Justin Bachman is confused

Over at Bloomberg, Justin Bachman is confused. *What Keeps the B-52 ‘Stratosaurus’ Airborne?” he wonders. “The Air Force says it sees a mission for the 1950s-era bomber until 2050. How can that be?”

I’ll tell you how, Justin, or rather why. Because our other bombers—our “new” bombers, the B-1 and B-2—are crap, that’s why. Worst of all, they’re outrageously expensive crap, so the Air Force is now planning to retire both planes to free up cash for its new “Hanger Queen”/Money Pit, the B-21, probably not so named because it will be worse than either, though it probably will be. In the meantime, the B-52 will keep flying because it’s the only bomber we have that isn’t crap. And when the B-21 comes out, if it ever does, the B-52 will still be the only bomber we have that isn’t crap.

How bad are the B-1 and the B-2? To save myself time, I’ll start by quoting New York Times reporter James Dao, writing about the B-1 in 2001:

“For most of its relatively short and often bumbling life, the B-1 has been the strategic bomber even the Pentagon has loved to hate.

“Even before the last B-1 rolled off the assembly line in 1988, the Air Force had determined that the plane was vulnerable to Soviet air defenses. A 1991 study found it could not fly in snow because it had no effective de-icing equipment. Engine problems sidelined it during the Persian Gulf war. And in 1999, the Pentagon delayed using B-1’s over Yugoslavia until enemy defenses had been suppressed by aging B-52’s and other aircraft.”

The reason why the Pentagon “delayed” using the B-1 is because its computer systems could not operate the plane’s offensive and defensive weapons systems at the same time, something that was of course known, not when the last B-1 (of 100) rolled off the assembly line, but when the first did. The Bush Administration was trying to get rid of the B-1 back in 2001 (the occasion for Dao’s article), but naturally Congress wouldn’t let that happen.

As for the B-2, well, we only have 20 of them, both because they were so damned expensive ($2.2 billion each!), and because they are so high maintenance—in 2013, its “mission capable rate” of 47% was the lowest in the Air Force—and because we didn’t need the damn things in the first place, both because the Cold War was over and because missiles.¹

The B-52 is the only bomber we have that actually works, because it was built back when we needed a bomber. We didn’t need the B-1. We didn’t need the B-2. And we don’t need the B-21, either, which is likely to be the real “Stratosaurus”, because by the time it rolls off the assembly line, manned combat aircraft will have vanished from the skies.

Afterwords
One gets the strong feeling when reading Justin’s “gosh, the B-52 is so awesome” prose that the article was written to gloss over the fact that the Air Force is dumping its so-called “advanced” planes in favor of a fifties-era relic that actually works in order to make room for new, improved crap that won’t.

UPDATE
Over at THE WARZONE, Tyler Rogoway provides a manly, two-fisted, and hilariously disingenuous “explanation” of why the decision to retire both the B-1 and B-2 well ahead of schedule is a good one—and it is, because they’re both crap, something that Tyler labors to disguise with hundreds of words of soaring, wild blue yonder prose. Like any military aircraft aficionado worth his cojones, Tyler can scarcely wait for the arrival of the abfab B-21, that “stealthy, high-flying, multi-mission and highly flexible platform” which will prove “absolutely critical to future combat operations in a wide variety of scenarios, but especially so for peer-state conflicts that the Pentagon and the Trump Administration have built their new defense strategy around”—said “peer-state conflicts” (that is, with Russia or China) would, of course, lead to the total destruction of all human life on this planet. Something to look forward to!