Pentagon Picks Northrop Grumman For Next Gen Bomber (theatlantic.com)

retroworks writes: The B-52s currently in use have been flown by three generations of American Air Force pilots. B1s and B-2 Bombers are also long in the tooth. The Pentagon has been looking for a new model to replace them, and Northrop Grumman has won for the next half-century with a major new order for state-of-the-art bomber aircraft. The bomber will be capable of carrying nuclear weapons, and the contract is worth almost $60 billion. The Atlantic reports, "While the current fleet remains useful, the Air Force wants a bomber that can evade the advancing air defenses of Russia and China—if ever the need arises. The long-range bomber would act as a deterrent against actions designed to keep U.S. forces out of a designated area—what the military calls 'anti-access aerial denial.'"

Comments

Re:Already flying?

[Richard_at_work]

Actually, its not just speculation - the program is already fairly mature as all competitors have flown demonstrator scale versions and developed their entries to a higher level than normally required to. As an example, both the F-22 and F-35 programs were awarded based off of non-representative demonstrators, and the actual production examples were then developed from scratch after the contracts were awarded - in this case, the competitors were required to fly demonstrators based on the production examples, and were fully funded to that goal. The winner now gets to continue development on to full scale.

Why the change in approach? Because its run by a different office than normal acquisitions - the LRS-B contract competition was run by the Rapid Capabilities Office, which also handled such programs as the X-37 and thus isn't bound to the normal acquisition rulebook.

Re:How it compares to the F-35 contract...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

They padded it out with a bunch of paperwork just so everyone could save face; but I'm told that the actual bidding process was "We need a new bomber. Which one of our military aircraft oligopolies isn't responsible for the F-35? Ok, them then."

Re:I pick....canceled

[CrimsonAvenger]

We don't need a next gen bomber, we have murdering human beings down pat. There is no need for improvement on that front anymore.

Yes, we do. Bombers get old. And we no longer have the capability of building B-52's. The assembly line is long since gone to wherever old assembly lines go when they stop making something.

Since the B-52 is pre-interwebs and mostly pre-computer, recreating the ability to manufacture B-52's is likely to be even more expensive than designing a new bomber from scratch, even ignoring that we want stealth and other fun things in a new bomber.

Note that the B-1 and B-2 suffer some of the same problems - not making them anymore means recreating the ability to make them with modern machine tools may be as hard as or harder than starting a new bomber from scratch.