The next bomber in the US Air Force inventory should be stealthy and subsonic. It should travel 2,000-nautical miles to its target and have enough fuel on board to get home. It should carry at least 28 500-pound bombs. And (surprise!) there should be a human pilot on board.
These are the conclusions of the Air Force’s recently completed analysis of alternatives for a next-generation bomber to be fielded around 2018.
This is supposed to be a new thing, of course, but those specifications seem strangely familiar.
Anyone remember the A-12 Avenger II? It, too, was a stealthy, subsonic, manned aircraft that blurred the boundary between an attack aircraft and a bomber.
Dick Cheney cancelled the A-12 program on 7 January 1991, just as the bombs started to fall on Baghdad during Operation Desert Storm.
True, the A-12 was conceived as a carrier-based land attack aircraft, but it wasn’t entirely a Navy bird. According to our dog-eared copy of Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft 1991–92, a “USAF A-12″ had been proposed as a replacement for the F-111.
The F-111 was designed to carry 24 500-pound bombs and travel 1,800 miles, and it’s not unfair to think the proposed USAF variant of the super-secret A-12 would have been very similar in capability.
So, congratulations, taxpayers: Watch the Air Force spend billions of dollars over the next decade for an aircraft that General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas very nearly delivered to the navy and the air force 15 years ago.
Christian adds:
The Washington Post reported today the law suit between the government, General Dynamics and Boeing Co. that festered for years over the cancellation of the A-12 program has been adjudicated in favor of the governments position.
The U.S. Court of Federal Claims upheld the government’s 1991 decision to terminate the companies’ contract for the A-12 radar-evading plane, General Dynamics and Boeing said.
The “contracting officer could have concluded that McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics had ‘no reasonable likelihood’ of delivering the aircraft on time as measured by the schedule,” Judge Robert H. Hodges wrote in the decision. McDonnell Douglas merged with Boeing in 1997. “We must again uphold the Government’s default termination”
The debate dates to the eve of the Persian Gulf War in January 1991 when Dick Cheney, who was defense secretary, canceled the program, which was over budget and behind schedule. The Pentagon demanded return of the $1.3 billion it had invested in the plane, and General Dynamics sued, arguing that the real reason for the cancellation was that the Pentagon needed money for the war. No A-12s were ever built.
The case has been in the courts for years and became a symbol for the difficulty of canceling a weapons program. In 2002, the Navy told General Dynamics and Boeing to pay $2.3 billion to settle the case, which the companies refused to do. That demand included $1 billion in interest.
Why so many bombs? Just imagine — a minimum of 100 aircraft needs to be built to really justif a development program. 100 aircraft caarrying each 28 precision strike SDB’s … that’s enough to annilihalte the industrial capacity of a country like Ukraine with one sortie of each bomber …
If strikes were limited to electricity-related industries (powerplants), two bombers were enough to shut down the industry of a country like Ukraine.
(I used the Ukraine to have a decent-sized, developed country as example).
The bombload requirement is exaggerated imho.
The endurance was the more relevant variable in the past years and there are still some B-2’s to do jobs like “hit 300 targets within 2 hours while endangering less than 20 soldiers”.
sorry for the typos…
justify, carrying, annihilate … embarassing
No, the next bomber the Air Force uses should focus on:
–robustness, being able to be deployed to smaller bases without expensive maintenance or those B-2 pods
–loitering, with ground to air comm getting better and quicker it’s more important to have air support on site than flying around the world
–comm, being able to effectively communicate with ground forces is key. Sacrifice a couple bombs for better communications
–moderate stealth, being stealthy is already covered with B-2s, cruise missiles, and stand-off bombs.
Very nearly delivered?
The contractors were far behind schedule, far over weight, and far over budget when the contract was canceled. “Very nearly delivered” makes it sound like everything was just fine until the mean ol’ gub’mint decided to cancel the program just to waste the money.
I concur with DavidR. I worked on that program from ’88 to ’90, and I can say with certainty that we were nowhere near delivering anything when Cheney pulled the plug.
Yes, I may have exaggerated a tad on the “nearly delivered point”.
The air force’s next-generation long range strike is not new, but a very delayed replacement for the F-111’s range and weapons load and the A-12’s stealth, is my point.
That admittedly didn’t come through in my little write-up.
I hate to say it but unless we can find something novel, and useful that we don’t have in bombers we have out now I don’t see any reason to design new ones. If we want more bombers great, just buy more of the ones we already have. Hell if we are talking about close air support being a reason how about some more a-10s (With the new updates they are good for so much more than they used to be), if you just want to bomb the crap out of something from airbases thosands of miles away how about B-52s, Cruse missles, B-2s or F-111s for that matter. Can’t we think of anything that would be better servered with a complete redesign more than all the bombers we have to choose from?
It seems to be more than anything else the US military needs to figure out how to shrink it’s supply chain. We need to use less fuel, require less equipment, and truck less water. How many people have died in Iraq just because of our requirement to truck water and fuel all over the place?
Isn’t the B2 a stealthy, subsonic bomber? I thought something like, amuse me for a moment, a Y-Wing that can go into hyperspace, come out of hyperspace to drop its payload and then back into it. What I mean by that is something that’s extremely fast and can slow down enough to drop the payload.
But I’d like to add I’m not an expert on such matters and probably think you lot have guffawed your coffee down your fronts at such a notion.
1. LRS
The parameters tell me more about their planning assumptions tan anything else. And thus I consider this a Medium Range Strike concept.
2. A-12
Check out RAND
apologies for the fat fingering typos
What a waste of money.
We dont need some bomber to scare China…(which is what the B-2 did to Russia)…cause we wont ever do a full on assualt on china…and if that actually does happen…a slow bomber isn’t what would be used.
A interium bomber like the YF-23 makes more sense…since it would be much cheaper…and be able to go around mach 2. Which would make more sense…whether your going after terrorists or rouge nations.
11 years down the road…and they want a bomber thats slow and stealthy.…????
It seems the AF doesn’t want anything new.
What happened to the PDE engine…that thing showed massive amounts of potential.…there no way they would abandon that tech.
If they would make a YF-23 type of bomber…except ditch the jet engine, and go with PDE…they could have a high mach number aircraft…at least mach 5.
The USAF keeps searching for the holy grail of bombers, a bomber with long range, big pay-load, low radar cross-section, capable of being used as a fighter and it won’t ever happen.
I predict that within 10–20 years that airborne lasers (on both sides) will create such a hostile air environment that manned aircraft will have a short lifetime in the combat arena and that small, stealthy, fast RPV will dominate the airspace.
A stretched YF-23, with a lowered need for high speed, would be an exceptionally easy answer to this need. For that matter, an expanded, manned version of one of the A-12 derivatives now being built as UAVs, would be another — if ironic — possibility.
The conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have pointed out one error of the “go-fast” gang: No matter how many F-22s, F-35s and B-2s you buy, you will still always have a requirement for a less-flashy, durable and dependable “bomb truck” to put a concentrated mass of iron on some tactical targets.
Any “stealthy” Canberras waiting in the wings?
When is the airforce going to realise that manned bombers are not the way to go if you are looking for endurance? If they don’t then Israel (http://www.janes.com/press/articles/pc060307_1.shtml) or worse France will have the capability sooner. Countries with smaller defense budgets could attain an edge in this area because of smarter investment choices.
murc;
I’m very concerned about these “rouge” nations. Are they the ones that go red when we’re not looking? Or the ones that give us roguish looks?
Just confused, and blushing.
Subsonic only sounds good to the bean-counters cause it costs less money. But I bet anyone that the Air Force would love supersonic. That whole talk about prompt global strike can’t be just a lot of hot air.
Brian H — you know what countries I’m talking about…Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, syria, etc…basically a bunch of middle eastern countries.
The A-12 was cancelled, in a nutshell, because the technology required to make it work was too much of a stretch to achieve on a cost effective basis in 1991. The notion that the same thing might be less challenging technologically sixteen years later, after a period of revolutionary advances in the science and implementation of aircraft with new materials, advanced avionics, aerodynamic innovations, and stealth technology, is hardly a stretch.
In other words, it is entirely possible that Cheney, that bastard that he is, may have made the right decision for 1991, and that somebody else may be making the right decision in basically reinventing the A-12 now.
The technology has arrived, although I seriously doubt that the mission that its successor is designed to carry out (medium range, medium weight bombing runs) really ought to be a priority for the Air Force. The Air Force has the F-15E, F-16, F-35A, F-117, and A-10 for short range bombing missions. It has the B-52, B-1 and B-2 for long range bombing missions.
It isn’t as if the long range bomber fleet is so overtaxed that it can’t handle a medium range, medium payload run from time to time. There is slack in the system to allow the big guys to run those kinds of missions.
For my druthers, I’d rather see a B-52 successor, perhaps modeled on a Boeing 747 or 737, than a successor to the F-111 and the A-12. If the medim range bombing mission were so vital, we wouldn’t have retired the F-111 long before any replacement was in place.
Finally a carrier based aircraft in the class of a F111. Just like the F111 was originally intended.
Somebody inform Australia in a hurry
Let me begin my remarks by establishing my background. I am a retired Air Force officer with just shy of 2000 hours as a B-52 Radar Navigator (bombardier). I also served as Assistant Editor of The Air University Review and Deputy Director of Curriculum at Squadron Officer School. Bomber doctrine has been a real, close-up concern for most of my adult life, so what I write here is more than just a casual opinion.
A manned long-range bomber is and will be a necessary part of successful military operations for the forseeable future. Think of a bomber as long-range artillery that can devastate enemy operations and logistics with great precision hundreds of miles behind the front, or in his homeland. While we are currently involved in a guerilla battle, to assume there is no great war in the future would be naive.
That said, there are variables that may or may not be necessary.
Speed is important because it limits exposure to enemy defenses, but speed brings tradeoffs. Greater speed means increased fuel consumption and, therefore, smaller weapon loads and shorter range. Supersonic speeds dictate either smaller airframe design (e.g., B-58, FB-111) or exotic material content (e.g., YF-12, SR-71). Also, as enemy defenses become more sophisticated, speed alone loses much of its edge.
Stealthiness provides a marginal way to defeat enemy electronic defenses, but only until those defenses catch up technologically. It also is expensive, requiring cutting-edge (e.g., radar-absorbing) materials and radical airframe design; the latter makes flight characteristics very unstable and makes computerized control systems essential.
The most complex, and least valued component of modern bomber design is the crew. The more an aircraft depends on computers for threat assessment, weapon delivery, and egress, the more limited it becomes. In 1981, a flight of 6, 25-year-old B-52Gs (with 30-year-old defensive and weapons delivery systems) successfully struck 48 simulated targets at Red Flag, despite the state of the art F-15 and F-5 aggressors searching frantically for them. The bombers were never located because human electronic warfare officers were operating jammers and defensive systems in unpredictable ways. (I know this because I was on the lead bomber and was in the subsequent debriefing at Nellis AFB).
The ability to apply creativity and ingenuity to a situation requires a human crew. Computers cannot create. Regardless whether the government goes with speed or stealth, the minimum requirement for a long-range bomber is a live crew!
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