The B-21 And Beyond

The B-21 looks basically the same as, and has basically the same mission and approach to it as the B-2 bomber that it will replace (it would also replace the B-1 bomber and the B-52 bomber). It is also being built by the same company as the one that built the B-2.

The Air Force estimates that the average B-21 cost at $673 million. and it wants a lot of them (eventually 175-200 of them, and at least 100). This is less than a third of the pre-unit price of the B-2 bomber before even considering inflation (which was so high because the buy was limited to only about twenty planes that shared all of the R&D costs).

A B-21 is only a little bit less expensive than the latest U.S. Navy frigates, and about seven times as expensive as a new F-35 or F-15-EX jet fighter.

The size of the purchase is largely being driven by a belief that it is needed for conventional and/or nuclear wars with Russia and China. Smaller hostile militarized nations powers, like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea would plausible support a need for so many.

But the analysis supporting a large B-21 buy has some serious flaws.

1. There has never been a significant or sustained shortage of bomber resources in recent modern, allied military history. 

Bombers are among the least heavily utilized resources in the military, measured, for example, by hours flown per year. So, they have a much longer service life. 

The well maintained B-52s are quite sturdy and have, on average, only 16,000 flying hours. The Air Force estimates that the B-52s won't become un-maintainable until they reach 28,000 flight hours, despite almost five decades of service. A fighter jet becomes unmaintainable after about 14-17 years because the training and operations of one are so demanding.

2. The air superiority campaigns of major conventional military conflicts in the modern era have brief and conducted in a single theater of operations.

Post-Vietnam military conflicts in which the U.S. has been involved have tended to follow a clear pattern. There is a major campaign of bombing for a period of a few days to a couple of months, during which the opposition air force is routed, most air defenses and major military bases are destroyed, strategic communications and logistics infrastructure is destroyed, and heavy surface military systems like tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers, and warships are destroyed from the air.

Once this goal is achieved, air superiority can be maintained with a much smaller compliment of warplanes and drones, threatened mostly by infantry carried anti-aircraft missiles, that provides low volume bombing for selected late discovered targets, provides tactical observational and signals intelligence, and provides close air support for ground troops.

Once that phase is over, the bulk of the bomber resources, especially heavy stealth bomber resources, are no longer needed.

3. Long range bombers, and other aircraft supported by aerial refueling aircraft, can relocate to a new theater of operations very quickly.

Long range bombers like the B-21 can relocate to any new airfield in the world that its allies control, with, at most, one refueling stop, in a day.

There are basically no modern warplanes that can't relocate to any friendly airfield in the world, with the support of allied bases on land and aerial refueling tankers, over the course of a long weekend.

Even in the situation for which U.S. military planners have long prepared where there are two regional wars raging at once, or one gigantic world war three underway, it is still reasonable to expect that the military top brass of the U.S. and its allies could manage to stagger the most intense and warplane dependent phase of its initial air superiority campaign a few weeks apart.

4. Pretty much every major modern military operation in which the U.S. has participated since World War I has involved a multinational coalition of U.S. military allies.

Embarking on a regional war against a near peer opponent or coalition of opponents alone would be unprecedented folly and ill advised. The U.S. is often the lead participant in a military coalition, but never fights a major military conflict alone. If it is put in that position, moreover, it probably shouldn't enter into the conflict as that is a sign of unprecedented strong disapproval from our friends of the venture that should be taken seriously, even if the U.S. has sufficient military might to prevail.

As a result, when determining the peak military capacity that the U.S. requires in a scenario, failing to recognize that U.S. forces would be supplemented by the very advanced, if smaller, military forces of its allies in any given region, is simply an incorrect analysis of what is necessary.

5. "Smart bombs" have dramatically reduces the number of bombers necessary to accomplish the same objectives.

"Smart bombs" have dramatically reduced the number of bombing runs that are needed to achieve the same results (and produce less collateral damage as well), and thus the number of bomb carrying aircraft required to achieve the same results. So one to one replacement of old bombers may not make sense. 

During the peak six years of the Vietnam war, 6.7 million tons of bombs were dropped. That was the same rate they were dropped during the major bombing campaigns of World War II. But in eight years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, only 42,000 tons were dropped. Thus, while in the past, a million tons were dropped a year, for the war on terror, less than 6,000 tons a year were dropped. That means a reduction of over 99 percent. Even when you adjust for the different number of U.S. troops involved, that's still over 97 percent fewer bombs dropped. Even as late as the 1991 Gulf war, only 16 percent of the 250,000 bombs dropped were guided. But guided bombs did 75 percent of the actual damage. In the 1999 Kosovo campaign 98 percent of the 652 "smart bombs" used, hit their targets.

6.  Stealth, high altitude bombing operations, and standoff weapons like drones and long range missiles greatly reduce bomber attrition from enemy forces.

You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of stealth aircraft that have been shot down in flight in all of history. This is the whole point of anti-radar stealth technology.

Guided munitions, discussed above, not only reduce the number of sorties necessary to destroy a given number of targets. They also make it possible to drop bombs from high altitudes that are out of range of all but the most advanced forms of anti-aircraft weapons, and even out of range of less sophisticated enemy aircraft.

Also, modern bombers and fighters can fire relatively long range missiles dozens or even hundreds of miles away from their target, also keeping bombers further out of harm's way.

Historic bomber fleet sizes were built around the assumption that a significant number of the bombers would be lost to enemy fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft weapons as they approached enemy territory, exposed to radar and at the fairly low altitudes, more or less directly above their targets, that were necessary to have a reasonable change of hitting their targets. Historically, many bombers were shot down. At this moment in history, this is a situation that is unlikely to recur in the foreseeable future.

If stealth bombers, stealth air superiority fighters, unmanned combat aircraft, and long range missiles can effective overcome defending air to air fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft weapons, in a relatively short lived initial air superiority campaign, however, the attrition of the bomber fleet can reasonably be expected to be much lower than in the 20th century bombing campaigns that were used to set the status quo size of the warplane fleet, again arguing against one to one replacement of existing bombers.

7. Drones and long range missiles can substitute for bombers.

Drones and accurate long range missiles (fired by ground based batteries, ships, submarines, and warplanes) with ranges of dozens to hundreds, or even thousands of miles, have also allowed missions that were once the sole province of manned warplanes to be accomplished with other military resources.

These unmanned, long distance strike weapons can be substituted for missions traditionally reserved for long range heavy bombers, again reducing the need to replace existing bomber and warplane fleets on a one to one basis.

8. Truly extreme military scenarios are not plausible.

No foreseeable U.S. administration, or allied coalition, has the military objective of occupying on the ground, any substantial portion of the territory of China or Russia.

Unlike the wars that the U.S. has fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. and its allies would not seek to occupy and control the core territory of its most potential potential military adversaries.

The U.S. and its allies, might conceivably seek to secure control of large swaths of Chinese or Russian air space, or to obliterate their respective nuclear, naval and air forces. But there is no reasonable scenario in which the U.S. and its allies would need to destroy almost every Chinese or Russian tank, surface to surface artillery battery, military base, and armored personnel carrier, or to leave these countries without functioning road, rail, or pipeline facilities for the bulk of their respective territories. 

So, while the military capabilities most formidable plausible potential military opponents of the U.S. can and should drive U.S. military procurement policies, it does not make strategic sense to bankrupt the U.S. economy to prepare to fight scorched earth and conquest style military campaigns, like the regime change oriented war in Iraq, that the U.S. military will never wage.

This kind of a campaign both wouldn't serve a useful military purpose, and would make it highly likely that the military conflict would escalate into a global thermonuclear war that everyone on the planet would lose, leaving us to fight world war four with sticks and rocks.

Ruling out the most intensive possible scenarios for long range heavy stealth bombers as strategically unthinkable and not with planning to undertake, greatly reduces the size of the heavy bomber fleet that the U.S. military requires.

Realistically, the most bomber intensive mission that the U.S. military could plausibly have to carry out in one sustained campaign against China would be to wipe out combined navies of China and regional allies, China's nuclear forces, its long range aircraft, and its long range missile batteries. 

Essentially the same can be said for Russia  and its regional allies, but with only one geographic component of its navy targeted in any one sustained campaign against it.

The biggest barrier to such a maximal campaign would be locating all or nearly all of the adversary's nuclear forces, submarines, long range aircraft, and mobile long range missile batteries quickly. 

In such a campaign, the surface combatant warships, naval bases, airfields, and fixed missile batteries would be largely "sitting ducks" because they are large, slow or fixed in place, and wouldn't have sufficiently effective active countermeasures against a sustained attack from guided missiles and smart bombs and torpedoes that could be deployed against these surface combatants.

The need to preserve global economic ties would also strongly discourage the nations of the world from allowing conflicts with these global military powers and a U.S. led coalition, from ever getting anywhere close to that level of open, large scale, conventional warfare. There might be brinksmanship and threats, but it would take a significant change in circumstances for China, Russia or the U.S. to have the stomach for that kind of conflict, even though the military forces of each of these nations are doing their best to prepare for these conflicts.

Conclusion

In summary, advanced, long range, stealthy heavy bombers that can deploy large guided missiles, smart bombs, nuclear weapons, "bunker buster" munitions, and resupply drops in contested airspace have a critical role to play in modern military conflicts, both for isolated airstrikes far from any available allied airfield, and in the early phases of major conventional wars.

Therefore, this kind of warplane should be included in the U.S. military's arsenal. 

But, the U.S. simply does not need all that many of these bombers. 

One or two long range stealth bombers at a time are sufficient for isolated air strikes.

Intense use of these long range heavy bombers is limited largely to the first couple of months of a conflict, against a "near peer" adversary, in a single theater of warfare at a time, using munitions that destroy their targets 98% or more of the time, with bombers that are almost never shot down, with the support of large numbers of advanced (although perhaps not quite so advanced at U.S. state of the art aircraft) allied warplanes, which would not be used to fight a maximal scorched earth/ground occupation oriented objectives towards the most formidable potential adversaries of the U.S. military, like Russia and China.

The U.S. may need dozens of heavy, long range bombers in its air fleet (of all kinds combined), but it not hundreds of them, even for the most intense reasonably imaginable conflicts that the U.S. would plausibly undertake.

Similarly, it needs far fewer highly capable smaller and shorter range fighter-bombers than it has now, for essentially the  same reasons. It might need hundreds of fighters, rather than thousands of them.

According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a July 7, 2021 report:

The joint strike fighter is the largest acquisition project in the history of the Defense Department, with an estimated sustainment price tag of more than $1 trillion over the life of the program. The military plans to buy nearly 2,500 of the jets. The Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy are buying the A, B and C variants of the aircraft, respectively.

“The military services collectively face tens of billions of dollars in sustainment costs that they project will be unaffordable,” according to the report.

The cost to operate the platform can be as high as $38,000 per flying hour, according to estimates from the F-35 Joint Program Office. . .

If the Air Force doesn’t reduce the estimated annual cost per tail by about 47 percent by 2036, it will exceed its sustainment budget by about $4.4 billion, the study said. The Marine Corps will need to reduce annual sustainment costs per F-35B by 26 percent and the Navy must cut F-35C annual sustainment costs by 24 percent to meet affordability constraints in the mid-2030s, it added. . . .

In addition to affordability, the platforms’ readiness rates concerned the watchdog.

“F-35 mission capable rates — a measure of the readiness of an aircraft fleet — have recently improved, but still fall short of warfighter requirements,” according to the report.

“While the F-35’s mission capable and full mission capable rates have improved over the past two years, these rates remain well below the program’s objectives due to several significant and ongoing sustainment challenges,” the report said.

The United States does not need, and should not buy 2,500 F-35s, for essentially the same reasons that it does not need 175-200 B-21a. 

Developing Affordable and Proportionate Air Power

Also, as the U.S. military is finally starting to recognize, not all conflicts require extremely expensive, sixth generation fighters and B-21 bombers. 

Instead, some of the existing U.S. fleet of warplanes should be replaced with warplanes and drones that are less capable, but provide an affordable way to have air power that is still clearly dominant relative to asymmetric warfare opponents.

Many potential U.S. military adversaries would have only adapted civilian aircraft, civilian drones jerry rigged for military use, or third generation (or worse) fighters, that even updated fourth generation fighters like the F-14, F-15, F-16 or F-18 could defeat easily in air to air combat, if the adversaries have any air capabilities, or any anti-aircraft armaments at all. 

Many potential U.S. military adversaries have mere frigate and cutter navies, with unsophisticated missiles, or adapted civilian surface ships, or barely submerged DYI submarines, if they have any naval forces at all. 

Many potential military adversaries are counter-insurgency movements with no heavy military armaments at all, not even tanks, or armored personnel carriers, or heavy artillery, or modern guided missiles.

This doesn't mean that these military adversaries are easy to defeat. As the U.S. withdraws from Afghanistan, the Taliban is likely to be restored to the verge of conquest military position that it was immediately before September 11, 2001, twenty years ago, in short order. The Taliban won in the end, just as the Vietcong did in the Vietnam War.

The later part of the post-World War II era has seen lots of "small wars" and asymmetric conflicts, even though it has seen only a handful conflicts involving dog fights or naval warfare between near peer adversaries with military planes or ships built for that purpose, and has seen tanks become largely obsolete. 

This is likely to continue to be the case, as there are few circumstances when at all sustained conventional warfare between near peer nations with modern military forces make sense strategically. 

This doesn't mean that the U.S. military can ignore the possibility of more technologically capable adversaries entirely. 

But, the U.S. military also can't afford to ignore the distinct fiscal and military parameters of lower end conflicts.

A key factor to being effective in these asymmetric counterinsurgency conflicts and conflicts against weak third-world regimes, is to do so in a way that doesn't produce a lopsided war of attrition where the U.S. and its allies win the battles, but lose the war because they spend too much on military systems that are gross overkill for the situation, to justify continued participation in the conflict.

The U.S. doesn't need $80 million to buy and expensive to operate F-35s or F-15s or even somewhat less expensive F-16s to patrol civilian air space in the continental United States against rouge adapted civilian aircraft. It doesn't need heavy bombers for homeland defense missions. It doesn't need such advanced fighters to take on opponents driving armed pickup trucks and jeeps with small arms and the occasional short range, infantry carried anti-tank missile or IED.

For those situations, the U.S. military may need or desire airpower, but non-stealth, non-supersonic manned and unmanned aircraft, with less sophisticated armaments and avionics, at a much lower price tag to purchase and operate, are still more than sufficiently capable and prevent U.S. forces from losing wars of attrition with unreasonably disproportionate spending on excessive military systems.

Since modern warfare is disproportionately asymmetric due to the inability of countries or movements that don't have too much to lose economically from direct military conflict, and an unwillingness to risk a nuclear war with nuclear armed adversaries, much of the future warplanes and drones of the U.S. military should be less capable (but less expensive) than the fourth generation fighter fleet and B-1 and B-2 bombers it is discarding, rather than more capable.

Swiftly Deploying Many Ground Troops Still Matters

High end conflicts with near peer nations mostly call for modest numbers of highly advanced weapons to defeat the modest numbers of advanced weapons that plausible adversaries might bring to such a regional war or next world war.

Technology has made great strides in finding ways to defeat surface warships, military submarines, warplanes, tanks, artillery batteries, sea mines, radar antenna, and armored personnel carriers, with advanced aircraft, ships, submarines, satellites, and missiles.

Warships, submarines, and warplanes, however, can't hold or control territory. This takes ground troops. And, as aircraft and missiles become adept at defeating heavy armored military systems, this means irregular counterinsurgents, and enemy infantry, sometimes with light, fast, small military vehicles.

Ground troops haven't completely failed to advance technologically, despite the relentless march of offense in gaining an edge over defense and passive armor. 

Armored vehicles are still effective against small arms, however, and active defenses can help defend them against IEDs, artillery and tank shells, missiles, drones and ambushing snipers. And, in an asymmetric conflict, or even in the later stages of a conventional regional war like the Iraq War, before long only one side of the conflict, the one with air superiority, will have access to armored vehicles. 

Night vision, communications technologies, drones, and improved small arms, as well as vehicles with active defenses, all give modern ground troops a bit of an edge over their predecessor ground troops.

But, ultimately, the magnitude of technological improvements that ground troops have experienced pales before the revolutions that have taken place in high end warplanes and guided missiles.

This means that while the Navy and the Air Force can retain their effectiveness with fewer sailors and airmen using more advanced systems, the Army and Marines still need forces comparable in numbers as boots on the ground to those in historic post-World War II conflicts to take and hold control of territory.

The Army and Marines may be able to cut the number of troops and military systems needed in their armor and artillery forces. But the demand for infantry is virtually unchanged, and the U.S. military isn't very impressive on this front. 

The experience of the last couple of decades has shown us that ground warfare operations, unlike initial air and naval campaigns, can last many years, and that it is a great strain on U.S. capabilities to field more than about 100,000 ground troops in any one theater of conflict, at any one time, on a sustained basis, out of a total force size of about 1,500,000 active duty military personnel.

Moreover, even if the U.S. could quickly maximize its recourse to reserve and national guard troops, a surge in volunteer enlistments, and a military draft, it has only a limited capacity to get enough of those troops to the theater of conflict with the best possible equipment for the situation and support systems from air, sea, missiles, intelligence and supplies, at a pace prompt enough to make a decisive difference.

U.S. airlift and sealift capabilities are deficient. Probably less than half of U.S. Army and Marine ground troops are organized on a sufficiently expeditionary basis to make quick deployments at decisive moments, with enough military resources to be fully effective.

In the long run, the U.S. needs to significantly expand its airlift and fast sealift capabilities, to pre-place more resources in forward positions to limit the need for long distance airlift and sealift, and to organize a larger share of its ground troops on an expeditionary basis, because there will never be a major land war in the continental United States, where most U.S. ground troops are based.

This means more transport aircraft and transport drones (the most intensely used resources in the Air Force). This means considering adding airships to our logistics capabilities. This means more fast sealift ships. This may mean transport submarines to allow heavier equipment to bust embargoes. This means more active defenses and offensive capabilities on transport shifts and aircraft. This means sea basing ships in areas were likely adversaries don't have the capabilities to seriously threaten them were they locate themselves. This means more attention to pre-positioned supply caches, on land, in foreign bases, on ships at sea, on submarines, and in underwater caches.

This means more ground troops outfitted like Marines, paratroopers, and airborne units, and fewer really heavy divisions, with really heavy equipment like tanks and missile defense batteries, pre-positioned as close to likely centers of conflict as possible. This means developing new expeditionary systems that provide powerful capabilities with modest weight and size, like wheeled missile tanks, mobile guided rocket launchers, and lighter active point defense systems and missile launchers capable of being loaded on military trucks or armored personnel carriers or tactical vehicles.

The U.S. also needs a larger force of active duty ground troops, because the sophistication of modern military technologies and tactics makes green draftees with minimal training less useful as ground troops than in the past, and because immediate deployment of troops is frequently decisive in modern military conflicts. Future wars are likely to be more like the sudden fait accompli Russian occupation of Crimea and the Ukrainian border, than they are to be sustained slugfests in which large numbers of late deployed troops can easily make up for initially tiny rapid response forces.

Larger numbers of active duty ground troops are also important because, logistically, it is much harder and slower to relocate several divisions of ground troops from one theater to another as the relative needs of the generals in two active conflicts shift (really only marginally better than surface warships at best, and sometimes not every that quickly) than it is to relocate warplane resources.

For the most part, staggered deployment of large numbers of grounds troops from one front to another is still not really viable. Once ground troops arrive, they need to stay to continue to hold the territory that they have taken. The entirety of their equipment is often too heavy to economically transport from one theater to another by air. Loading up transport ships can be slow and most sealift is very slow itself (in additional to being vulnerable to hostile attacks in a widespread near peer conflict). 

Further, different ground environments require considerable specialization which is hard to shift quickly. Language and cultural understanding needs are different in different countries. Urban warfare and warfare in wide open spaces of various kinds of climate and terrain involve different habitual tactics that work best. Differently armed opponents call for different kinds of countermeasures.

The bottom line is that the U.S. military need more grunts equipped to deploy quickly with more airlift and sealift capabilities, and more pre-positioned equipment, to make this possible. But, it also needs a smaller, but more advanced, force to run aircraft, missiles, ships, satellites, drones and submarines to take on near peer adversaries and the initial air and sea dominance phases of a military conflict.

It might be reasonable to target having a force that can deploy 200,000 to 300,000 ground troops in a combat zone in a new regional war or two, at any one time (about two to three times the U.S. military's current capacity to do so using all of its national guard and reserve forces). In contrast, there would be a significant reduction in the number of active duty personnel in the Navy, the Air Force, and in the parts of the Marines and the Army that aren't suitable in that role while given them more powerful and capable systems to operate.

This would also have the beneficial side effect of keeping the defense budget manageable while providing skill training, education, discipline and experience for more young men and women who are not ready to immediately embark on a college education and who may never do so, giving them a leg up in life.

The overall force might actually have more active duty personnel, but those personnel would be greatly rebalanced between the services, and within subcomponents of the existing services.

Specialize the National Guard and Coast Guard

It also makes sense to more clearly differentiate the role of the reserves to provide surge capacity for active duty forces, from that of the Coast Guard and National Guard to serve in a primarily homeland defense role responding to disasters and civil emergencies, providing search and rescue capabilities, and being prepared for insurrections, almost unthinkable invasions, terrorist attacks, and, in the case of the Coast Guard, more ordinary law enforcement and anti-piracy roles, even though this somewhat diminishes the supply of ordinary ground troops available in the event of a foreign war.

The National Guard should not be armed with weapon systems ill suited to use domestically and primarily oriented towards near peer conventional wars abroad. The Air National Guard doesn't need bombers or supersonic stealth jet fighters. The Army National Guard doesn't need howitzers, Apache helicopter gunships, and large numbers of tanks. In both cases, some new military systems should be designed and purchased for their primary missions, rather than limiting them to hand me downs from the active duty force (something that should be limited to the various reserve forces).

This isn't to say that the Coast Guard and National Guard should never be mobilized to deploy abroad in foreign conflicts. But these deployments should be in capacities that reflect their homeland defense orientation, rather than being interchangeable in equipment and training from reserve troops in both equipment and training, as they tend to be now.