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US Military Working On 'Optionally-Manned' Bomber

Posted by Soulskill on from the contract-paid-by-skynet dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Despite massive budget deficits, the U.S. military is working towards a stealthy and 'optionally-manned' bomber capable of carrying nuclear weapons. The craft is intended to replace the 1960s B-52, 1970s B-1 and 1990s B-2 bombers. The new aircraft is meant to be a big part of the U.S. 'pivot' to the Pacific. With China sporting anti-ship weapons that could sink U.S. carriers from a distance, a new bomber is now a top priority."

8 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove? by JoeMerchant · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So, more crew than a cruise missile? Multiple targets like a MIRV, ability to recall, and no (pilot/crew) lives at risk... what's not to like?

    1. Re:Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove? by similar_name · · Score: 5, Funny

      Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

    2. Re:Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove? by lgw · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The advantage of the ship-mounted bomb-throwers starts on the second week of a war, when you need the cheapest way to get bomb tonnage on target, not the most effective. But I'm not conviced we'll ever do it - aside form the LDS, we seem unable to settle on a new ship design, with the DDX and CGX programs seemingly discarding every cool new idea they come up with.

      I don't know if these new bombers are suppsed to be first-week weapons or not - I guess if they are supposed to replace B2s and cruise missiles they would be, unlike how we currently use B1s and B52s. But B2s have the range to launch from the US and reach any target they need to, without waiting weeks to get the logistics trail in place. I wonder if that's true of these bew bombers?

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    3. Re:Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove? by Sir_Sri · · Score: 5, Insightful

      to deal with a PRC attack on Taiwan you will wake up in the morning and find a hammer and sickle hanging over taipei, and have to decide if you want to launch an invasion to liberate them from the phillipines or Japan, and if so how in the hell you're going to pull that off with china in control of the whole area at sea.

      Unmaned drones are all well and good against enemies who's greatest weapon is a 20 year old shoulder mounted anti aircraft missile you sold them, or a state that has no real interest in putting up a fight, with soldiers who don't want to die for the dipshit in charge. China is none of those things. You will run out of missiles long before china runs out of things worth bombing, and they aren't going to fuck around without electronic warfare capabilities. If they decide to take taiwan by force you're going to be scrambling to source electronic components, because they will control the sea around taiwan, shipping around korea will be treacherous at best, and the same could be said of most of japan and thailand, and it suddenly looks much harder to run a high tech war without reliable access to most of those goods. Possible, but difficult.

      not that rail guns are all that much more use. On a good day they're about 100Km range, and you can't get much more than that without assistance (rocket powered) simply because the air has too much of an impact beyond that point (friction, drag, random wind orientation in the intervening space etc.). I suppose if you had a ring around taiwan of rail guns it would give coverage over half the straights with china, but still, going in the other way a good missile will knock a ship out of commission for months at much longer range. Rail guns might be cost effective, but it remains to be seen if the cost savings is worth the tradeoff. It's basically like a new version of a battleship with triple the range, but still against missiles and aircraft carriers with ranges 5x the base, so I'm not sure it gets enough to be a deciding factor.

  2. No one see's a problem with this? by Coldeagle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Drones I can understand, they're primarily detailed to doing surveillance or limited to small munitions, but now we're talking about a full bomber that could be remote controlled? Seriously? There's nothing that can't be hacked! If it's controllable by something outside of the craft itself, it is vulnerable to hacking! Oh let's give enemies the opportunity to hack our BOMBERS, with a Nuclear option no less!

  3. Autonomous killing machines by girlintraining · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I see another layer of avoiding responsibility for casualties emerging here. Ignoring the technology's effectiveness or benefits, the industrial-military complex has never been good at taking responsibility.

    They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
    They were depriving us of their valuable resources.
    Those people were [insert hate group here].
    They allowed themselves to be used as human shields.
    Sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.

    I envision that in the future, innocent people will be killed and new excuses will be created and they will say it was because their biometrics matched that of the target, or that there was an error in the targeting system, or that they made a hostile gesture at the killing machine that was 'innocently' going about it's business above his house. But never do I expect to see them come straight out and say "We screwed up. Sorry."

    No matter how great the technology is, what I want to here isn't about how efficient it is, but how human the people pushing the buttons are. If someone is hurt or killed that wasn't supposed to be, will they admit it? Will they compensate the victim? The families? The rest of the community that was deprived of the loss? Until that happens, all that this new technology will mean is more creative ways for bureuacracy to avoid responsibility, which is, afterall, its primary function.

    If war was no more complicated than two societies who couldn't resolve their differences each sending a certain number of soldiers to be incinerated in some machine located on an island, and the country with the biggest number won, then I suspect war would be a lot less common. All these layers of technology and rationalization takes away from the fact that is all war is. Technology just means we have to sacrifice fewer to the machine than the other team does.

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    1. Re:Autonomous killing machines by girlintraining · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If an act of killing has so little impact, there is theoretically so little mental resistance to performing the act. There are exceptional people out there who consider the ramifications, but they aren't likely to be the majority.

      The overwhelming majority of people responsible for carrying out the final act of ending another human life know it. Whether it's at the end if a knife, or the end of a thousand miles of cable, they know exactly what they just did, and feel it intensely. Those are not the people I am concerned with.

      It's the people who have spent their entire lives as upper/ruling class, and who are surrounded with others who provide complex rationalizations for killing, the people who eventually enact the legislation, framework, and power to compel the people at the end of the chain to commit those acts. People who commit those acts knowing that if they don't push the button they could spend the rest of their lives jailed, or be executed for disobeying the order... they aren't the problem. It's those at the top, who ceased viewing people as valuable and instead view them as a means to an end.

      This technology means that fewer people will feel that emotional burden of having taken a life, while more will feel justified in having ordered those fewer people to do it. That's the problem: It's not the button pusher at the bottom but the mouth breather at the top. If he had to die for the interests he would send others to die for, then war would be much less common. People wouldn't kill others for trivial things. When we make the process of killing so automated that those outside the process are completely unaware of it, then the risk of one of those mouth breathers at the top using it to satisfy their own emotional needs at the expense of the lives of others becomes too high.

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  4. Re:first bomb by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A nifty graphic on the federal budget While defense is high, healthcare and social security both outstrip it and interest on the national debt is gaining ground rapidly. Not to say we can't reduce defense as well, but it's not the only bogeyman in the budget, and it's not the one with a rapidly increasing share of the budget either.

    As for the grandparent's assertion about Iraq, total spending in the total war on terror is estimated (on the high side) at about $4T. The deficit has increased by the same amount since Obama was elected. So is it the sense of /. that Obama is as big a disaster as the Iraq war? If you want to blame Bush, just remember the Democratic majority in congress for two years prior to Obama's election that passed those spending authorizations up to and including all Obama spending. Many of those same people voted to go to war in Iraq.

    Now go worship your Obama god having completely ignored any of the accepted facts above.