As National Defense‘s Mandy Mayfield reports, the Air Force is considering refocusing its budget away from the B-1 bomber and toward the next generation B-21 bomber. The problem, the Air Force chief of staff says, is that the B-1 sustainment costs are increasing to a point that drowns out investment funds for other strike programs.
My take: Reallocating toward the B-21 is the right thing to do for five reasons: China, China, Russia, China, and China.
Put more simply, this really should be a no-brainer in terms of the evolving threat environment.
The problem is not simply that the Air Force B-1B aircraft are limited in number (62), but that they are also very old. Although they have been repeatedly upgraded, they are a creation of the later Cold War period. There’s only so much you can do with an airframe. Considering advanced Chinese and Russian air defense capabilities, B-1 crews would likely suffer significant losses in a conflict with either of those nations.
The Air Force says it has addressed these concerns by building new standoff range strike capabilities into the B-1. As the National Interest reports, the B-1s are now successfully integrated with the new Long Range Anti-Ship Missile. With a range of around 300 nautical miles, the LRASM is designed to deter and deny Chinese fleet mobility.
But just as the Navy wrongly insists that its carriers are invulnerable to Chinese anti-ship missiles, the Air Force is likely overestimating the B-1’s survivability, even at range, against next generation Chinese radar-kill systems. Those systems are designed to achieve sensor dominance along the electromagnetic spectrum. The B-1s would therefore have to employ the LRASM at near-max range to avoid being hit by Chinese air or naval forces, such as the exceptional Renhai-class cruiser.
The rational solution here is a crash program to deploy the B-21 at scale.
While imperfect, and almost certainly too reliant on networked warfare (which China will credibly aim to disrupt on day one of any conflict), the B-21 brings much more to the fight than the B-1. Equipped with the LRASM and other standoff munitions, it would give U.S. commanders a greater means of successfully penetrating the battlespace and thus an increase in possible targets. The deterrent factor here would also supplement the B-2 bomber.
The key is to buy time until we can deploy swarms of lethal, long-range armed drones.
