strike won’t matter. I’m sure that smarter people than I are thinking about this, but change comes hard, and there are too many political positions, jobs, and ranks to protect. Status quo has a ton of inertia behind it.

The Powershift in Steve's '12 Ford Focus killed it's TCM (under warranty!) > No, I don't thank you for the fish at all 10/05/2015 at 15:54

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I think the concept of the strategic bomber is tactically relevant only as a method for delivering long range, stealthy, preferably supersonic, cruise missiles. The days of penetrating an integrated air defense system with manned bombers, even if they’re stealthy, are over. The cost and complexity of something like a B-2 makes it far too politically risky to send it into a hostile environment in anything but a WW3 scenario...which would probably devolve into nukes sooner, rather than later, anyway.

With that in mind, something like a modern B-52 or Tu-95 is worth having around as a strategic cruise missile delivery platform or a heavy tactical CAS platform in a permissive environment. They essentially become a bomb/missile truck, and don’t ever have to get into range of an enemy’s SAMs and radar. With a big enough bomb truck, you can send in a variety of different size and capability missiles, from heavy bunker busters to small precision missiles, to do all the dirty work for you. If they get shot down or intercepted, you don’t lose irreplaceable men and bombers, and with a large aircraft, you can carry lots of missiles and decoys to overwhelm enemy defenses.

What is worthwhile to me is a stealthy heavy strike fighter, like an F-15E based off of the F-22, or a modern and less-shitty F-111. You can attack with smaller, shorter range precision weapons for strategic attacks without having to bring a bomb truck into range of enemy defenses, carry a small number of heavier weapons for a critical strike where having a man in the cockpit is perceived to be necessary, or provide CAS in an environment where the enemy still has active SAMs or fighters. If you base this aircraft on a fighter, like the F-15E, and maintain much of it’s performance, you open up the possibility for self escort during strikes, in addition to common maintenance, training, and upgrade options between the strike fighter and it’s pure-fighter brother.

ly2v8-Brian > ttyymmnn 10/05/2015 at 17:35

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That loitering in the battle space is key to the future of these craft.

sunnydaysam > No, I don't thank you for the fish at all 10/05/2015 at 19:40

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imo, the F-35 debacle has ruined any credibility the USAF has when we talk about new aircraft.

sunnydaysam > ttyymmnn 10/05/2015 at 19:42

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‘ it’s time to get rid of the independent branch of the USAF and roll it back into the Army, as it was in WWII.’

exactly so!

ttyymmnn > sunnydaysam 10/05/2015 at 20:29

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I'm interested to know why you agree with that.

gmporschenut also a fan of hondas > No, I don't thank you for the fish at all 10/05/2015 at 21:48

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With the Buffs 60 years old, the B1b and b2 30 years old, at some point a replacement will be needed. I still think a platform with long range loitering capability will be needed. With the Pacific a greater focus fighters wont have the range needed, especially with the vulnerability of carriers.

Hot Takes Salesman > No, I don't thank you for the fish at all 10/05/2015 at 22:16

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Yes, but, look at the B-1B Lancer- smaller radar cross section than a B-52, supersonic, can carry the same payload longer, and can carry long-range standoff missiles. The Bomber Barons and Fighter Mafia within the Air Force have been asking your question for thirty years my friend, with each side having considerable evidence. I side with the bomber crews. When an airspace is fully secured, bombers can do the heavy lifting to destroy enemy command and control, infrastructure, units, morale, and more.