The Global Race for Next-Generation Bombers

more than a year ago we talked about the global race to develop a Next Generation fighter covering the efforts of that very small group of countries with the resources necessary to take the next developmental step with some of the most complicated weapons of war ever designed but if the number of nations that can build Advanced Fighters is small the bomber Club is absolutely tiny and there depending on where you set the Finish Line the Next Generation race May already have a winner having given the world the first operational stealthy strategic bomber with the B2 Spirit the US has recently released images of its successor the B21 raidar in flight but the world of military competition Abes a monopoly and as the B21 takes the sky Russia and China are pushing ahead with their own nextg programs so today I want to look at the aircraft likely to make up the bomber fleets of the future from incredibly Advanced and expensive Next Generation platforms to some much older veteran designs that might still have a fair amount of service ahead of them to do that as I often do I&#39;ll start with a little bit of History covering the evolution of the Strategic bomber why Nations have or haven&#39;t chosen to build them and the three major existing fleets then we&#39;ll start to hone in on the Next Generation including both common Next Generation features and the three main development programs one each for the United States China and Russia finally though we&#39;ll pivot from looking at the future role of very Advanced aircraft to the role of much older classic designs and ask why on a future Battlefield potentially dominated by all sorts of sci-fi technology we may still see classic designs like the Boeing B52 push on towards Wards a century in service so let&#39;s kick off with some history I&#39;ve already done an episode on strategic bombing itself in the past so today I&#39;m going to focus on the aircraft themselves humans being what they are it didn&#39;t take too long to go from hey we can build something that flies to hey we can probably drop things on people while we&#39;re up there leaving aside very early examples involving things like Kites and balloons the first Employments of something we might recognize as a strategic bomber at scale probably date to the first world war initially for countries like Germany the task of strategic bombing that is hitting targets well behind opposing lines was handled by lighter than air aircraft Zeppelin for some unknowable reason however uh slow moving flammable gas bags had a bit of a survivability problem once defenses started to improve and by the end of World War One most powers appear to have reached the conclusion that a heavy fix wi aircraft was a better option Germany would use aircraft like the G4 for a number of raids on Britain while in the Eastern Front the Russians had started the war with a heavy bomber design already available the Ilia morets was for the time a very large 4 engine aircraft that could carry a significant number of defensive machine guns they would also reportedly maintain a positive loss ratio against German Fighters interestingly enough the Ilia morets was actually a sakori design sakori himself was born in Kiev and designed a number of aircraft in Imperial Russia before fleeing to the United States in 1919 there he became a major figure in American aircraft development and sakori aircraft to this day continue to be responsible for some naan lesser known American designs like you know the uh60 Blackhawk one wonders what it might have meant for Russian Aviation development if he and others like him had never immigrated due to the Bolshevik takeover but that piece of historical trivia aside let&#39;s get back to the heavy bombers the technology of the heavy bomber continued to evolve in the inter War period and then exploded in capability over the course of the second world war generally becoming faster longer ranged higher flying better armed far more equipped with far more destructive payloads ultimately including the atomic bomb and as a general rule much much larger as designers managed to get more range and more Bomb by building more bomber during World War I a typical German bomber might manage a payload just north of £800 an early World War II bomber like the twin engine Vicor Wellington might manage more than five times that with a listed payload of about £4,500 by the end of World War II modified versions of the British Lancaster 4 engine heavy could carry the 10 ton 22,000 lb Grand Slam earthquake bomb and even with the development of the atomic weapon payloads just kept getting larger a big belly version of the B52 during the Vietnam war could carry 84 individual 500 lb bombs plus additional bombs on external pylons but even before jet bombers like the be2 started to appear in Earnest even greater levels of sheer Ridiculousness had been achieved as suggested by the image on the right there showing a convey b36 Peacemaker introduced 1948 next to a b29 the world&#39;s first type of nuclear bomber to ever drop a nuclear weapon the b36 had a crew of 13 a maximum takeoff weight of more than 185 tons and a standard not maximum payload of more than £72,000 or 33 tons again this was a 1940s aircraft to put that into perspective that meant the b36 is bomb load weighed more than two empty a lancasters meaning that if form factor wasn&#39;t a problem this was a bomber that could have carried other bombers especially during the early Cold War period before the widespread adoption of intercontinental ballistic missiles American nuclear war plans were dominated by the role of Strategic Air Command and its longrange bombers and in the &#39; 50s the US would majorly build up sack strength in answer to a Soviet threat that might have been at least in the air slightly exaggerated the classic example here was the So-Cal bomber gap of the early and mid 1950s it started off simply enough with the Soviets developing the M4 malot heavy bomber NATO call sign bison and some Publications like Aviation week running attention grabbing headlines amping up the threat of a potential Soviet nuclear attack against the US Homeland using this new InterContinental bomber then in 1955 the Soviets themselves got in on the action during the aviation Day Celebrations which were of course closely monitored by Foreign governments the Soviets would fly a number of fors over the location until they left view before having them quickly turn around join up with another flight and fly over the parade area again convincing many foreign observers that they had seen far more Super bombers than they actually had that parade appearance led to some predictions that by 1960 the Soviets might have as many as 800 of these things however for actual Intelligence on the Soviet bomber buildup the Americans would turn to the U2 spy plane in 1956 one of those flights would go over a Soviet bomber base where they would see 30 M4 bombers analysts would then make assumptions and extrapolate out based on the number of other known Soviet bomber bases and came up with an estimate of 150 to 250 of these bombers by 1958 and 600 by the 1960s the US Air Force of course called out for more resources and Sack scrambled to match the Soviet challenge building up to a massive Peak force of approximately 2,500 bombers including 750 b52s with most of the remainder being b-47s the problem however was that the Doomsday Soviet bomber Force didn&#39;t actually exist there were no bison at other Soviet bases it just so happened the U2 flight Flew Over the one base that was storing all of them in fact in the end the Soviets weren&#39;t even that happy with the design as built it didn&#39;t have the range necessary to launch a nuclear attack on the United States and then make it back to a Soviet base afterwards production would be discontinued with fewer than 100 aircraft manufactured and a lot of the ones that were put into service were used as things like tankers or in Maritime roles in essence the Soviets had faked a small capability spotting intelligence and extrapolation had then grown that capability into a significant threat fortunately however no one would ever again exaggerate the performance or production figures for any Russian or Soviet weapon system American Heavy bombers would play a significant role in both Korea and Vietnam but by the 1960s it was clear that new technological developments were threatening the place the bomber had there too enjoyed the emergence of surface toar missiles and increasingly capable Jet and Rocket powered interceptors would make the bombers more vulnerable at the same time substitute options were emerging for some of the heavy bombers traditional missions longrange missiles were becoming available as a nuclear delivery system while for the more conventional role of just dropping lots and lots of high explosive on stuff the additional lifting power provided by the jet engine meant that now lighter more flexible tactical aircraft could carry very significant bomb loads the American f105 Thunder Chief fighter bomber which entered in 1958 for example had a payload capacity that wouldn&#39;t have been out of place on a number of World War II heavy bombers and it could heft that while being much smaller and more flexible than a full-sized heavy as is often the case different nations came up with different answers to these threats to the bombers position some like the United Kingdom would eventually just get rid of their heavy bombers although not before the raf&#39;s AO Vulcans launched some very long distance bombing raids during the fand&#39;s war while US and Soviet designers would push on for different answers while one of the first answers was just to design a bomber that would go very very fast the conveyor b-58 Hustler introduced 1960 could manage more than twice the speed of sound carrying its nuclear payload in a disposable pod under the belly of the aircraft the high and fast concept would arguably reach its apex with the American xp70 Valkyrie which as designed and tested was capable of flying at more than three times the speed of sound the immense costs of the program and concerns over survivability however would lead to the xp7 being cancelled as unnecessary and economically unjustifiable with the two prototypes being handed over to NASA to support research efforts of course that didn&#39;t stop the program spooking the Soviets who thought the Americans might end up with entire fleets of the things leading to them overbuilding a response in the form of the very highspeed Mig 25 Interceptor which in turn would be perceived by the Americans as a potential super fighter leading to them overbuilding a response in the form of the F-15 because apparently a story is always funnier when it happens a third fourth or 50th time towards the end of the Cold War both Moscow and Washington would develop variable geometry bombers these swing wi designs could change their configurations in flight to optimize either for low and slow operations high-speed supersonic Sprints or anything in between these gave them access to different means for survival depending on the circumstances they faced and along with Speed and Performance the bombers also got two other survivability answers firstly the availability of a wide array of longrange crew Cru and anti-shipping missiles which could theoretically enable bombers to perform a lot of their mission without moving into range of enemy air defenses Soviet bombers in particular would be heavily adapted for the dedicated missile carrier role to the point where during modernization some Soviet bombers would actually have their bomb sites removed another survivability response was to come up with bombers incorporating very low observability features AKA stealth bombers which didn&#39;t rely so much on highp speed or very longrange weapons so much as the inherent difficulty of trying to shoot down something that you can&#39;t find for decades stealth bombers have been an exclusively American asset but now with the emergence of Next Generation bomber programs we may be getting closer to the point when that Monopoly is finally Broken But if that&#39;s a quick snapshot of how bombers have evolved why in the 21st century might you as a nation decide to invest or not invest in buying and Fielding these things key point one right as we said at the start is that the default position for most countries is not to have strategic bombers there are some systems out there that most militaries will have like a basic armored vehicle but if you&#39;re talking about strategic bombers there are currently only really three countries that have looked at what they offer and said yes that&#39;s worth the price and in terms of challenges that explain that relatively low uptick rate there are more than a few firstly there are the costs and challenges involved in Fielding the aircraft themselves chunky aircraft tend to mean chunky acquisition and sustainment budgets as well as demands for base and maintenance facilities that can accommodate and support them and to that that there are relatively few companies out there with any recent experience building these things and you have economic challenge one coupled with that is the problem that for a lot of Nations there are probably acceptable substitutes to investing in a heavy bomber Force if you want aircraft that can carry a lot but not obscene amounts of ordinance there are lots of Alternatives out there NATO&#39;s nuclear sharing program is built around the use of gravity bombs in the F-35 the French Nuclear Strike capability is based on the asmp missile and the raile yes the raile is probably only going to carry one yuk when the be 52 can carry many many more but under most circumstances how many nukes are you really going to need to send a final warning plus a lot of the time using smaller aircraft also means using more flexible and multi-mission aircraft an F-15 e strike eagle can carry many tons worth of ground attack ordinance but in many ways it&#39;s still fundamentally an F15 and so if suddenly it turns out you need a fighter or an Interceptor not an attack aircraft just fit some am Rams and declare Mig season open that multimission flexibility feeds into economic argument to the question of scale all else being equal one of the things you don&#39;t want to be doing as an Air Force is operating lots and lots of small fleets of many many different types of aircraft less scale can mean more expensive production more pressure to close down production lines early more difficult long-term sustainment and more cases of your maintainers spontaneously developing a deep empathy for the BLS responsible for keeping the utter managerie of equipment operated by the Ukrainian Armed Forces functional and in service and for countries out out there that aren&#39;t trying to do superpower things all the time and don&#39;t have superpower defense budgets it might be a lot more practical to buy more of a lighter multi-mission design than to invest in a couple of strategic bombers even if you had a scenario where a fighter might be twice as good as a multi-roll design at being a fighter and a heavy bomber might be four times as good as a multi-roll aircraft at being a bomber you might find it&#39;s cheaper more efficient and more flexible to operate 36 multi-roll aircraft instead of trying to eat the development cost and then convince your local industry to set up separate production lines for 12 Fighters and three bombers obviously in the real world there&#39;s going to be more to an investment decision than just those sort of simple calculations but it&#39;s fair to say if you&#39;re a country going into heavy bombers it&#39;s probably because you need some of these specific capabilities that the aircraft provide and you need those capabilities in sufficient quantity to Merit actually maintaining a fleet if you&#39;re only casually into bombing people then bombers might not be for you if however you&#39;re a country where every policy brief comes with bombing as an option keep listening in its modern incarnations there&#39;s a couple of things the heavy bomber might offer that other aircraft may not range and loitering time are fairly obvious big plane can fly further and hang around longer without developing an incredibly clingy relationship with the local refueling tankers advantage to is usually payload quantity and payload flexibility all else being equal more playing can probably carry more stuff in total and there might be especially large payloads that smaller aircraft just can&#39;t carry full stop that Russian tu22m on the right there for example is carrying three large anti-ship missiles and good luck getting a lot of the multiroll fighters out there to carry even one missile with that sort of form factor finally you might want certain specialized characteristics that work best in a larger strategic bomber design a subsonic flying wing design for example might give you excellent stealth performance provided you&#39;re sufficiently accurate in copying northr grumman&#39;s homework but it would probably make for a relatively shitty multi-roll fighter sized air and really only starts to make sense once you talk about going big at a larger scale though both in terms of the size of the aircraft and the size of the fleet things can start to make sense compared to other options we&#39;ll come back to some of the math behind this in the future but if you want to move a lot of ordinance a long distance strategic bombers might be one of the more affordable and more flexible ways to do it with refueling support bombers based for example in the continental United States might be able to hit Targets on relatively short notice almost anywhere in the world while if you relying for examp on Naval cruise missiles or Naval Aviation you&#39;d be reliant on having a task force already in the area to launch those attacks it also might create scenarios where you can put more investment into the reusable platform as opposed to the ordinance you&#39;re using if I try for example to strike a Defender Target using a cruise missile so my ship or aircraft isn&#39;t destroyed by enemy defenses then I&#39;m getting the reach and survivability I need by pouring a lot into the weapon I&#39;m using If instead I take something very expensive but also very survivable like a B2 Spirit stealth bomber then I might be able to get the expensive but reusable bit close enough to my target to use a much cheaper weapon instead striking dozens of targets with guided bombs instead of dozens of cruise missiles in monetary terms I&#39;m probably investing far more in scenario 2 than I did in scenario 1 but more of my capital is tied up in something that I can reuse again and again potentially for decades rather than something that is literally designed to explode so while there&#39;s definitely a use case there for the Strategic bomber as of 2024 they&#39;ve pretty much become just great power weapons previously strategic bombers were operated by a range of countries including the United Kingdom Indonesia Iraq Egypt and of course Ukraine which inherited a significant force of strategic bombers from the Soviet Union including more than 120 t6s with International encouragement many of those aircraft would later be disassembled while some of the more advanced types like the TU 160s were sold back to Russia along with hundreds of compatible longrange missiles but in 2024 there are really only three primary heavy bomber fleets operating aircraft that fall into one of three categories there are subsonic bomb trucks and missile carriers like the American B52 Russian t95 and Chinese H6 these are designs that can trace their lineages back to the 50s or 60s and are about as stealthy as your average apartment building the Next Generation also still in service are the supersonic variable geometry bombers think the American B1 or the Soviet tu22m and tu60 aircraft like the B1 and tu 160 can obviously provide much higher performance than the older subsonic designs at the price of being well pricier to get an idea of where these aircrafts sit in the chronology the 22m entered Soviet service in the early 1970s while the B1 arrived in 1986 and the t160 1987 finally you have the subsonic stealth bombers or rather I should say bomber as we&#39;re only aware of one type that is publicly confirmed to currently be in service adding stealth features to the platform obviously gives it a completely different survival Prospect effect against a ranger defense systems just historically at a price so high that even the United States had to bulk at it with each of the 21 B2 bombers ultimately procured by the United States costing an average of $2.1 billion US once research development and other costs were taken into account although in large part those costs were driven by the fact that with the Soviet Union collapsing for some reason the US Congress didn&#39;t see a need to proceed with the original plan for 132 Uber bombers and cut the number down to just 21 of the three strategic bomber powers only the United States operates aircraft of all three types for the US strategic bombers are largely used to support the global strike role that is to go anywhere in the world where the US has interests on relatively short notice and communicate those interests to relevant parties with the actual or threaten release of significant volumes of high explosives as a global power with global interests the range provided by strategic bombers can give the US considerable flexibility the B2 and B52 also play play a continued role as part of America&#39;s nuclear deterent the Chinese strategic bomber Force by comparison has a much simpler Force profile being made of the Xian H6 a license-built version of the tu6 which over the course of its many years in Chinese service has operated alongside a number of other designs for example various escort Fighters as well as Maritime strike h6s ew h6s aerial refueling h6s cruise missile carrying h6s modernized conventional bomber h6s and of course a new Nuclear Strike version of you guessed it the H6 although note with a lot of versions there is some overlap between the various roles different versions of the H6 are operated both by The People&#39;s Liberation Army Air Force and the not at all confusingly named people&#39;s Liberation Army Naval Air Force the aircraft arguably deserves a special degree of Distinction considering the first triple F16 flew in 1952 and as of 2024 more than 70 years later the H6 derivative is still believed to be inactive production finally there&#39;s the existing Russian strategic Aviation Force which has an interesting story of its own Russia&#39;s current Fleet of strategic bombers are responsible for carrying out a range of missions they retain a long- range Nuclear Strike role and continue to fly so-called deterrence missions which often involve these somewhat strange sites of seeing ancient t95 turbo prop bombers intercepted and then escorted by Fighters young enough to be their grandchildren more significantly the bomber Force also functions as a missile carrying Force both in the naval strike roll maintaining a Readiness to H longrange anti-shipping missiles at NATO shipping and as we&#39;ve seen in Ukraine fairly regularly launching longrange missile attacks against ground targets where the bombers basically just serve to Loft the missiles up to a launch height and location as it stands currently the Russian Fleet consists of three main types the subsonic turbo prop powered tupv 95 bear and then two supersonic capable variable geometry bombers the smaller one tu22m is sometimes referred to in Russian circles as a Euro strategic bomber owing to its much more limited range and payload while the tu60 to the Russians the White Swan and to Nato the Blackjack is probably best considered as roughly analogous to the American b1b Lancer put that all together and you&#39;ve roughly got the chart you see on screen here here I&#39;ve set out the three main strategic bomber fleets by number and type of aircraft in inventory and I&#39;ve deliberately used the military balance 2022 figures here because after the Russian invasion of Ukraine the number and availability of their available strategic bombers becomes just that bit more uncertain what that shows is that in 2022 in raw numbers of airframes the US actually operated the smallest of the three strategic bomber forces with the obvious Counterpoint being that it was also arguably the most capable the B2 stealth bombers were and still are a unique asset and while Russia had a larger number of SuperSonic bombers on paper the vast majority of those were the smaller older and less capable tu22m not the TU 160s which don&#39;t compare well in most car eristics to the American B1 Lancer the People&#39;s Republic of China meanwhile had the largest Fleet on paper with more than 200 heavy bombers size and age however can of course matter when you&#39;re talking heavy bombers and in that sense it&#39;s worth noting the H6 has less than half the maximum takeoff weight of the B52 a smaller maximum payload and a significantly shorter range for most of China&#39;s likely employment scenarios however launching missiles relatively close to the Chinese Homeland the range and payload offered may be more than enough but the wi observation here is just how old all of these inservice designs are with those figures in mind it perhaps shouldn&#39;t be surprising that all three of these countries now have programs to design something entirely new so what I want to do here is start with a couple of potential common features the sorts of Technologies and capabilities that might be at the core of what it means to be a next Generation bomber here I&#39;m going to slam the obvious caveat that while all the programs were going to look at officially do exist the specifics of exactly what they can do and what technologies they&#39;re going to incorporate are going to be protected in layers of secrecy so please keep in mind we&#39;re dealing with a pretty low level of certainty here to start with most commentators seem fairly confident that these next Generation strategic bomber programs are aiming to produce fairly stealthy aircraft we&#39;re talking subsonic flying wing designs in roughly the same vein as the original American B2 for the US and the stealthy aircraft geometry Wizards at northr Grumman this might not be a next Generation technology it&#39;s a cold war concept getting serious refinement but for anyone else in the the game including Moscow and Beijing this is very much a technological leap it also seems likely that these Mann stealthy platforms are going to be intended to operate alongside unmanned ones we&#39;ve talked about the potential of air combat drones and manned unmanned teaming in the past with drones potentially providing the bomber with everything from improved senses and awareness secondary means to carry payloads refueling support or self-defense assistance but the interesting addition here is there might be some elements of what makes a bomber that makes it even more suitable for teaming with drones than a Next Generation fighter a bomber is almost guaranteed to have a crew of at least two people potentially more so compared to a fighter you might have more crew decision-making bandwidth to Monitor and control drones you&#39;re also likely to have more room available on the aircraft for potential support equipment say for example a dedicated drone control station and if you&#39;re trying to design an affordable and stealthy drone system it&#39;s probably going to be easier to design one that can keep up with a subsonic stealth bomber than with a super cruising fighter that&#39;s not to say there aren&#39;t potential challenges when it comes to teaming drones and bombers and US Air Force secretary Frank Kendall has said the US has explicitly abandoned the idea of building a drone with the same range as the bomber but having a Next Generation system operate alongside shorter range drones like the American CCA or the Russian S70 is probably something that&#39;s very much on the cards Next Generation sensors and control systems are also probably a bit of a noar feature I&#39;ve got an image from a t95 cockpit on the right there and as you can see that&#39;s some pretty retro instrumentation again gain compared to a Next Generation fighter there might be some elements that make a tech Refresh on a bomber at least somewhat easier from an engineering perspective assuming the fighter is also meant to be stealthy but also faster and smaller power generation heat dissipation and internal volume are all likely to be less limited on the bomber and we have Clues across the Next Generation programs that countries are thinking in that General Direction with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin describing America&#39;s B21 as a multifunctional aircraft that can quote handle anything from G ing intelligence to battle management end quote at the same time however these aircraft might be able to operate in a crew optional configuration themselves commentators in all three of these programs have hinted they may initially or eventually become optionally man platforms where you have all the facilities on board to accommodate a full crew controlling the aircraft in the case of low-risk operations or those where a human decision maker is absolutely essential like hopefully the Nuclear Strike role I&#39;m not sure anyone out there is particularly Keen to hand chat GPT the big red button just yet but being able to send one or more aircraft up without a crew might be a way to minimize pilot risk or maximize endurance reportedly a directive letter related to the B21 program obtained through Freedom of Information explicitly required the Air Force to quote develop an acquisition program that delivers a sustainable long-range penetrating bomber capable of manned and unmanned operations end quote and currently published us information described the bomber as having been designed to accommodate manned or unmanned and operations and given the general path of technological development it&#39;s not out of the question that other Next Generation programs will go in the same direction and a key idea here might be to think about these things more in terms of being Next Generation platforms than just dedicated bombers ultimately what you&#39;re talking about here are likely to be very long ranged very technologically advanced and hopefully very survivable platforms with lots of the kinds of things that tend to make Engineers unreasonably excited like available internal volume pay Lo capacity power and heat management yes these things are probably primarily intended to carry a bunch of ordinance but given time who&#39;s to say what else they might not be used to carry or do and a wider Force including systems like engard and F35 might occasionally benefit from having a supporting stealthy platform that can potentially carry a very wide array of ordinance in those internal weapon bays and this might be part of the reason we&#39;re seeing Next Generation bombers emerge ahead of the Next Generation Fighters it&#39;s likely easier with something slight larger like a bomber to build a product now that&#39;s going to be upgradeable into the future and speaking of upgrades it&#39;s probably time to talk about our first Next Generation bomber project and one apparently designed to be about as easy to upgrade as a clan omnimech it&#39;s America&#39;s second entry in the Flying Wing stealth bomber category the B21 Raider in the early 21st century the American strategic bomber Force had a pretty clear albeit slow burning problem all three of America&#39;s bomber designs had gone out of production leaving the air force to fight some very hot Wars with some very cold production lines fortunately maintaining and cannibalizing old cold war airf frames was absolutely on the cards and given the somewhat obscene size the US bomber Force had once reached especially for the B-52 there were an awful lot of spare parts parked out there in the Boneyard that said there was apparently a general understanding that sometime between then and the invention of the warp drive the venerable B52 and the other bombers would eventually need a replacement in the head days of the late 1990s the Assumption appears to have been that the Air Force would eventually need some sort of new platform which may or may not actually look like a bomber by the near future year of 2038 for some reason that timeline eventually encountered some push back and I&#39;ve included a screenshot from a 2008 report on the right there showing that at the time a decision was being made to accelerate the timeline on the Air Force&#39;s new bomber aircraft by a casual 20 years the idea which I think tells us a bit about the confidence of the time was that a new generation bomber could be developed in builded by 2018 for a cost of between 8 and10 billion it could then serve as a quote interim fix to bridge the bomber capability Gap apparently in the early 21st century interim Solutions and stop Gap measures meant different things to different people to some militaries that might mean welding a new weapon system to the back of an armored vehicle in America apparently it meant casually developing a Next Generation stealth bomber until something better came along that push gave us the so-called Next Generation bomber program between fiscal 2004 and 2009 the dod requested more than $1.4 billion in research and development funding for the NGB but reportedly scope creep and scope uncertainty were about to claim another victim like many US development programs of the early 2000s the Next Generation bomber reportedly pulled something of an ious maneuver when it came to setting requirements according to one report one of the reasons the Next Generation bomber became so complex and expensive was that it was apparently intended to be able to operate basically independent for example by gathering its own intelligence rather than relying on The Wider force in 2009 the program officially bombed with defense secretary Robert Gates saying that they wouldn&#39;t continue with an air force bomber program until there was a better understanding of quote the need the requirement and the technology end quote the Next Generation bomber was dead and in its place we got the longrange strike bomber after canning the NGB the US Air Force and DOD went back and did a front end analysis of the whole longrange strike concept they considered options to replace the man bombers with everything from conventional ballistic missiles to new air and sea launched cruise missiles ultimately reaching the conclusion by 2011 that what they really needed was kind of what they already had but a bit better in 2011 Se def approved the continuing development of an optionally manned penetrating bomber which unlike the NGB would apparently be able to account for the fact that the rest of the US military does in fact exist and was thus able to focus on a smaller number of core capabilities a large and flexible payload including current and projected future Munitions a very long range stealthy features and a projected procurement cost of not more than $550 million per unit in 2010 terms if that sounds an awful lot to you like the Air Force was asking for a new B2 but better and cheaper than old B2 you probably won&#39;t be surprised that the company that built the B2 North R Grumman would win the design competition in 2015 defeating the Rival Consortium of Boeing and loed Martin giving the program better access to Northrup grumman&#39;s experience in stealthy bomber design although it&#39;s always interesting to hypothesize what other firms might have been able to bring to the table like lessons learned from other programs proprietary technology additional industrial scale or the absolute finest in whistleblower detection technology at the risk of alienating some of the Audience by nerding out over Contracting and program management for a moment it&#39;s worth stressing that in many ways the B21 has been a program not like the others the program has generally been and just brace yourself for a moment here on time and on or under budget and the insane weirdness of the whole Endeavor doesn&#39;t stop there compared to other aircraft design competitions the B21 design was much more detailed and complete at the time the selection was made these weren&#39;t rough sketches with a bunch of TBA scribbled in the margin they were complete down to the level of according to one US Air Force briefing individual access panels that helped reduce design risk and move things along faster later the entire program was was managed and acquired through the Air Force&#39;s rapid capability office meaning it had a much smaller program office than typical for a program of that scale despite the immense complexity of the program that smaller team orbe it one with streamlined processes and a greater ability to make decisions and access decision makers appears to have been able to deliver faster than roughly comparable programs with larger management officers and there were a long list of program elements that read like a how-to guide of avoiding common procurement missteps the aircraft was built to a clear of requirements and a defined cost Target it was built using an open system architecture meaning future upgrades should be much less of a nightmare and there were close information sharing agreements between Northrup Grumman and the Air Force the Air Force for example had full access to a bunch of the relevant intellectual property and a digital twin of the B21 aircraft the design process featured production sustainment as design priorities not afterthoughts and when it came time to build a prototype for testing rather than build an entirely unique handbuilt bespoke air frame northr Grumman reportedly built the plane the same way they intended to build the production versions turning the Prototype not just into a test of the aircraft but a test to the production process to quote Northrock Grumman the B21 test aircraft is equipped with mission systems and was built by the same manufacturing technicians using the same processes and tooling as for the production aircraft end quote the Air Force got fixed price contracts for the initial low rope production batches Northrop Grumman got assurances the Air Force intended to procure close to 100 other the things meaning there might actually be acceptable scale this time around now make no mistake there&#39;s still plenty of room for things to go horribly horribly wrong in the future and largely because of unexpected inflation spikes Northrop Grumman expects to actually lose money on the initial production batches although they expect to make money overall but is a relatively Advanced development program intended to produce something with some clearly defined requirements produced at scale delivered on time and on budget with a central focus on product life cycle sustainment upgrades Etc from the outside looking in I&#39;m kind of tempted to award a couple of Peron gold stars here in December 2022 we finally got to see the B21 unveiled orbe it from only certain angles that concealed some sensitive parts of the design what it looks like essentially is a slightly smaller much more advanced version of the B2 Spirit the basic similarities conceal detail changes to just about everything about the aircraft from the windows to the intakes to the shaping of the design as a secretary defense put it 50 years of advances in low observable technology have gone into this aircraft and even the most sophisticated air defense systems will struggle to detect a B21 in the sky and with images now being released of test versions of the B21 actually in Flight confirming northr grman weren&#39;t just pulling a kahur 313 maneuver with a non-flying model obviously the aircraft still has some serious challenges ahead of it not just in terms of getting through testing but getting the funding from Congress to build the projected 100 airframes eventually but there&#39;s a lot more public evidence of progress here than there are for the other two programs we&#39;re going to look at if the US Next Generation bomber program is evolutionary working towards essentially a new B2 with Next Generation bells and whistles and a slightly less obscene price tag for the people&#39;s Liberation Army in China a Next Generation bomber would arguably be revolutionary there the currently dominant strategic bomber traces its design lineage to an aircraft that first flew in the Stalin era not to mention one that&#39;s considerably smaller than both the b 2 and tu9 95 so introducing a stealthy longrange bomber with sixth generation features would arguably be an upgrade in the same sense that handing Roman legionaries a bunch of firearms would also be an upgrade and yet that appears to be precis the goal of the program aiming to produce the H20 bomber Chinese official sources have described the H20 as a system of national significance and US intelligence describes it as an aircraft that is likely to feature a stealthy design a range of more than 10,000 km and be capable of employing both conventional and nuclear Weaponry so far the H20 is one of those programs where you see a lot of bits and pieces but ultimately know very little official sources have carried various CGI mockups and models of the aircraft all of which are different from each other and unlike with the B21 where we&#39;ve actually seen one with the H20 no one operating solely on publicly available information will be able to tell you with 100% confidence exactly what the thing looks like but the common view among many International commentators including the Russy report on the right there is that this thing is generally speaking going to be a rough analog to the American B2 Spirit a subsonic flying wing or crank kite design with tremendous range the aforementioned Russy report does raise some questions about the program including China&#39;s ability to produce engines necessary for a true B2 class aircraft but with the people&#39;s Liberation Army Air Force suggesting the aircraft will be unveiled to the public relatively soon it seems likely we may get a better look at the Chinese design and their answer to the various technical problems involved sooner rather than later perhaps the most important part of the Chinese program though is not exactly what the aircraft looks like but what a capability like this might allow the plf to do other than its very longrange missiles there are currently relatively few Chinese assets that can reach out long distances from the Chinese Mainland the Navy isn&#39;t currently well configured to contest something like the US Navy beyond the first island chain and under most circumstances trying to fly a non stealthy subsonic bomber like the H6 out into Allied airspace would be a bit of a Leroy Jenkins maneuver if it even had the range to get where you wanted to go with a useful payload in the first place a B2 analog by contrast could add reach and survivability and significantly multiply the number of targets that could potentially be held at risk and so while some sources including everyone&#39;s favorite the anonymous us intelligence official have suggested that H20 is likely to fall short of us platforms when it comes to capability for a lot of purposes China may not need something as good as B2 or B21 it just needs the H20 to be good and enough so let&#39;s move on then to the Russian program much like the US Air Force the Russian Aerospace forces and Naval Aviation have long understood that eventually the Strategic bombing Fleet would probably need a refresh a key difference however is that Russia has never designed built and operated a stealth bomber meaning there would have been an understanding in Russian industry that if they did decide to press ahead with one it would represent much more of a revolutionary step for the Russian defense industrial base than moving from B2 to B21 does for northr Grumman building up the capability to do so therefore would represent a significant commitment of scarce resources Russia has comparatively fewer of those than the US and China and thus has to be careful how it expends them it&#39;s also a country whose State media occasionally puts out pieces suggesting that stealth aircraft don&#39;t really matter because air defense systems like S400 are capable of seeing and shooting them down anyway this Tas article covering the sale of S400 systems to India for example claimed the S400 was quote capable of detecting and destroying low observable in Brackets stealth and fast moving aerial targets end quote if that latter claim was unambiguously true then designing and building a stealth bomber would probably represent a colossal waste of limited resources and you&#39;d probably be better off relying on designs that could at least leverage speed for survivability like the Blackjack so of course Russia announced a stealth bomber program early mentions of a Next Generation Russian bomber go back as far as the late 1990s and in 2009 the tupal Lev design Bureau who are basically the first and last word in Russian strategic bomber design reportedly received a 3-year R&amp;D contract to get the longrange bomber project moving those processes would eventually mature into an aircraft concept that is the prospective Aviation complex for longrange Aviation or pack D to ease our way going forward though we&#39;re going to refer to this thing either by its reported Russian code name that is the polanik or the English translation Envoy or messenger because I guess if you&#39;re trying to send an international message a strategic payload of high explosives might just do it comments by Russian political figures State media and various other sources all point to this thing as most likely being a subsonic strategic bomber with some low observable characteristics some features that have been commonly referred to include packing this thing with a new generation of navigation and electronic equipment including electronic warfare equipment of domestic Russian manufacturer but the overall concept A at least somewhat stealthy subsonic flying wing bomber would give the envoy at least some resemblance to being a likely somewhat less stealthy Russian B2 but of course like any sensitive military program until we see the final product there is some uncertainty involved Russian State media Western intelligence and defense commentators for example lean towards the subsonic stealth bomber Theory but back in 2016 the daily maale quoting a noou highly credible Russian Source described it as a variable geometry Hypersonic space plane that would quote fly into outer space in order to strike using nuclear bombs and then return to the Airfield end quote so yeah subsonic stealth bomber or Hypersonic swing wing space bomber I guess we&#39;ll just have to go 50 cents each way on that mystery as with many Hallmark Russian military development programs news about the potential features of the Envoy have ranged from the relatively conservative and the official to the somewhat slightly more outlandish we know Russian media have talked about the aircraft potentially filling more than just a bomber rooll serving as a controller for example of unman systems like the S70 drone I have pictured in the top right there the aircraft is meant to have low observable features be compatible with hypersonic weapons be aided by drones and as we said earlier feature a new electronic warfare and sensor Suite some observers also noted the potential relevance of some engine related patents that have been filed by tupv but there&#39;s nothing to say that the aircraft design featured in those patent illustrations is the envoy design there&#39;s also nothing to say that while on paper the envoy has a feature list that seems somewhat similar to that of the B20 one we discussed earlier that the envoy&#39;s actual features and stealth characteristics will be anywhere near as developed as its American competitors nor exactly how quickly if at all the program is really pushing towards a mass-produced production aircraft although again you have to be a little bit careful with the internet there YouTube for example randomly decided to serve me the video on the top right there which includes a clip of a flying wing stealth bomber being dramatically unveiled with the rosc logo in the top left and the understated title terrifying three exclamation marks Putin reviews construction of tup pack Dar stealth bomber the clip of course is actually from the unveiling of the American B21 Raider apparently edited to remove the Pentagon watermark in the bottom right and to add the rosc logo in the top left this is very much not the post lanic and it remains to be seen when exactly we&#39;ll see one because this is one Russian program where whoever&#39;s behind it probably deserves a gold medal in Gold poost moving in 2012 Russian Major General Anatoli zakov was reported as indicating the prototype for the envoy would be flying around 2020 and enter service in 2025 in 2012 Tas reported on the head of the defense and security Committee of the Russian Federation Council saying that research and development on the aircraft was near incompletion and carrying a subheader indicating that the aircraft would enter service between 2025 and 2030 2 years later according to Tas the first bomber was now under construction due for completion by 2021 in 2021 it was then reported that the demonstrator would be ready by 2023 so given it&#39;s now 2024 I&#39;m sure there&#39;s a fully functional demonstrator out there somewhere presumably stashing a hanger somewhere along with the first copies of halflife 3 I bring all this up not to argue that Russia is incapable of developing and building good aircraft they clearly are instead I bring it up to illustrate that this looks like a military development program like many military development programs that has seen its disclosed timelines slip by several years over the course of development with most of those apparent delays coming before for February 2022 and it&#39;s that context I think that really casts the development risk for Russia&#39;s program apart from the American and Chinese ones the American and Chinese defense sectors both have the combination of more resources than Russia does and fewer immediate demands than Russia does even within the context of a Russian Aviation sector which is dealing with challenges like a finite pool of trained Personnel UAC decision makers might face a dilemma between Staffing up the envoy program and instead making sure that lines that are delivering aircraft currently being used in Ukraine are running at full capacity or that Russia&#39;s nearer term strategic bomber program which we&#39;ll talk about in a bit has what it needs to keep delivering bombers that can launch missiles against Ukraine now rather than fly deterence patrols and give NATO some Wicked side eye in the 2030s a lot of the critiques I&#39;ve read of the envoy program focus on the technical unknowns is the aircraft what Russia needs and can Russian industry actually build it but for me the most pressing threat to the envoy might not be anything to do with the aircraft itself but rather that sort of archetypical Russian development story it&#39;s a story of an industrial base with an extensive Legacy some rather talented people and nowhere near the resources necessary to build the kind of Wonder Weapons leadership seemed to want at a scale that will actually make them practical and economical in essence in Personnel count terms the Russians are currently trying to run a Chinese siiz military on a fraction of the Chinese budget while fighting a conventional war and in that context remains to be seen just what resources will be dedicated to producing what is essentially a long-term luxury capability but here&#39;s the thing while those three stealth bombers are no doubt the high tech part of each nation&#39;s plan for their future bomber Force they aren&#39;t the only components and in many cases countries are running parallel bomber programs that call for something just a little less Hightech the US for example is currently engaged in a more than $2.5 billion effort to fit new Rolls-Royce engines to its Boeing b52s the newest of which rolled off the assembly line in 1962 the question is why in this era of ultra Advanced stealth bombers capable air defenses and potential competitive threats like fifth and sixth generation Fighters and New Generation air to a missiles is why would you invest billions of dollars in trying to keep a 70 plus year old platform flying and the answer is that not every Mission requires a stealth bomber the B52 like the Russian t95 is nothing fancy from an engineering perspective you don&#39;t need to make the concessions you need for supersonic or Hypersonic flight you don&#39;t need expensive stealth Coatings or any sort of fancy flying wing design instead designers could focus on just building something that could carry a lot of payload a very long way and so in a permissive environment where a bear or a B52 isn&#39;t going near anything that could conceivably shoot it down it still might be the most practical choice for a range of missions for a couple of reasons the first quite simply is just cost what I have on the right there are essentially a list of cost recovery rates for various US Air Force aircraft basically if for whatever reason another US government agency or other user had to borrow a US Air Force aircraft what would the Air Force try and recover from them to cover the cost of operating it and as you can see they vary immensely by airframe if for whatever reason the IRS or border patrol needed to borrow an A10 that would come at a cost of around $8,200 per hour and F22 meanwhile commands a price tag north of 50,000 between the three bombers the B52 has a significant cost Advantage offering a saving of about a third compared to the B1 and even more compared to the hangar Queen herself the B2 you can get somewhat different numbers if you look at different measurements and different sources the figures you see on the right there are the operating and support costs per aircraft in fiscal year 2020 according to the GAO and these are those same support costs but cut by flying hour but while the values change the overall pattern doesn&#39;t tend to the B52 is always significant iFly cheaper to fly than the b1b or the B2 Spirit although the B1 and B2 do sometimes change places with each other and when you start Crossing these hourly costs against the payload of the platform the B52 can actually get competitive with some of the other lighter aircraft on the list according to these figures you can get roughly two F5 e flight hours for every B52 flight hour but try as they might no f15e is going to be able to carry as much ordinance as a B52 and the combination of payload and loer time have meant it&#39;s often the Strategic bombers dropping a lot of pgms and that yes in places like Afghanistan you saw beef tusos doing close air support work according to one report I found the record for the most Precision guided bombs dropped by a B-52 in Afghanistan in a single mission was 24 a number enabled by the fact that the B-52s could sort of circle over the battlefield with a belly full of bombs giving the troops on the ground the ability to dial a jam whenever a bush looked at them funny as big and expensive as strategic bombers like the B52 can be they can often carry an awful lot of bang for a given amount of buck take that into account and suddenly the bean counters might be on the buff side there&#39;s also the flexibility that comes from being a non- stealthy design and as a result being able to carry very heavy things without being restricted by the size of internal Bombay militaries can&#39;t know for sure exactly how big future weapon designs will be missiles might remain relatively compact suitable for Carriage internally by a future stealth bomber but even if they&#39;re not there&#39;s probably nothing to stop you strapping them to the pylon on a B52 t95 or H6 and provided the threat level in the environment is as close to zero as possible countries might find Value in aircraft with massive lift capacity that you can just strap a bunch of to externally without ruining its fundamental reason for being and so with that in mind I want to close out by looking at some of what we know about China Russia and the United States planned for their future bomber forces starting of course with the United States even for a country as wealthy and well armed as the United States a three bomber force is already pretty demanding from a sustainment perspective just adding a fourth design in the form of the B21 without any other changes then would probably require some pretty significant cutbacks elsewhere I mean you could cut enlistment bonuses but then depending on your jurisdiction who&#39;s going to buy all the charges Mustangs and jet skis introducing the B21 will give the Americans one bomber from the 50s two from the&#39;80s and one from the 2020s and so of course it&#39;s the two from the 80s that got to go at least eventually long term the US Air Force is slimming down to 2 and 1 half designs with a goal of at least 100 b2s in service the US Air Force aims to eventually roughly quintuple its stealth bomber force that will essentially flip the force profile from one where only a minority of aircraft can fly into very high threat environments to one where the non- stealthy designs are the exception rather than the norm one potential Advantage for that configuration is that it might make it harder for American competitors that rely on air denial strategies the US military in general has often been very averse to being told there&#39;s any battle space it can&#39;t access put a proverbial no entry sign up on your front gate and there&#39;s 50/50 odds they&#39;re going to take it as a challenge with the B21 potentially being a hell of a gate Crasher if for example you had a hypothetical opponent that tried to zone out us striking power through the use of longrange missiles that could Target aircraft carriers or Regional airbases to a significant extent the B21 just might not care with refueling support it could potentially fly missions from bases in the continental United States and still get to the relevant battle space with a significant payload of bombs or cruise missiles unless your area denial is virtually Global you may not be able to zone out the radar and on the flip side because the bombers can hypothetically reach almost anywhere any potential adversary has to consider the immense resources involved in trying to defend almost anywhere given its potential value there have already been a number of voices in the US advocating to increase planned B21 production above the currently planned 100 but given the likely rates of production involved any decision to cut or expand that figure probably doesn&#39;t have to be made for some Years yet and for its partner in crime the B21 won&#39;t have the B2 Spirit or the B1 Lancer it&#39;ll have the good old B52 complete with its new Rolls-Royce engines the plan essentially is to rebuild much of the B52 Fleet not just with new engines but with new avionics new weapons new communication systems digital displays new new Wheels brakes Etc and then hoping that the airframes can actually handle the process keep the beef d2s flying until roughly 2060 that implies another 35 years of service for the veteran bomber taking its Total Service lifespan out past a century that plan is fairly Uncharted Territory for a military aircraft and isn&#39;t without its risks but the US apparently thinks it needs a bomb truck and missile carrier for more permissive environments and nothing trucks ordinance quite like the buff there is however a bit of a wild card in the US Air Force&#39;s forward planning one that relies not on Advanced stealth or cuttingedge technology but on the overwhelming power of palti Logistics in theory the rapid Dragon system which is basically a fancy way of describing a process where you push pallets of cruise missiles out the back of a cargo plane could potentially transform large parts of the US Air Force&#39;s massive transport Fleet into missile carriers in the event of an emergency these would clearly be even more vulnerable and more restricted to permiss environments than the B-52 but it also means if you ever needed to suddenly generate hundreds or even thousands of cruise missile strikes relatively quickly and you had the missiles available suddenly your opponent would be in a situation where they don&#39;t just need to Target all of your bomber aircraft and airfields they need to knock out every single transport and transport compatible Air Base as well so while this may not be considered a bomber program per se I&#39;m happy to give it an honorable mention for their part the People&#39;s Republic of China also appears to be pushing towards a two type Force like the US the Chinese appear to be interested in keeping around a missile truck in the form of the H6 relying on an older subsonic type to make up a significant portion of their Fleet from a procurement sustainment perspective that makes perfect sense there&#39;s an active production line a large Fleet already in service presumably a large supply of spare parts as well as Generations worth of organizational memory flying and maintaining the aircraft for purposes like carrying large numbers of air launch cruise missiles to altitude and then launching them from friendly airspace the H6 will probably Remain the obvious choice for some time yet the H20 then would presumably fill a more specialized role flying missions that called for an aircraft that could fly further survive better or both an interesting observation here is despite the US and China having very different strategic context so far as their strategic bombing fleets go they&#39;ve come up with relatively similar answers a two type Force representing a high low mix because even when you have superpower resources these systems are just so expensive that you probably want to consult validate when you can unless of course you happen to be Russia a lot of the challenges the Russian Fleet is arguably facing now are very similar to those in the US lots of older airframes and designs that can only last so long production lines that have been inactive for years and just the general issues that come with trying to keep three different types of strategic bomber in service each in relatively small numbers in fact arguably Russia&#39;s situation is even worse because instead of having one bomb truck one swing wing and one stealth bomber the force currently lacks a stealth bomber capability and has two of the expensive swing wi designs the tu60 and the tu22m adding the envoy would bring that number up to four if the US doesn&#39;t want to manage the strain of operating more than two bomber types one would think the Russian Aerospace forces would be looking to consolidate at least that much so you might ask what gets to stay and what&#39;s got to go for now at least it looks like the bear is going to Soldier on for some time yet as a missile carrier it&#39;s been shouldering a lot of the burden of Russia&#39;s missile campaign in Ukraine and and contracts to upgrade the t95 fleet to the so-called MSM level suggest they&#39;re going to keep that role for some time yet to maximize the parallels between the bear and the B-52 another 1950s Workhorse the primary change from the MSM upgrade is arguably the new power plant in this case an upgraded version of the original Power Plant although with new propellers that&#39;ll be coupled with changes to internal systems like navigation communication sensors Etc as well as some general service life extension activities that you&#39;d expect trying to keep older frame in the air one potential Advantage the bare Fleet might have from a sustainment perspective going forward is that while the oldest bear airf frames are more ancient than even the most elderly of B-52s the Soviet Union just kept producing these things and Russia only gave up on them in the early 1990s meaning there are some airframes out there that are only a couple of decades old so while bear Pilots might get a little nervous sharing airspace in the same bloody hemisphere as things like enat or Tempest we&#39;re probably going to see the world&#39;s last Turbo prop strategic bomber push on towards the mid-century but if you think that just because the Bears are staving off hibernation for a couple more decades Russia has any intention of getting rid of the Swing Wing 22m sorry but signs currently point to no the announced intention is for about half of the backfire Fleet to be upgraded to 22 m3m standard a version that only underwent flight testing in 2020 and which was described by the Company CEO was featuring absolutely new onboard radio electronic equipment combined with a deep modernization and service life extension effort that could stretch the life of part of The Fleets out to the 2040s or 2050s presumably leaving the Russian Aerospace forces with every maintainer dream a tiny Fleet of variable geometry bombers that have been out of production for half a century but you know what&#39;s better than operating one small Fleet of variable geometry bombers operating two small fleets of variable geometry bombers because not just does Russia have no intention of resigning its existing tu60 bombers it also actually resume production of brand new airframes pre- Ukraine Invasion the estimate was that Russia would build up to a production rate of three aircraft per year aiming to build 50 new airframes and upgrade 16 existing ones those figures don&#39;t include an explicit estimate for when these aircraft would exit service but some basic extrapolation suggest it would be nearly 2040 before Russia finishes the last of those new builds and that&#39;s if there are no delays building expensive platforms and then immediately throwing them away is more of a US Navy maneuver so if we assume the Russians intended keep the aircraft in service for at least say 15 years this schedule would keep the blackjacks flying until at least the mid 2050s probably closer to 2060 so yeah Russia isn&#39;t just not retiring classes of Legacy designs it&#39;s actually rolling out new build versions even as it plans for the Next Generation meaning that if the envoy does enter Russian service to act as a multi-purpose Next Generation aircraft the Russians are likely to end up with the smallest of the Strategic bomber fleets operating the largest number of designs the anomaly compared to both the US and Chinese fleets is the decision to maintain the swing Wings something the rest of the world is mostly moving away from concluding that they were generally complicated expensive to maintain and that Speedy bombers didn&#39;t necessarily equal survivable bombers hence why something like all of these stealth bomber designs would exist in the first place that&#39;s not to say that the Blackjack and backfire are bad designs or they aren&#39;t useful more there&#39;s just a lot of competition in the Russian defense budget right now and arguably the 34 as we&#39;ve looked at Russia is the one that least needs a large Fleet of strategic bombers the US is in the business of international power projection bombers are one of the key ways and sometimes the more economically efficient way of doing that you look at China&#39;s likely theaters of operations and the distances it might want to strike targets at and again bombers make sense but if all of Russia&#39;s strategic bombers except the 95s to heft missiles up to altitude disappear tomorrow realistically you have to ask yourself what would actually change while for a long long list of systems that Russia might have deficits in the answer is somewhat less ambiguous so to zoom out briefly in closing where does all of that leave the Next Generation bomber race and here I think there&#39;s at least three big points to make the first is that with all three of these programs there&#39;s still a range of unknowns issues during development of testing can shoot down the best laid plans and for the Russian program in particular I think there are massive questions over future resourcing rusi for example predicts there is every possibility the Russians get to a prototype of the envoy but whether a country that had to cancel its next Generation battle tank for being too expensive is able to Pony up the resources to mass produce a Next Generation strategic bomber is I think very much an open question although the ukrainians are probably hoping the program gets every Rubble it asks for and more the Counterpoint however is that the US and Chinese programs at least are likely very well Advanced and will probably enter service when they do they&#39;ll likely represent major leaps in bomber technology and for China a significant new capability they also potentially represent very long-term Investments we know B21 for example is being designed with upgradeability in mind and given just how long we&#39;ve seen current bomber generation soldier on the new entrance might have long service lives ahead of them but if the question of future bomber Force design shows us anything it&#39;s that raw technological complexity isn&#39;t always the be all and end all what matters most is coming up with tools that allow Force to carry out its missions imposing the maximum possible cost on competitors and the minimum possible cost on the friendly force and friendly taxpayers sometimes that might mean developing Cutting Edge stealth bombers with borderline sci-fi technology other times it might mean taking a 1950s bomb truck giving it some new engines and a fresh con of paint and saying there are a few decades more where that came from and okay let me add on a channel update to close out this is a video that&#39;s been in the quebe for release for a while the US actually released footage of the B21 in Flight some time ago but given the pattern of Global events and Patron votes it always seemed reasonable to delay this one just one more week this week I felt like there was finally an opportunity to release it and I hope you all enjoyed heading into June there are a couple of quick updates to give firstly if you are on the patreon I put up an update post there last week and have started Gathering questions for the next Q&amp;A meanwhile if you&#39;re one of the poor longsuffering pering gaming fans I was actually able to record some content this week although it does require editing but it is now guaranteed to be coming and I&#39;d look out for it early this coming week I&#39;ll try to give a slightly more fome update next week but for the moment let me just thank you all very much for watching and say that I very much hope to see you all again next week

more than a year ago we talked about the global race to develop a Next Generation fighter covering the efforts of that very small group of countries with the resources necessary to take the next developmental step with some of the most complicated weapons of war ever designed but if the number of nations that can build Advanced Fighters is small the bomber Club is absolutely tiny and there depending on where you set the Finish Line the Next Generation race May already have a winner having given the world the first operational stealthy strategic bomber with the B2 Spirit the US has recently released images of its successor the B21 raidar in flight but the world of military competition Abes a monopoly and as the B21 takes the sky Russia and China are pushing ahead with their own nextg programs so today I want to look at the aircraft likely to make up the bomber fleets of the future from incredibly Advanced and expensive Next Generation platforms to some much older veteran designs that might still have a fair amount of service ahead of them to do that as I often do I&amp;#39;ll start with a little bit of History covering the evolution of the Strategic bomber why Nations have or haven&amp;#39;t chosen to build them and the three major existing fleets then we&amp;#39;ll start to hone in on the Next Generation including both common Next Generation features and the three main development programs one each for the United States China and Russia finally though we&amp;#39;ll pivot from looking at the future role of very Advanced aircraft to the role of much older classic designs and ask why on a future Battlefield potentially dominated by all sorts of sci-fi technology we may still see classic designs like the Boeing B52 push on towards Wards a century in service so let&amp;#39;s kick off with some history I&amp;#39;ve already done an episode on strategic bombing itself in the past so today I&amp;#39;m going to focus on the aircraft themselves humans being what they are it didn&amp;#39;t take too long to go from hey we can build something that flies to hey we can probably drop things on people while we&amp;#39;re up there leaving aside very early examples involving things like Kites and balloons the first Employments of something we might recognize as a strategic bomber at scale probably date to the first world war initially for countries like Germany the task of strategic bombing that is hitting targets well behind opposing lines was handled by lighter than air aircraft Zeppelin for some unknowable reason however uh slow moving flammable gas bags had a bit of a survivability problem once defenses started to improve and by the end of World War One most powers appear to have reached the conclusion that a heavy fix wi aircraft was a better option Germany would use aircraft like the G4 for a number of raids on Britain while in the Eastern Front the Russians had started the war with a heavy bomber design already available the Ilia morets was for the time a very large 4 engine aircraft that could carry a significant number of defensive machine guns they would also reportedly maintain a positive loss ratio against German Fighters interestingly enough the Ilia morets was actually a sakori design sakori himself was born in Kiev and designed a number of aircraft in Imperial Russia before fleeing to the United States in 1919 there he became a major figure in American aircraft development and sakori aircraft to this day continue to be responsible for some naan lesser known American designs like you know the uh60 Blackhawk one wonders what it might have meant for Russian Aviation development if he and others like him had never immigrated due to the Bolshevik takeover but that piece of historical trivia aside let&amp;#39;s get back to the heavy bombers the technology of the heavy bomber continued to evolve in the inter War period and then exploded in capability over the course of the second world war generally becoming faster longer ranged higher flying better armed far more equipped with far more destructive payloads ultimately including the atomic bomb and as a general rule much much larger as designers managed to get more range and more Bomb by building more bomber during World War I a typical German bomber might manage a payload just north of £800 an early World War II bomber like the twin engine Vicor Wellington might manage more than five times that with a listed payload of about £4,500 by the end of World War II modified versions of the British Lancaster 4 engine heavy could carry the 10 ton 22,000 lb Grand Slam earthquake bomb and even with the development of the atomic weapon payloads just kept getting larger a big belly version of the B52 during the Vietnam war could carry 84 individual 500 lb bombs plus additional bombs on external pylons but even before jet bombers like the be2 started to appear in Earnest even greater levels of sheer Ridiculousness had been achieved as suggested by the image on the right there showing a convey b36 Peacemaker introduced 1948 next to a b29 the world&amp;#39;s first type of nuclear bomber to ever drop a nuclear weapon the b36 had a crew of 13 a maximum takeoff weight of more than 185 tons and a standard not maximum payload of more than £72,000 or 33 tons again this was a 1940s aircraft to put that into perspective that meant the b36 is bomb load weighed more than two empty a lancasters meaning that if form factor wasn&amp;#39;t a problem this was a bomber that could have carried other bombers especially during the early Cold War period before the widespread adoption of intercontinental ballistic missiles American nuclear war plans were dominated by the role of Strategic Air Command and its longrange bombers and in the &amp;#39; 50s the US would majorly build up sack strength in answer to a Soviet threat that might have been at least in the air slightly exaggerated the classic example here was the So-Cal bomber gap of the early and mid 1950s it started off simply enough with the Soviets developing the M4 malot heavy bomber NATO call sign bison and some Publications like Aviation week running attention grabbing headlines amping up the threat of a potential Soviet nuclear attack against the US Homeland using this new InterContinental bomber then in 1955 the Soviets themselves got in on the action during the aviation Day Celebrations which were of course closely monitored by Foreign governments the Soviets would fly a number of fors over the location until they left view before having them quickly turn around join up with another flight and fly over the parade area again convincing many foreign observers that they had seen far more Super bombers than they actually had that parade appearance led to some predictions that by 1960 the Soviets might have as many as 800 of these things however for actual Intelligence on the Soviet bomber buildup the Americans would turn to the U2 spy plane in 1956 one of those flights would go over a Soviet bomber base where they would see 30 M4 bombers analysts would then make assumptions and extrapolate out based on the number of other known Soviet bomber bases and came up with an estimate of 150 to 250 of these bombers by 1958 and 600 by the 1960s the US Air Force of course called out for more resources and Sack scrambled to match the Soviet challenge building up to a massive Peak force of approximately 2,500 bombers including 750 b52s with most of the remainder being b-47s the problem however was that the Doomsday Soviet bomber Force didn&amp;#39;t actually exist there were no bison at other Soviet bases it just so happened the U2 flight Flew Over the one base that was storing all of them in fact in the end the Soviets weren&amp;#39;t even that happy with the design as built it didn&amp;#39;t have the range necessary to launch a nuclear attack on the United States and then make it back to a Soviet base afterwards production would be discontinued with fewer than 100 aircraft manufactured and a lot of the ones that were put into service were used as things like tankers or in Maritime roles in essence the Soviets had faked a small capability spotting intelligence and extrapolation had then grown that capability into a significant threat fortunately however no one would ever again exaggerate the performance or production figures for any Russian or Soviet weapon system American Heavy bombers would play a significant role in both Korea and Vietnam but by the 1960s it was clear that new technological developments were threatening the place the bomber had there too enjoyed the emergence of surface toar missiles and increasingly capable Jet and Rocket powered interceptors would make the bombers more vulnerable at the same time substitute options were emerging for some of the heavy bombers traditional missions longrange missiles were becoming available as a nuclear delivery system while for the more conventional role of just dropping lots and lots of high explosive on stuff the additional lifting power provided by the jet engine meant that now lighter more flexible tactical aircraft could carry very significant bomb loads the American f105 Thunder Chief fighter bomber which entered in 1958 for example had a payload capacity that wouldn&amp;#39;t have been out of place on a number of World War II heavy bombers and it could heft that while being much smaller and more flexible than a full-sized heavy as is often the case different nations came up with different answers to these threats to the bombers position some like the United Kingdom would eventually just get rid of their heavy bombers although not before the raf&amp;#39;s AO Vulcans launched some very long distance bombing raids during the fand&amp;#39;s war while US and Soviet designers would push on for different answers while one of the first answers was just to design a bomber that would go very very fast the conveyor b-58 Hustler introduced 1960 could manage more than twice the speed of sound carrying its nuclear payload in a disposable pod under the belly of the aircraft the high and fast concept would arguably reach its apex with the American xp70 Valkyrie which as designed and tested was capable of flying at more than three times the speed of sound the immense costs of the program and concerns over survivability however would lead to the xp7 being cancelled as unnecessary and economically unjustifiable with the two prototypes being handed over to NASA to support research efforts of course that didn&amp;#39;t stop the program spooking the Soviets who thought the Americans might end up with entire fleets of the things leading to them overbuilding a response in the form of the very highspeed Mig 25 Interceptor which in turn would be perceived by the Americans as a potential super fighter leading to them overbuilding a response in the form of the F-15 because apparently a story is always funnier when it happens a third fourth or 50th time towards the end of the Cold War both Moscow and Washington would develop variable geometry bombers these swing wi designs could change their configurations in flight to optimize either for low and slow operations high-speed supersonic Sprints or anything in between these gave them access to different means for survival depending on the circumstances they faced and along with Speed and Performance the bombers also got two other survivability answers firstly the availability of a wide array of longrange crew Cru and anti-shipping missiles which could theoretically enable bombers to perform a lot of their mission without moving into range of enemy air defenses Soviet bombers in particular would be heavily adapted for the dedicated missile carrier role to the point where during modernization some Soviet bombers would actually have their bomb sites removed another survivability response was to come up with bombers incorporating very low observability features AKA stealth bombers which didn&amp;#39;t rely so much on highp speed or very longrange weapons so much as the inherent difficulty of trying to shoot down something that you can&amp;#39;t find for decades stealth bombers have been an exclusively American asset but now with the emergence of Next Generation bomber programs we may be getting closer to the point when that Monopoly is finally Broken But if that&amp;#39;s a quick snapshot of how bombers have evolved why in the 21st century might you as a nation decide to invest or not invest in buying and Fielding these things key point one right as we said at the start is that the default position for most countries is not to have strategic bombers there are some systems out there that most militaries will have like a basic armored vehicle but if you&amp;#39;re talking about strategic bombers there are currently only really three countries that have looked at what they offer and said yes that&amp;#39;s worth the price and in terms of challenges that explain that relatively low uptick rate there are more than a few firstly there are the costs and challenges involved in Fielding the aircraft themselves chunky aircraft tend to mean chunky acquisition and sustainment budgets as well as demands for base and maintenance facilities that can accommodate and support them and to that that there are relatively few companies out there with any recent experience building these things and you have economic challenge one coupled with that is the problem that for a lot of Nations there are probably acceptable substitutes to investing in a heavy bomber Force if you want aircraft that can carry a lot but not obscene amounts of ordinance there are lots of Alternatives out there NATO&amp;#39;s nuclear sharing program is built around the use of gravity bombs in the F-35 the French Nuclear Strike capability is based on the asmp missile and the raile yes the raile is probably only going to carry one yuk when the be 52 can carry many many more but under most circumstances how many nukes are you really going to need to send a final warning plus a lot of the time using smaller aircraft also means using more flexible and multi-mission aircraft an F-15 e strike eagle can carry many tons worth of ground attack ordinance but in many ways it&amp;#39;s still fundamentally an F15 and so if suddenly it turns out you need a fighter or an Interceptor not an attack aircraft just fit some am Rams and declare Mig season open that multimission flexibility feeds into economic argument to the question of scale all else being equal one of the things you don&amp;#39;t want to be doing as an Air Force is operating lots and lots of small fleets of many many different types of aircraft less scale can mean more expensive production more pressure to close down production lines early more difficult long-term sustainment and more cases of your maintainers spontaneously developing a deep empathy for the BLS responsible for keeping the utter managerie of equipment operated by the Ukrainian Armed Forces functional and in service and for countries out out there that aren&amp;#39;t trying to do superpower things all the time and don&amp;#39;t have superpower defense budgets it might be a lot more practical to buy more of a lighter multi-mission design than to invest in a couple of strategic bombers even if you had a scenario where a fighter might be twice as good as a multi-roll design at being a fighter and a heavy bomber might be four times as good as a multi-roll aircraft at being a bomber you might find it&amp;#39;s cheaper more efficient and more flexible to operate 36 multi-roll aircraft instead of trying to eat the development cost and then convince your local industry to set up separate production lines for 12 Fighters and three bombers obviously in the real world there&amp;#39;s going to be more to an investment decision than just those sort of simple calculations but it&amp;#39;s fair to say if you&amp;#39;re a country going into heavy bombers it&amp;#39;s probably because you need some of these specific capabilities that the aircraft provide and you need those capabilities in sufficient quantity to Merit actually maintaining a fleet if you&amp;#39;re only casually into bombing people then bombers might not be for you if however you&amp;#39;re a country where every policy brief comes with bombing as an option keep listening in its modern incarnations there&amp;#39;s a couple of things the heavy bomber might offer that other aircraft may not range and loitering time are fairly obvious big plane can fly further and hang around longer without developing an incredibly clingy relationship with the local refueling tankers advantage to is usually payload quantity and payload flexibility all else being equal more playing can probably carry more stuff in total and there might be especially large payloads that smaller aircraft just can&amp;#39;t carry full stop that Russian tu22m on the right there for example is carrying three large anti-ship missiles and good luck getting a lot of the multiroll fighters out there to carry even one missile with that sort of form factor finally you might want certain specialized characteristics that work best in a larger strategic bomber design a subsonic flying wing design for example might give you excellent stealth performance provided you&amp;#39;re sufficiently accurate in copying northr grumman&amp;#39;s homework but it would probably make for a relatively shitty multi-roll fighter sized air and really only starts to make sense once you talk about going big at a larger scale though both in terms of the size of the aircraft and the size of the fleet things can start to make sense compared to other options we&amp;#39;ll come back to some of the math behind this in the future but if you want to move a lot of ordinance a long distance strategic bombers might be one of the more affordable and more flexible ways to do it with refueling support bombers based for example in the continental United States might be able to hit Targets on relatively short notice almost anywhere in the world while if you relying for examp on Naval cruise missiles or Naval Aviation you&amp;#39;d be reliant on having a task force already in the area to launch those attacks it also might create scenarios where you can put more investment into the reusable platform as opposed to the ordinance you&amp;#39;re using if I try for example to strike a Defender Target using a cruise missile so my ship or aircraft isn&amp;#39;t destroyed by enemy defenses then I&amp;#39;m getting the reach and survivability I need by pouring a lot into the weapon I&amp;#39;m using If instead I take something very expensive but also very survivable like a B2 Spirit stealth bomber then I might be able to get the expensive but reusable bit close enough to my target to use a much cheaper weapon instead striking dozens of targets with guided bombs instead of dozens of cruise missiles in monetary terms I&amp;#39;m probably investing far more in scenario 2 than I did in scenario 1 but more of my capital is tied up in something that I can reuse again and again potentially for decades rather than something that is literally designed to explode so while there&amp;#39;s definitely a use case there for the Strategic bomber as of 2024 they&amp;#39;ve pretty much become just great power weapons previously strategic bombers were operated by a range of countries including the United Kingdom Indonesia Iraq Egypt and of course Ukraine which inherited a significant force of strategic bombers from the Soviet Union including more than 120 t6s with International encouragement many of those aircraft would later be disassembled while some of the more advanced types like the TU 160s were sold back to Russia along with hundreds of compatible longrange missiles but in 2024 there are really only three primary heavy bomber fleets operating aircraft that fall into one of three categories there are subsonic bomb trucks and missile carriers like the American B52 Russian t95 and Chinese H6 these are designs that can trace their lineages back to the 50s or 60s and are about as stealthy as your average apartment building the Next Generation also still in service are the supersonic variable geometry bombers think the American B1 or the Soviet tu22m and tu60 aircraft like the B1 and tu 160 can obviously provide much higher performance than the older subsonic designs at the price of being well pricier to get an idea of where these aircrafts sit in the chronology the 22m entered Soviet service in the early 1970s while the B1 arrived in 1986 and the t160 1987 finally you have the subsonic stealth bombers or rather I should say bomber as we&amp;#39;re only aware of one type that is publicly confirmed to currently be in service adding stealth features to the platform obviously gives it a completely different survival Prospect effect against a ranger defense systems just historically at a price so high that even the United States had to bulk at it with each of the 21 B2 bombers ultimately procured by the United States costing an average of $2.1 billion US once research development and other costs were taken into account although in large part those costs were driven by the fact that with the Soviet Union collapsing for some reason the US Congress didn&amp;#39;t see a need to proceed with the original plan for 132 Uber bombers and cut the number down to just 21 of the three strategic bomber powers only the United States operates aircraft of all three types for the US strategic bombers are largely used to support the global strike role that is to go anywhere in the world where the US has interests on relatively short notice and communicate those interests to relevant parties with the actual or threaten release of significant volumes of high explosives as a global power with global interests the range provided by strategic bombers can give the US considerable flexibility the B2 and B52 also play play a continued role as part of America&amp;#39;s nuclear deterent the Chinese strategic bomber Force by comparison has a much simpler Force profile being made of the Xian H6 a license-built version of the tu6 which over the course of its many years in Chinese service has operated alongside a number of other designs for example various escort Fighters as well as Maritime strike h6s ew h6s aerial refueling h6s cruise missile carrying h6s modernized conventional bomber h6s and of course a new Nuclear Strike version of you guessed it the H6 although note with a lot of versions there is some overlap between the various roles different versions of the H6 are operated both by The People&amp;#39;s Liberation Army Air Force and the not at all confusingly named people&amp;#39;s Liberation Army Naval Air Force the aircraft arguably deserves a special degree of Distinction considering the first triple F16 flew in 1952 and as of 2024 more than 70 years later the H6 derivative is still believed to be inactive production finally there&amp;#39;s the existing Russian strategic Aviation Force which has an interesting story of its own Russia&amp;#39;s current Fleet of strategic bombers are responsible for carrying out a range of missions they retain a long- range Nuclear Strike role and continue to fly so-called deterrence missions which often involve these somewhat strange sites of seeing ancient t95 turbo prop bombers intercepted and then escorted by Fighters young enough to be their grandchildren more significantly the bomber Force also functions as a missile carrying Force both in the naval strike roll maintaining a Readiness to H longrange anti-shipping missiles at NATO shipping and as we&amp;#39;ve seen in Ukraine fairly regularly launching longrange missile attacks against ground targets where the bombers basically just serve to Loft the missiles up to a launch height and location as it stands currently the Russian Fleet consists of three main types the subsonic turbo prop powered tupv 95 bear and then two supersonic capable variable geometry bombers the smaller one tu22m is sometimes referred to in Russian circles as a Euro strategic bomber owing to its much more limited range and payload while the tu60 to the Russians the White Swan and to Nato the Blackjack is probably best considered as roughly analogous to the American b1b Lancer put that all together and you&amp;#39;ve roughly got the chart you see on screen here here I&amp;#39;ve set out the three main strategic bomber fleets by number and type of aircraft in inventory and I&amp;#39;ve deliberately used the military balance 2022 figures here because after the Russian invasion of Ukraine the number and availability of their available strategic bombers becomes just that bit more uncertain what that shows is that in 2022 in raw numbers of airframes the US actually operated the smallest of the three strategic bomber forces with the obvious Counterpoint being that it was also arguably the most capable the B2 stealth bombers were and still are a unique asset and while Russia had a larger number of SuperSonic bombers on paper the vast majority of those were the smaller older and less capable tu22m not the TU 160s which don&amp;#39;t compare well in most car eristics to the American B1 Lancer the People&amp;#39;s Republic of China meanwhile had the largest Fleet on paper with more than 200 heavy bombers size and age however can of course matter when you&amp;#39;re talking heavy bombers and in that sense it&amp;#39;s worth noting the H6 has less than half the maximum takeoff weight of the B52 a smaller maximum payload and a significantly shorter range for most of China&amp;#39;s likely employment scenarios however launching missiles relatively close to the Chinese Homeland the range and payload offered may be more than enough but the wi observation here is just how old all of these inservice designs are with those figures in mind it perhaps shouldn&amp;#39;t be surprising that all three of these countries now have programs to design something entirely new so what I want to do here is start with a couple of potential common features the sorts of Technologies and capabilities that might be at the core of what it means to be a next Generation bomber here I&amp;#39;m going to slam the obvious caveat that while all the programs were going to look at officially do exist the specifics of exactly what they can do and what technologies they&amp;#39;re going to incorporate are going to be protected in layers of secrecy so please keep in mind we&amp;#39;re dealing with a pretty low level of certainty here to start with most commentators seem fairly confident that these next Generation strategic bomber programs are aiming to produce fairly stealthy aircraft we&amp;#39;re talking subsonic flying wing designs in roughly the same vein as the original American B2 for the US and the stealthy aircraft geometry Wizards at northr Grumman this might not be a next Generation technology it&amp;#39;s a cold war concept getting serious refinement but for anyone else in the the game including Moscow and Beijing this is very much a technological leap it also seems likely that these Mann stealthy platforms are going to be intended to operate alongside unmanned ones we&amp;#39;ve talked about the potential of air combat drones and manned unmanned teaming in the past with drones potentially providing the bomber with everything from improved senses and awareness secondary means to carry payloads refueling support or self-defense assistance but the interesting addition here is there might be some elements of what makes a bomber that makes it even more suitable for teaming with drones than a Next Generation fighter a bomber is almost guaranteed to have a crew of at least two people potentially more so compared to a fighter you might have more crew decision-making bandwidth to Monitor and control drones you&amp;#39;re also likely to have more room available on the aircraft for potential support equipment say for example a dedicated drone control station and if you&amp;#39;re trying to design an affordable and stealthy drone system it&amp;#39;s probably going to be easier to design one that can keep up with a subsonic stealth bomber than with a super cruising fighter that&amp;#39;s not to say there aren&amp;#39;t potential challenges when it comes to teaming drones and bombers and US Air Force secretary Frank Kendall has said the US has explicitly abandoned the idea of building a drone with the same range as the bomber but having a Next Generation system operate alongside shorter range drones like the American CCA or the Russian S70 is probably something that&amp;#39;s very much on the cards Next Generation sensors and control systems are also probably a bit of a noar feature I&amp;#39;ve got an image from a t95 cockpit on the right there and as you can see that&amp;#39;s some pretty retro instrumentation again gain compared to a Next Generation fighter there might be some elements that make a tech Refresh on a bomber at least somewhat easier from an engineering perspective assuming the fighter is also meant to be stealthy but also faster and smaller power generation heat dissipation and internal volume are all likely to be less limited on the bomber and we have Clues across the Next Generation programs that countries are thinking in that General Direction with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin describing America&amp;#39;s B21 as a multifunctional aircraft that can quote handle anything from G ing intelligence to battle management end quote at the same time however these aircraft might be able to operate in a crew optional configuration themselves commentators in all three of these programs have hinted they may initially or eventually become optionally man platforms where you have all the facilities on board to accommodate a full crew controlling the aircraft in the case of low-risk operations or those where a human decision maker is absolutely essential like hopefully the Nuclear Strike role I&amp;#39;m not sure anyone out there is particularly Keen to hand chat GPT the big red button just yet but being able to send one or more aircraft up without a crew might be a way to minimize pilot risk or maximize endurance reportedly a directive letter related to the B21 program obtained through Freedom of Information explicitly required the Air Force to quote develop an acquisition program that delivers a sustainable long-range penetrating bomber capable of manned and unmanned operations end quote and currently published us information described the bomber as having been designed to accommodate manned or unmanned and operations and given the general path of technological development it&amp;#39;s not out of the question that other Next Generation programs will go in the same direction and a key idea here might be to think about these things more in terms of being Next Generation platforms than just dedicated bombers ultimately what you&amp;#39;re talking about here are likely to be very long ranged very technologically advanced and hopefully very survivable platforms with lots of the kinds of things that tend to make Engineers unreasonably excited like available internal volume pay Lo capacity power and heat management yes these things are probably primarily intended to carry a bunch of ordinance but given time who&amp;#39;s to say what else they might not be used to carry or do and a wider Force including systems like engard and F35 might occasionally benefit from having a supporting stealthy platform that can potentially carry a very wide array of ordinance in those internal weapon bays and this might be part of the reason we&amp;#39;re seeing Next Generation bombers emerge ahead of the Next Generation Fighters it&amp;#39;s likely easier with something slight larger like a bomber to build a product now that&amp;#39;s going to be upgradeable into the future and speaking of upgrades it&amp;#39;s probably time to talk about our first Next Generation bomber project and one apparently designed to be about as easy to upgrade as a clan omnimech it&amp;#39;s America&amp;#39;s second entry in the Flying Wing stealth bomber category the B21 Raider in the early 21st century the American strategic bomber Force had a pretty clear albeit slow burning problem all three of America&amp;#39;s bomber designs had gone out of production leaving the air force to fight some very hot Wars with some very cold production lines fortunately maintaining and cannibalizing old cold war airf frames was absolutely on the cards and given the somewhat obscene size the US bomber Force had once reached especially for the B-52 there were an awful lot of spare parts parked out there in the Boneyard that said there was apparently a general understanding that sometime between then and the invention of the warp drive the venerable B52 and the other bombers would eventually need a replacement in the head days of the late 1990s the Assumption appears to have been that the Air Force would eventually need some sort of new platform which may or may not actually look like a bomber by the near future year of 2038 for some reason that timeline eventually encountered some push back and I&amp;#39;ve included a screenshot from a 2008 report on the right there showing that at the time a decision was being made to accelerate the timeline on the Air Force&amp;#39;s new bomber aircraft by a casual 20 years the idea which I think tells us a bit about the confidence of the time was that a new generation bomber could be developed in builded by 2018 for a cost of between 8 and10 billion it could then serve as a quote interim fix to bridge the bomber capability Gap apparently in the early 21st century interim Solutions and stop Gap measures meant different things to different people to some militaries that might mean welding a new weapon system to the back of an armored vehicle in America apparently it meant casually developing a Next Generation stealth bomber until something better came along that push gave us the so-called Next Generation bomber program between fiscal 2004 and 2009 the dod requested more than $1.4 billion in research and development funding for the NGB but reportedly scope creep and scope uncertainty were about to claim another victim like many US development programs of the early 2000s the Next Generation bomber reportedly pulled something of an ious maneuver when it came to setting requirements according to one report one of the reasons the Next Generation bomber became so complex and expensive was that it was apparently intended to be able to operate basically independent for example by gathering its own intelligence rather than relying on The Wider force in 2009 the program officially bombed with defense secretary Robert Gates saying that they wouldn&amp;#39;t continue with an air force bomber program until there was a better understanding of quote the need the requirement and the technology end quote the Next Generation bomber was dead and in its place we got the longrange strike bomber after canning the NGB the US Air Force and DOD went back and did a front end analysis of the whole longrange strike concept they considered options to replace the man bombers with everything from conventional ballistic missiles to new air and sea launched cruise missiles ultimately reaching the conclusion by 2011 that what they really needed was kind of what they already had but a bit better in 2011 Se def approved the continuing development of an optionally manned penetrating bomber which unlike the NGB would apparently be able to account for the fact that the rest of the US military does in fact exist and was thus able to focus on a smaller number of core capabilities a large and flexible payload including current and projected future Munitions a very long range stealthy features and a projected procurement cost of not more than $550 million per unit in 2010 terms if that sounds an awful lot to you like the Air Force was asking for a new B2 but better and cheaper than old B2 you probably won&amp;#39;t be surprised that the company that built the B2 North R Grumman would win the design competition in 2015 defeating the Rival Consortium of Boeing and loed Martin giving the program better access to Northrup grumman&amp;#39;s experience in stealthy bomber design although it&amp;#39;s always interesting to hypothesize what other firms might have been able to bring to the table like lessons learned from other programs proprietary technology additional industrial scale or the absolute finest in whistleblower detection technology at the risk of alienating some of the Audience by nerding out over Contracting and program management for a moment it&amp;#39;s worth stressing that in many ways the B21 has been a program not like the others the program has generally been and just brace yourself for a moment here on time and on or under budget and the insane weirdness of the whole Endeavor doesn&amp;#39;t stop there compared to other aircraft design competitions the B21 design was much more detailed and complete at the time the selection was made these weren&amp;#39;t rough sketches with a bunch of TBA scribbled in the margin they were complete down to the level of according to one US Air Force briefing individual access panels that helped reduce design risk and move things along faster later the entire program was was managed and acquired through the Air Force&amp;#39;s rapid capability office meaning it had a much smaller program office than typical for a program of that scale despite the immense complexity of the program that smaller team orbe it one with streamlined processes and a greater ability to make decisions and access decision makers appears to have been able to deliver faster than roughly comparable programs with larger management officers and there were a long list of program elements that read like a how-to guide of avoiding common procurement missteps the aircraft was built to a clear of requirements and a defined cost Target it was built using an open system architecture meaning future upgrades should be much less of a nightmare and there were close information sharing agreements between Northrup Grumman and the Air Force the Air Force for example had full access to a bunch of the relevant intellectual property and a digital twin of the B21 aircraft the design process featured production sustainment as design priorities not afterthoughts and when it came time to build a prototype for testing rather than build an entirely unique handbuilt bespoke air frame northr Grumman reportedly built the plane the same way they intended to build the production versions turning the Prototype not just into a test of the aircraft but a test to the production process to quote Northrock Grumman the B21 test aircraft is equipped with mission systems and was built by the same manufacturing technicians using the same processes and tooling as for the production aircraft end quote the Air Force got fixed price contracts for the initial low rope production batches Northrop Grumman got assurances the Air Force intended to procure close to 100 other the things meaning there might actually be acceptable scale this time around now make no mistake there&amp;#39;s still plenty of room for things to go horribly horribly wrong in the future and largely because of unexpected inflation spikes Northrop Grumman expects to actually lose money on the initial production batches although they expect to make money overall but is a relatively Advanced development program intended to produce something with some clearly defined requirements produced at scale delivered on time and on budget with a central focus on product life cycle sustainment upgrades Etc from the outside looking in I&amp;#39;m kind of tempted to award a couple of Peron gold stars here in December 2022 we finally got to see the B21 unveiled orbe it from only certain angles that concealed some sensitive parts of the design what it looks like essentially is a slightly smaller much more advanced version of the B2 Spirit the basic similarities conceal detail changes to just about everything about the aircraft from the windows to the intakes to the shaping of the design as a secretary defense put it 50 years of advances in low observable technology have gone into this aircraft and even the most sophisticated air defense systems will struggle to detect a B21 in the sky and with images now being released of test versions of the B21 actually in Flight confirming northr grman weren&amp;#39;t just pulling a kahur 313 maneuver with a non-flying model obviously the aircraft still has some serious challenges ahead of it not just in terms of getting through testing but getting the funding from Congress to build the projected 100 airframes eventually but there&amp;#39;s a lot more public evidence of progress here than there are for the other two programs we&amp;#39;re going to look at if the US Next Generation bomber program is evolutionary working towards essentially a new B2 with Next Generation bells and whistles and a slightly less obscene price tag for the people&amp;#39;s Liberation Army in China a Next Generation bomber would arguably be revolutionary there the currently dominant strategic bomber traces its design lineage to an aircraft that first flew in the Stalin era not to mention one that&amp;#39;s considerably smaller than both the b 2 and tu9 95 so introducing a stealthy longrange bomber with sixth generation features would arguably be an upgrade in the same sense that handing Roman legionaries a bunch of firearms would also be an upgrade and yet that appears to be precis the goal of the program aiming to produce the H20 bomber Chinese official sources have described the H20 as a system of national significance and US intelligence describes it as an aircraft that is likely to feature a stealthy design a range of more than 10,000 km and be capable of employing both conventional and nuclear Weaponry so far the H20 is one of those programs where you see a lot of bits and pieces but ultimately know very little official sources have carried various CGI mockups and models of the aircraft all of which are different from each other and unlike with the B21 where we&amp;#39;ve actually seen one with the H20 no one operating solely on publicly available information will be able to tell you with 100% confidence exactly what the thing looks like but the common view among many International commentators including the Russy report on the right there is that this thing is generally speaking going to be a rough analog to the American B2 Spirit a subsonic flying wing or crank kite design with tremendous range the aforementioned Russy report does raise some questions about the program including China&amp;#39;s ability to produce engines necessary for a true B2 class aircraft but with the people&amp;#39;s Liberation Army Air Force suggesting the aircraft will be unveiled to the public relatively soon it seems likely we may get a better look at the Chinese design and their answer to the various technical problems involved sooner rather than later perhaps the most important part of the Chinese program though is not exactly what the aircraft looks like but what a capability like this might allow the plf to do other than its very longrange missiles there are currently relatively few Chinese assets that can reach out long distances from the Chinese Mainland the Navy isn&amp;#39;t currently well configured to contest something like the US Navy beyond the first island chain and under most circumstances trying to fly a non stealthy subsonic bomber like the H6 out into Allied airspace would be a bit of a Leroy Jenkins maneuver if it even had the range to get where you wanted to go with a useful payload in the first place a B2 analog by contrast could add reach and survivability and significantly multiply the number of targets that could potentially be held at risk and so while some sources including everyone&amp;#39;s favorite the anonymous us intelligence official have suggested that H20 is likely to fall short of us platforms when it comes to capability for a lot of purposes China may not need something as good as B2 or B21 it just needs the H20 to be good and enough so let&amp;#39;s move on then to the Russian program much like the US Air Force the Russian Aerospace forces and Naval Aviation have long understood that eventually the Strategic bombing Fleet would probably need a refresh a key difference however is that Russia has never designed built and operated a stealth bomber meaning there would have been an understanding in Russian industry that if they did decide to press ahead with one it would represent much more of a revolutionary step for the Russian defense industrial base than moving from B2 to B21 does for northr Grumman building up the capability to do so therefore would represent a significant commitment of scarce resources Russia has comparatively fewer of those than the US and China and thus has to be careful how it expends them it&amp;#39;s also a country whose State media occasionally puts out pieces suggesting that stealth aircraft don&amp;#39;t really matter because air defense systems like S400 are capable of seeing and shooting them down anyway this Tas article covering the sale of S400 systems to India for example claimed the S400 was quote capable of detecting and destroying low observable in Brackets stealth and fast moving aerial targets end quote if that latter claim was unambiguously true then designing and building a stealth bomber would probably represent a colossal waste of limited resources and you&amp;#39;d probably be better off relying on designs that could at least leverage speed for survivability like the Blackjack so of course Russia announced a stealth bomber program early mentions of a Next Generation Russian bomber go back as far as the late 1990s and in 2009 the tupal Lev design Bureau who are basically the first and last word in Russian strategic bomber design reportedly received a 3-year R&amp;amp;D contract to get the longrange bomber project moving those processes would eventually mature into an aircraft concept that is the prospective Aviation complex for longrange Aviation or pack D to ease our way going forward though we&amp;#39;re going to refer to this thing either by its reported Russian code name that is the polanik or the English translation Envoy or messenger because I guess if you&amp;#39;re trying to send an international message a strategic payload of high explosives might just do it comments by Russian political figures State media and various other sources all point to this thing as most likely being a subsonic strategic bomber with some low observable characteristics some features that have been commonly referred to include packing this thing with a new generation of navigation and electronic equipment including electronic warfare equipment of domestic Russian manufacturer but the overall concept A at least somewhat stealthy subsonic flying wing bomber would give the envoy at least some resemblance to being a likely somewhat less stealthy Russian B2 but of course like any sensitive military program until we see the final product there is some uncertainty involved Russian State media Western intelligence and defense commentators for example lean towards the subsonic stealth bomber Theory but back in 2016 the daily maale quoting a noou highly credible Russian Source described it as a variable geometry Hypersonic space plane that would quote fly into outer space in order to strike using nuclear bombs and then return to the Airfield end quote so yeah subsonic stealth bomber or Hypersonic swing wing space bomber I guess we&amp;#39;ll just have to go 50 cents each way on that mystery as with many Hallmark Russian military development programs news about the potential features of the Envoy have ranged from the relatively conservative and the official to the somewhat slightly more outlandish we know Russian media have talked about the aircraft potentially filling more than just a bomber rooll serving as a controller for example of unman systems like the S70 drone I have pictured in the top right there the aircraft is meant to have low observable features be compatible with hypersonic weapons be aided by drones and as we said earlier feature a new electronic warfare and sensor Suite some observers also noted the potential relevance of some engine related patents that have been filed by tupv but there&amp;#39;s nothing to say that the aircraft design featured in those patent illustrations is the envoy design there&amp;#39;s also nothing to say that while on paper the envoy has a feature list that seems somewhat similar to that of the B20 one we discussed earlier that the envoy&amp;#39;s actual features and stealth characteristics will be anywhere near as developed as its American competitors nor exactly how quickly if at all the program is really pushing towards a mass-produced production aircraft although again you have to be a little bit careful with the internet there YouTube for example randomly decided to serve me the video on the top right there which includes a clip of a flying wing stealth bomber being dramatically unveiled with the rosc logo in the top left and the understated title terrifying three exclamation marks Putin reviews construction of tup pack Dar stealth bomber the clip of course is actually from the unveiling of the American B21 Raider apparently edited to remove the Pentagon watermark in the bottom right and to add the rosc logo in the top left this is very much not the post lanic and it remains to be seen when exactly we&amp;#39;ll see one because this is one Russian program where whoever&amp;#39;s behind it probably deserves a gold medal in Gold poost moving in 2012 Russian Major General Anatoli zakov was reported as indicating the prototype for the envoy would be flying around 2020 and enter service in 2025 in 2012 Tas reported on the head of the defense and security Committee of the Russian Federation Council saying that research and development on the aircraft was near incompletion and carrying a subheader indicating that the aircraft would enter service between 2025 and 2030 2 years later according to Tas the first bomber was now under construction due for completion by 2021 in 2021 it was then reported that the demonstrator would be ready by 2023 so given it&amp;#39;s now 2024 I&amp;#39;m sure there&amp;#39;s a fully functional demonstrator out there somewhere presumably stashing a hanger somewhere along with the first copies of halflife 3 I bring all this up not to argue that Russia is incapable of developing and building good aircraft they clearly are instead I bring it up to illustrate that this looks like a military development program like many military development programs that has seen its disclosed timelines slip by several years over the course of development with most of those apparent delays coming before for February 2022 and it&amp;#39;s that context I think that really casts the development risk for Russia&amp;#39;s program apart from the American and Chinese ones the American and Chinese defense sectors both have the combination of more resources than Russia does and fewer immediate demands than Russia does even within the context of a Russian Aviation sector which is dealing with challenges like a finite pool of trained Personnel UAC decision makers might face a dilemma between Staffing up the envoy program and instead making sure that lines that are delivering aircraft currently being used in Ukraine are running at full capacity or that Russia&amp;#39;s nearer term strategic bomber program which we&amp;#39;ll talk about in a bit has what it needs to keep delivering bombers that can launch missiles against Ukraine now rather than fly deterence patrols and give NATO some Wicked side eye in the 2030s a lot of the critiques I&amp;#39;ve read of the envoy program focus on the technical unknowns is the aircraft what Russia needs and can Russian industry actually build it but for me the most pressing threat to the envoy might not be anything to do with the aircraft itself but rather that sort of archetypical Russian development story it&amp;#39;s a story of an industrial base with an extensive Legacy some rather talented people and nowhere near the resources necessary to build the kind of Wonder Weapons leadership seemed to want at a scale that will actually make them practical and economical in essence in Personnel count terms the Russians are currently trying to run a Chinese siiz military on a fraction of the Chinese budget while fighting a conventional war and in that context remains to be seen just what resources will be dedicated to producing what is essentially a long-term luxury capability but here&amp;#39;s the thing while those three stealth bombers are no doubt the high tech part of each nation&amp;#39;s plan for their future bomber Force they aren&amp;#39;t the only components and in many cases countries are running parallel bomber programs that call for something just a little less Hightech the US for example is currently engaged in a more than $2.5 billion effort to fit new Rolls-Royce engines to its Boeing b52s the newest of which rolled off the assembly line in 1962 the question is why in this era of ultra Advanced stealth bombers capable air defenses and potential competitive threats like fifth and sixth generation Fighters and New Generation air to a missiles is why would you invest billions of dollars in trying to keep a 70 plus year old platform flying and the answer is that not every Mission requires a stealth bomber the B52 like the Russian t95 is nothing fancy from an engineering perspective you don&amp;#39;t need to make the concessions you need for supersonic or Hypersonic flight you don&amp;#39;t need expensive stealth Coatings or any sort of fancy flying wing design instead designers could focus on just building something that could carry a lot of payload a very long way and so in a permissive environment where a bear or a B52 isn&amp;#39;t going near anything that could conceivably shoot it down it still might be the most practical choice for a range of missions for a couple of reasons the first quite simply is just cost what I have on the right there are essentially a list of cost recovery rates for various US Air Force aircraft basically if for whatever reason another US government agency or other user had to borrow a US Air Force aircraft what would the Air Force try and recover from them to cover the cost of operating it and as you can see they vary immensely by airframe if for whatever reason the IRS or border patrol needed to borrow an A10 that would come at a cost of around $8,200 per hour and F22 meanwhile commands a price tag north of 50,000 between the three bombers the B52 has a significant cost Advantage offering a saving of about a third compared to the B1 and even more compared to the hangar Queen herself the B2 you can get somewhat different numbers if you look at different measurements and different sources the figures you see on the right there are the operating and support costs per aircraft in fiscal year 2020 according to the GAO and these are those same support costs but cut by flying hour but while the values change the overall pattern doesn&amp;#39;t tend to the B52 is always significant iFly cheaper to fly than the b1b or the B2 Spirit although the B1 and B2 do sometimes change places with each other and when you start Crossing these hourly costs against the payload of the platform the B52 can actually get competitive with some of the other lighter aircraft on the list according to these figures you can get roughly two F5 e flight hours for every B52 flight hour but try as they might no f15e is going to be able to carry as much ordinance as a B52 and the combination of payload and loer time have meant it&amp;#39;s often the Strategic bombers dropping a lot of pgms and that yes in places like Afghanistan you saw beef tusos doing close air support work according to one report I found the record for the most Precision guided bombs dropped by a B-52 in Afghanistan in a single mission was 24 a number enabled by the fact that the B-52s could sort of circle over the battlefield with a belly full of bombs giving the troops on the ground the ability to dial a jam whenever a bush looked at them funny as big and expensive as strategic bombers like the B52 can be they can often carry an awful lot of bang for a given amount of buck take that into account and suddenly the bean counters might be on the buff side there&amp;#39;s also the flexibility that comes from being a non- stealthy design and as a result being able to carry very heavy things without being restricted by the size of internal Bombay militaries can&amp;#39;t know for sure exactly how big future weapon designs will be missiles might remain relatively compact suitable for Carriage internally by a future stealth bomber but even if they&amp;#39;re not there&amp;#39;s probably nothing to stop you strapping them to the pylon on a B52 t95 or H6 and provided the threat level in the environment is as close to zero as possible countries might find Value in aircraft with massive lift capacity that you can just strap a bunch of to externally without ruining its fundamental reason for being and so with that in mind I want to close out by looking at some of what we know about China Russia and the United States planned for their future bomber forces starting of course with the United States even for a country as wealthy and well armed as the United States a three bomber force is already pretty demanding from a sustainment perspective just adding a fourth design in the form of the B21 without any other changes then would probably require some pretty significant cutbacks elsewhere I mean you could cut enlistment bonuses but then depending on your jurisdiction who&amp;#39;s going to buy all the charges Mustangs and jet skis introducing the B21 will give the Americans one bomber from the 50s two from the&amp;#39;80s and one from the 2020s and so of course it&amp;#39;s the two from the 80s that got to go at least eventually long term the US Air Force is slimming down to 2 and 1 half designs with a goal of at least 100 b2s in service the US Air Force aims to eventually roughly quintuple its stealth bomber force that will essentially flip the force profile from one where only a minority of aircraft can fly into very high threat environments to one where the non- stealthy designs are the exception rather than the norm one potential Advantage for that configuration is that it might make it harder for American competitors that rely on air denial strategies the US military in general has often been very averse to being told there&amp;#39;s any battle space it can&amp;#39;t access put a proverbial no entry sign up on your front gate and there&amp;#39;s 50/50 odds they&amp;#39;re going to take it as a challenge with the B21 potentially being a hell of a gate Crasher if for example you had a hypothetical opponent that tried to zone out us striking power through the use of longrange missiles that could Target aircraft carriers or Regional airbases to a significant extent the B21 just might not care with refueling support it could potentially fly missions from bases in the continental United States and still get to the relevant battle space with a significant payload of bombs or cruise missiles unless your area denial is virtually Global you may not be able to zone out the radar and on the flip side because the bombers can hypothetically reach almost anywhere any potential adversary has to consider the immense resources involved in trying to defend almost anywhere given its potential value there have already been a number of voices in the US advocating to increase planned B21 production above the currently planned 100 but given the likely rates of production involved any decision to cut or expand that figure probably doesn&amp;#39;t have to be made for some Years yet and for its partner in crime the B21 won&amp;#39;t have the B2 Spirit or the B1 Lancer it&amp;#39;ll have the good old B52 complete with its new Rolls-Royce engines the plan essentially is to rebuild much of the B52 Fleet not just with new engines but with new avionics new weapons new communication systems digital displays new new Wheels brakes Etc and then hoping that the airframes can actually handle the process keep the beef d2s flying until roughly 2060 that implies another 35 years of service for the veteran bomber taking its Total Service lifespan out past a century that plan is fairly Uncharted Territory for a military aircraft and isn&amp;#39;t without its risks but the US apparently thinks it needs a bomb truck and missile carrier for more permissive environments and nothing trucks ordinance quite like the buff there is however a bit of a wild card in the US Air Force&amp;#39;s forward planning one that relies not on Advanced stealth or cuttingedge technology but on the overwhelming power of palti Logistics in theory the rapid Dragon system which is basically a fancy way of describing a process where you push pallets of cruise missiles out the back of a cargo plane could potentially transform large parts of the US Air Force&amp;#39;s massive transport Fleet into missile carriers in the event of an emergency these would clearly be even more vulnerable and more restricted to permiss environments than the B-52 but it also means if you ever needed to suddenly generate hundreds or even thousands of cruise missile strikes relatively quickly and you had the missiles available suddenly your opponent would be in a situation where they don&amp;#39;t just need to Target all of your bomber aircraft and airfields they need to knock out every single transport and transport compatible Air Base as well so while this may not be considered a bomber program per se I&amp;#39;m happy to give it an honorable mention for their part the People&amp;#39;s Republic of China also appears to be pushing towards a two type Force like the US the Chinese appear to be interested in keeping around a missile truck in the form of the H6 relying on an older subsonic type to make up a significant portion of their Fleet from a procurement sustainment perspective that makes perfect sense there&amp;#39;s an active production line a large Fleet already in service presumably a large supply of spare parts as well as Generations worth of organizational memory flying and maintaining the aircraft for purposes like carrying large numbers of air launch cruise missiles to altitude and then launching them from friendly airspace the H6 will probably Remain the obvious choice for some time yet the H20 then would presumably fill a more specialized role flying missions that called for an aircraft that could fly further survive better or both an interesting observation here is despite the US and China having very different strategic context so far as their strategic bombing fleets go they&amp;#39;ve come up with relatively similar answers a two type Force representing a high low mix because even when you have superpower resources these systems are just so expensive that you probably want to consult validate when you can unless of course you happen to be Russia a lot of the challenges the Russian Fleet is arguably facing now are very similar to those in the US lots of older airframes and designs that can only last so long production lines that have been inactive for years and just the general issues that come with trying to keep three different types of strategic bomber in service each in relatively small numbers in fact arguably Russia&amp;#39;s situation is even worse because instead of having one bomb truck one swing wing and one stealth bomber the force currently lacks a stealth bomber capability and has two of the expensive swing wi designs the tu60 and the tu22m adding the envoy would bring that number up to four if the US doesn&amp;#39;t want to manage the strain of operating more than two bomber types one would think the Russian Aerospace forces would be looking to consolidate at least that much so you might ask what gets to stay and what&amp;#39;s got to go for now at least it looks like the bear is going to Soldier on for some time yet as a missile carrier it&amp;#39;s been shouldering a lot of the burden of Russia&amp;#39;s missile campaign in Ukraine and and contracts to upgrade the t95 fleet to the so-called MSM level suggest they&amp;#39;re going to keep that role for some time yet to maximize the parallels between the bear and the B-52 another 1950s Workhorse the primary change from the MSM upgrade is arguably the new power plant in this case an upgraded version of the original Power Plant although with new propellers that&amp;#39;ll be coupled with changes to internal systems like navigation communication sensors Etc as well as some general service life extension activities that you&amp;#39;d expect trying to keep older frame in the air one potential Advantage the bare Fleet might have from a sustainment perspective going forward is that while the oldest bear airf frames are more ancient than even the most elderly of B-52s the Soviet Union just kept producing these things and Russia only gave up on them in the early 1990s meaning there are some airframes out there that are only a couple of decades old so while bear Pilots might get a little nervous sharing airspace in the same bloody hemisphere as things like enat or Tempest we&amp;#39;re probably going to see the world&amp;#39;s last Turbo prop strategic bomber push on towards the mid-century but if you think that just because the Bears are staving off hibernation for a couple more decades Russia has any intention of getting rid of the Swing Wing 22m sorry but signs currently point to no the announced intention is for about half of the backfire Fleet to be upgraded to 22 m3m standard a version that only underwent flight testing in 2020 and which was described by the Company CEO was featuring absolutely new onboard radio electronic equipment combined with a deep modernization and service life extension effort that could stretch the life of part of The Fleets out to the 2040s or 2050s presumably leaving the Russian Aerospace forces with every maintainer dream a tiny Fleet of variable geometry bombers that have been out of production for half a century but you know what&amp;#39;s better than operating one small Fleet of variable geometry bombers operating two small fleets of variable geometry bombers because not just does Russia have no intention of resigning its existing tu60 bombers it also actually resume production of brand new airframes pre- Ukraine Invasion the estimate was that Russia would build up to a production rate of three aircraft per year aiming to build 50 new airframes and upgrade 16 existing ones those figures don&amp;#39;t include an explicit estimate for when these aircraft would exit service but some basic extrapolation suggest it would be nearly 2040 before Russia finishes the last of those new builds and that&amp;#39;s if there are no delays building expensive platforms and then immediately throwing them away is more of a US Navy maneuver so if we assume the Russians intended keep the aircraft in service for at least say 15 years this schedule would keep the blackjacks flying until at least the mid 2050s probably closer to 2060 so yeah Russia isn&amp;#39;t just not retiring classes of Legacy designs it&amp;#39;s actually rolling out new build versions even as it plans for the Next Generation meaning that if the envoy does enter Russian service to act as a multi-purpose Next Generation aircraft the Russians are likely to end up with the smallest of the Strategic bomber fleets operating the largest number of designs the anomaly compared to both the US and Chinese fleets is the decision to maintain the swing Wings something the rest of the world is mostly moving away from concluding that they were generally complicated expensive to maintain and that Speedy bombers didn&amp;#39;t necessarily equal survivable bombers hence why something like all of these stealth bomber designs would exist in the first place that&amp;#39;s not to say that the Blackjack and backfire are bad designs or they aren&amp;#39;t useful more there&amp;#39;s just a lot of competition in the Russian defense budget right now and arguably the 34 as we&amp;#39;ve looked at Russia is the one that least needs a large Fleet of strategic bombers the US is in the business of international power projection bombers are one of the key ways and sometimes the more economically efficient way of doing that you look at China&amp;#39;s likely theaters of operations and the distances it might want to strike targets at and again bombers make sense but if all of Russia&amp;#39;s strategic bombers except the 95s to heft missiles up to altitude disappear tomorrow realistically you have to ask yourself what would actually change while for a long long list of systems that Russia might have deficits in the answer is somewhat less ambiguous so to zoom out briefly in closing where does all of that leave the Next Generation bomber race and here I think there&amp;#39;s at least three big points to make the first is that with all three of these programs there&amp;#39;s still a range of unknowns issues during development of testing can shoot down the best laid plans and for the Russian program in particular I think there are massive questions over future resourcing rusi for example predicts there is every possibility the Russians get to a prototype of the envoy but whether a country that had to cancel its next Generation battle tank for being too expensive is able to Pony up the resources to mass produce a Next Generation strategic bomber is I think very much an open question although the ukrainians are probably hoping the program gets every Rubble it asks for and more the Counterpoint however is that the US and Chinese programs at least are likely very well Advanced and will probably enter service when they do they&amp;#39;ll likely represent major leaps in bomber technology and for China a significant new capability they also potentially represent very long-term Investments we know B21 for example is being designed with upgradeability in mind and given just how long we&amp;#39;ve seen current bomber generation soldier on the new entrance might have long service lives ahead of them but if the question of future bomber Force design shows us anything it&amp;#39;s that raw technological complexity isn&amp;#39;t always the be all and end all what matters most is coming up with tools that allow Force to carry out its missions imposing the maximum possible cost on competitors and the minimum possible cost on the friendly force and friendly taxpayers sometimes that might mean developing Cutting Edge stealth bombers with borderline sci-fi technology other times it might mean taking a 1950s bomb truck giving it some new engines and a fresh con of paint and saying there are a few decades more where that came from and okay let me add on a channel update to close out this is a video that&amp;#39;s been in the quebe for release for a while the US actually released footage of the B21 in Flight some time ago but given the pattern of Global events and Patron votes it always seemed reasonable to delay this one just one more week this week I felt like there was finally an opportunity to release it and I hope you all enjoyed heading into June there are a couple of quick updates to give firstly if you are on the patreon I put up an update post there last week and have started Gathering questions for the next Q&amp;amp;A meanwhile if you&amp;#39;re one of the poor longsuffering pering gaming fans I was actually able to record some content this week although it does require editing but it is now guaranteed to be coming and I&amp;#39;d look out for it early this coming week I&amp;#39;ll try to give a slightly more fome update next week but for the moment let me just thank you all very much for watching and say that I very much hope to see you all again next week

Transcript for:The Global Race for Next-Generation Bombers

Transcript for:
The Global Race for Next-Generation Bombers