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B-52s: The Plane That Refuses To Die
HughPickens.com writes: Dave Phillipps has an interesting article in the NY Times about B-52's and why the Air Force's largest bomber, now in its 60th year of active service and scheduled to fly until 2040, are not retiring anytime soon. "Many of our B-52 bombers are now older than the pilots who fly them," said Ronald Reagan in 1980. Today, there is a B-52 pilot whose father and grandfather flew the plane. Originally slated for retirement generations ago, the B.U.F.F. — a colorful acronym that the Air Force euphemistically paraphrases as Big Ugly Fat Fellow — continues to be deployed in conflict after conflict. It dropped the first hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Islands in 1956, and laser-guided bombs in Afghanistan in 2006. It has outlived its replacement. And its replacement's replacement. And its replacement's replacement's replacement. The unexpectedly long career is due in part to a rugged design that has allowed the B-52 to go nearly anywhere and drop nearly anything the Pentagon desires, including both atomic bombs and leaflets. But it is also due to the decidedly underwhelming jets put forth to take its place. The $283 million B-1B Lancer first rolled off the assembly line in 1988 with a state-of-the-art radar-jamming system that jammed its own radar. The $2 billion B-2 Spirit, introduced a decade later, had stealth technology so delicate that it could not go into the rain. "There have been a series of attempts to build a better intercontinental bomber, and they have consistently failed," says Owen Coté. "Turns out whenever we try to improve on the B-52, we run into problems, so we still have the B-52."
The usefulness of the large bomber — and bombers in general — has come under question in the modern era of insurgent wars and stateless armies. In the Persian Gulf war, Kosovo, Afghanistan and the Iraq war, the lumbering jets, well-established as a symbol of death and destruction, demoralized enemy ground troops by first dropping tons of leaflets with messages like "flee and live, or stay and die," then returning the next day with tons of explosives. In recent years, it has flown what the Air Force calls "assurance and deterrence" missions near North Korea and Russia. Two B-52 strategic bombers recently flew near artificial Chinese-built islands in the South China Sea and were contacted by Chinese ground controllers but continued their mission undeterred. "The B.U.F.F. is like the rook in a chess game," says Maj. Mark Burleys. "Just by how you position it on the board, it changes the posture of your adversary."
The usefulness of the large bomber — and bombers in general — has come under question in the modern era of insurgent wars and stateless armies. In the Persian Gulf war, Kosovo, Afghanistan and the Iraq war, the lumbering jets, well-established as a symbol of death and destruction, demoralized enemy ground troops by first dropping tons of leaflets with messages like "flee and live, or stay and die," then returning the next day with tons of explosives. In recent years, it has flown what the Air Force calls "assurance and deterrence" missions near North Korea and Russia. Two B-52 strategic bombers recently flew near artificial Chinese-built islands in the South China Sea and were contacted by Chinese ground controllers but continued their mission undeterred. "The B.U.F.F. is like the rook in a chess game," says Maj. Mark Burleys. "Just by how you position it on the board, it changes the posture of your adversary."
Shirley, that'd be Big Ugly Fat Fucker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
sag
At some point they really need to send them all elsewhere. I suggest Planet Claire.
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Having a plane that can be kept in the air as much as possible trumps technology every time.
There are a few examples of engineering projects where everything went right, or at least better than expected. The UK equivalent plane was the Vulcan bomber, which would have been a stealth bomber by accident: only the upright tail gives it away on radar. The AK-47 has it. The London Routemaster bus had it. The Soyuz lifter has it. The Panama canal has it too. Can you think of any others?
More importantly, can we make everything work like that?
I'm sure things like avionics and perhaps engines have been updated over the years. So maybe the B-52's replacement should simply be a B-52 built out of more modern materials? Call it a B-53.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
The A-10 isn't quite so old, having been introduced in 1977, but it too is uniquely successful at its job, with no practical replacement in sight.
Ask any Army Soldier or Marine Rifleman that has seen combat and needed close air support what their favorite jet is, and you'll hear only one name.
Rather than talking about retirement, we should be building more of these two jets. Yes, I know it would be expensive to re-create all of the tooling. In my opinion, new production lines for them should be established and maintained in perpetuity as national treasures, at least until suitable replacements are found and validated by real-world experience.
(The C-130 should probably be included too, and would be much easier, since it is still in active production.)
See that "Preview" button?
The US has maintained Air Superiority since the 70s. Why NOT have a giant lumbering bomb machine flying around?
It kind of makes me wonder who designs those shitty replacements.
How does a design for a plane that can't fly in the rain even make it to a production stage?
Why did they change from a rugged, can fly any time, airplane to something that needs a day of maintenance for every hour of flight?
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Let's get this straight: the B-2 is not "so delicate" it can't go out into the rain, and that statement simply belies a common ignorance of stealth.
It's very simple: in the rain, on radar, an aircraft, any aircraft, shows up as spot of no rain, stealth or not.
An aircraft sized fast moving rain shadow on a properly configured radar isn't exactly that hard to figure out.
I hope they are not doing it the Conquistador's way.
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Only time I've felt terror from above was glancing up and seen five of these flying in close formation. It turns out their air base was having a long [runway] overhaul and they did a little tour of nearby cities as they departed. Had some evolutionary flashback to being some meerkat-like creature. Also appreciated why civilian jets are called 'wide-bodied'.
The thing that makes the B-52 work is that it's a simple bombtruck that can carry an insane amount of ordnance. It's achilles heel though is that it is not survivable in contested skies. It's a big lumbering airplane and if your enemy has a somewhat capable air defense, the B-52 is going to get shot down. This rules out use against countries like Russia and China, or even Iran, at least in first wave strikes. Even relatively simple SA-2 SAMs managed to take out several B-52s in Vietnam.
Its successors all tried to address the survivability issue. The B-1 did it by adding speed and low level flying to the equation, the B-2 by adding stealth.
Luckily, most of the US' conflicts since the Vietnam war have been with adversaries that are not technologically advanced, so the B-52 is still highly useful.
It has this in common with the A-10 by the way, very useful plane in the current context, but not usable against an adversary with an actual air defence system.
When they use technology for technology's sake.
Ironically, captcha was breaking...
"...The $2 billion B-2 Spirit, introduced a decade later, had stealth technology so delicate that it could not go into the rain."
I know someone who works with the B-2 Spirit bombers, and he confirms this. If it's more than a drizzle, they don't fly them (they won't even take them out of the hangar). Thank goodness our enemies would never attack us while it's raining.
And don't even get me started on the F-35, also known as the "Little Plane That Can't". Can't fly, can't dogfight, can't turn, and can't land. Can't start the engine or takeoff if it's too hot or too cold, can't fly in the rain, can't shoot its gun twice in a row without jamming. As someone in the know once said, "It's like a $148 million garbage disposal for money." And that's the budget model, the Navy version (the F-35C) costs a staggering $337 million each.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
It's interesting to compare this with the C-130 which first flew a little later, 1954, and is still being built. The time interval over which they have been building them is longer than the time interval between the Wright Brothers, and the first C-130 flight.
This gives rise to the interesting thought that in certain niche areas (dropping insanely huge numbers of bombs, landing 10 tons of cargo on a remote dirt airstrip) we have reached "peak aeroplane" and did so decades ago. Essentially, spending a huge wodge of money on a clean sheet design to do those jobs will never result in benefits that justify the cost. Far better just to tweak the designs we have with a few incremental improvements.
Civil aircraft don't seem to have reached peak as there are still improvements (in running cost) to be made, which justify new designs. "The average amount of energy consumed per mile, per passenger, fell by 74% on domestic flights in America between 1970 and 2010", according to The Economist. But presumably that will also eventually peak out in the future, eventually making brand-new civil designs pointless.
I was reading about the B-52 some time ago and came across this gem:
"The B-52 has the power of 8 locomotives, 10 miles of wire, and enough metal to make 10,000 trash cans. That's exactly how it flies, like 8 locomotives pulling 10,000 trash cans with 10 miles of wire."
The summary is highly misleading. In fact, while the B-1 or B-2 may have been thought of as a possible replacement at one time, it was decided to only make a few of each and use their unique capabilities.
The B-2 has come in very handy and can do things the B-52 cannot. It can't replace the B-52, but having a plane that is all but invisible in clear non-rainy skies is still a big advantage.
Same wth the B-1. It's high-speed down-low flying makes it a good nuclear deterrent va the slow, lumbering B-52.
When we were fighting the Soviets in the cold war, the cost of the B-2 didn't mean as much. Trying to bomb a country that could have SAMs hidden in every patch of rock meant that B-2s had a much higher survivability rate for each mission. Who cares if it costs 10 times as much to maintain each B-2 (actually closer to 2x) if 20 times as many B-52s would get shot down during missions.
Today we have pretty strong air dominance in most any mission a bomber will be involved in and hostile countries have a fraction the number of SAMs available. When maintenance cost is priority over survivability, high tech loses out.
The B-1 is also an interesting case. With the ability to loiter for a long time on site at low speed and then dash to a target at supersonic speed. This provides an amazing ground support capacity that the B-52 can't match. On top of that, the B-1 actually costs less than the B-52 to operate: http://www.realcleardefense.co...
It kind of makes me wonder who designs those shitty replacements.
Typically a a large group of people who doesn't have to do the actual work but only needs to suggest neat features.
How does a design for a plane that can't fly in the rain even make it to a production stage?
Not a problem if it is supposed to fly over the rain.
Why did they change from a rugged, can fly any time, airplane to something that needs a day of maintenance for every hour of flight?
The scenario changed from needing to win a war against a capable opponent to a situation where you need to look as if you actually is useful while engaging non-threats.
I recently saw B-52s doing some approaches to an airport in my town and they are wonderful to observe, hear, and feel the power they project. They roar robustly and made me glad we are on the same side.
Aside from the "because military contractors" excuse, I suspect that the very dumb, durable, reliability of the B-52 may actually contribute to a dysfunctional replacement-selection process:
Since the B-52, while old enough that it could almost certainly be done better with newer engines, more lightweight composites, and whatnot, does what it does fairly well; which means that any bid of the form "Well, build basically the same aircraft; but with contemporary technology where applicable" will immediately be compared with proposals to just do more maintenance and some incremental system upgrades to the planes we already have.
Any bids of the "zOMG, radical new bomber with sexy low-radar-signature geometry and stuff!" flavor, by contrast, aren't as vulnerable to "Or we could just upgrade the engines at markedly lower cost and within a much shorter and more reliable timeframe..." objections.
In fairness to the "zOMG radical new bomber!" proposals, one of the reasons that the B-52 has remained in service so long is that it can be used to air-launch cruise missiles against targets that might actually have AA capabilities; and many of our wars largely involve pounding on hapless opponents who simply lack the means to shoot down anything other than low-flying helicopters, so its probably-dismal survivability against remotely competent air defenses hasn't been a serious issue. This probably also complicates the bidding for a replacement: If you decided to admit that "Yeah, this thing isn't supposed to go near actual air defenses, it's either a missile boat or for beating down soft targets", you could probably have the B-52++ sketched out relatively quickly. If you want similar payload; but in an aircraft that can actually survive hostile environments, it's much less clear exactly how you can do that. B-1s and B-2s are totally sci-fi; but I'd hate to imagine what building an aircraft like that on a scale large enough to match a B-52 would cost.
Nuclear deterrent? With nuclear subs and ICBMS?? Please stop. The Gulf War clearly showed that stealth technology was clearly not needed.
Really? "Design flaws and engine fires sidelined the plane during the Persian Gulf war and have limited its capabilities since." http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12...
The A-10 Warthog is more valuable.
When you're fighting enemies that uses equipment at least 3 generations older than yours, stealth is not your concern.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There is one huge advantage of old technology over new one: Repairs. As any military mechanic will tell you, you're SOL with new technology and no spare parts. You NEED the correct spare for the job, you may be able to salvage one from another plane of exactly the same spec, but even that's not a given. You cannot simply "patch" it. The old joke about beer cans being used to fix leaking fuel lines was originally no joke. You could actually do that. Couldn't for the longest time now, but there were still a few things you could do without necessarily having exactly the right spare parts.
Not with any modern jet, tank or other vehicle. And I'm not even talking about anything complex like avionics or electronics. Something as simple as a hole in the wrong section of the fuselage without you having the correct part to replace it grounds the plane.
This is of course not a problem for an army with a logistic that overshadows its actual fighting staff. And bluntly, with the US military I often get the idea that the whole intent is to make it as un-repairable as possible to maximize profits for replacements. Well, you have to somehow, it's not like many of those planes are lost in a battle against an enemy that is essentially unable to put a dent into those birds. But that can be very relevant for an army that actually has to fight without more logistic staff than fighting staff. Being able to repair your weapons with minimal equipment is key to many armies on this planet.
There's a reason Russian weapons technology is prized. Yes, it's ugly, yes, it's rather low tech, yes it's sometimes unreliable and less accurate under most circumstances. But it works in ANY terrain, ANY climate condition and most of all, can be kept operational with an absolute minimum of repair equipment and skill.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Just who in the hell do you think ran ahead of the bomb trucks and took out all the SAM emplacements?
F117s. Yes an apache flight took some I that famous vid, clearing a path for the tank rush and its CAS, but the majority, especially around Bagdad, were taken out by the F117.
Then we got a repeat of that during the 2nd Gulf War when, once again when taking Bagdad, stealths flew in ahead and once again took out the SAMs and other defenses ahead of the main push, this time being done by the B2.
Don't know about the B1 being lower cost.
It's rather famous in the maintainer community for requiring the most maintenance man hours per flight hour of any piece of equipment in the inventory, needing something like 140 manhours of work per flight hour.
It's great that we're able to appreciate old, reliable (or "reliable enough"), working designs that persist in physical space. It's too bad upstarts (no pun intended) don't take this lesson and apply it to other types of technology engineering too.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
The B-52 did not "[drop] the first hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Islands in 1956" as the summary states. The first hydrogen bomb was much too heavy to fly, resembling a locomotive in size and weight. "Ivy Mike" was the first hydrogen bomb tested, detonated by the United States at Enewetak Atoll on November 1, 1952. It weighed 80 tons and yielded about 10 megatons.
While the armchair pundits were pontificating, the Reap replaced the A-10. We're flying a lot more reap hours and shooting a lot more from reaps. Endurance wins; I've got to go hit the tanker every 2 hours and I'm done after about 6 in the airplane. The reap guys swap out and stay on station for 20+ hours.
The B-52 is great at bombing people back into the stone age, so long as the people were not that advanced to begin with (i.e. as long as the people can't really shoot back). This was evident even back in the Vietnam war.
Want to bomb some insurgents in south Vietnam who don't have surface to air misses or fighter aircraft? No problem.
Want to bomb north Vietnam, which has some fighters and reasonably good surface to air missiles? Danger!
For example, look at operation Linebacker II, the American bombing campaign that "ended" the Vietnam War. The US used 207 B-52s, which flew 741 sorties during the operation. The North Vietnamize had 14 S-75 missile batteries distributed over their whole country. The S-75 design was about 15 years, so not super high tech even at the time. (The USSR had newer missilea, but they didn't give them to North Vietnam.) These 14 missile batteries shot down 15 B-52s. Granted, that's only a 2% loss rate per sortie, but imagine if North Vietnam had more than 14 missile batteries! Imagine that the missile batteries used modern technology rather than 1950s technology. The B52-s would be mincemeat even with more modern countermeasures. If the B-52 had a 2% loss rate in Iraq or Afghanistan, you would not be seeing the above headline.
That's the fundamental issue with the B-52. It's not a threat to a modern and competent foe like China or even Russia. Iran just bought a bunch of modern surface to air missiles (with a ~250 mile range) from Russia, so who knows how B-52s would fare in Iran.
Short version: The B-52 is great against people who wield AK-47s and drive around in Toyota pickup trucks. It's not clear how useful the B-52 is against a reasonably modern and competent military. I should add, rightly or wrongly, that is the logic for why the air force wants to ditch its A-10s, which fly at lower altitudes than the B-52 and are thus more vulnerable to man-portable surface to air missiles.
ummm, wasn't the 'overcast' the B-36?
I'm still trying to figure out what the "replacement's replacement's replacement" mentioned in the article is. Did they maybe count the F-111 in there? That's a strategic bomber... it wasn't even close to an intended replacement.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
From the article I referenced. I can't really judge which article is more accurate.
"Aside from its less controversial presence, the B-1 has a number of other advantages over its B-2 and B-52 counterparts. Its internal payload capacity is the highest at 75,000 pounds, which is 5,000 more than the B-52 and 25,000 more than the B-2. Reaching Mach 1.2, it is the only supersonic heavy bomber the U.S. possesses. It is also the cheapest to fly at $63,000 per hour of flight, compared with $72,000 for the B-52 and $135,000 for the B-2. Furthermore, as a testament to its preference among U.S. commanders, from October 2001 to September 2012 the B-1 flew 10,940 combat sorties over Iraq and Afghanistan versus the B-52's 2,891 and the B-2's 69. In fact, the B-1 dropped 40 percent of the bomb tonnage in the first six months of the war in Afghanistan, and, by 2012, had released 60 percent of the weapons overall. Now, it is carrying out a similar mission in Iraq."
My understanding is when the B-1 was first produced its reliability was abysmal. This was improved in more recent models, making it a very valuable asset. Though I don't have any articles to support this beyond the somewhat support from the quote above.
I wasn't comparing the B-1 to the A-10, but to the B-52. The A-10 is far and above the better aircraft for vehicle killing and small building destruction in my opinion. Where I can see the B-1 shining is taking out larger buildings and vehicle formations (though even formations I think the A-10 has nearly as good a capability). Also the B-1 can be on site faster, if likely less precise.
The B52 resilience is to die is surpassed only by the resilience of brass to fund pet projects for their cronies of the military-industrial complex that sucks the life out of nations, including its host.
...and fly the plane your father flew, they used to say.
Now, it's "fly the plane your grandfather flew".
Pretty soon, it'll be great-grandfather.
I'd hate to imagine what building an aircraft like that on a scale large enough to match a B-52 would cost.
Your entire post is spot on, but I would add that if we ever did have to fight a war against "remotely competent air defenses," we are probably talking about a major war. In that case, it is not unreasonable to expect a major mobilization of huge parts of the economy, including, say, reallocating nearly all civilian engineers to work on military projects, as was done during WWII. In that case, it is acceptable that we didn't invest in more modern technology before such a war, because the B-52 replacement will be designed to deal with a specific threat in mind, instead of trying to worry about the Chinese, and the Russians, and the Indians, and the Germans, and the British, and the French, and whoever else could field serious air defenses in the near future. Sometimes, it is better *for the military* to leave resources under civilian control unless and until it is absolutely necessary.
It's a sweep wing, maintenance costs will be high. Without its enormous payload there would be absolutely no reason to prefer it over a "multi role fighter turned bomber"
...be designed in an era where attack capability and reliability -did not- take a back seat to lining the pockets of campaign donors.
The Gulf War clearly showed that stealth technology was clearly not needed.
Not needed after they went in the first night and blew up all the radar stations and C&C you mean.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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Hmm... Not sure if serious? I encourage you to look at what happened in the Gulf War, specifically with stealth-capable aircraft. It came in quite handy and may well have saved a bunch of lives and expensive equipment. More than once they were firing up at an unseen enemy because things mysteriously we blowing up around them.
Having one tool is generally a bad idea unless you need to accomplish a very uncomplicated thing. We probably could have used a B-52, lost a few, and obliterated whole cities if we wanted to. Since the days of Total War, ala WWII or, perhaps, Korea, that's generally frowned upon as certain people get their knickers in a wad when you're killing scads of innocent civilians.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The Spoon: The utensil that refuses to die
It could fly in the rain. It's just the wet wing surface no longer made it stealthy. Having a radar jamming system that jammed it's own radar system is probably due to the sensitivity of the radar system.
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In other words, design attribute prioritization is wrong on those following planes. The aerospace engineers should look for help in the software engineering field for this problem (hides, ducks, jumps into a pool of flame retardant). Politics fucks up every engineering project in every field.
Just who in the hell do you think ran ahead of the bomb trucks and took out all the SAM emplacements?
F117s. Yes an apache flight took some I that famous vid, clearing a path for the tank rush and its CAS, but the majority, especially around Bagdad, were taken out by the F117.
Then we got a repeat of that during the 2nd Gulf War when, once again when taking Bagdad, stealths flew in ahead and once again took out the SAMs and other defenses ahead of the main push, this time being done by the B2.
While we're on the topic of old-timers that refuse to die, don't forget to mention the Phantom F4-G SEAD missions in the first Gulf war.
It took out about 3/4 of the radar sites destroyed.
http://www.defensemedianetwork...
We've got a pretty decent system, I think.
The B-2 is expensive to maintain in large numbers and doesn't have the giant payload. Thanks okay, we don't need a lot, nor does it need to carry what a B-52 does. It's job is mostly to knock out air defense. Once the radar, launchers, and C&C are offline, B-52s can do whatever they want with impunity.
This touches on most of the reasoning but leaves out the most obvious thing: the B-52 is as close to the "ideal" for a subsonic bomb truck that we've been able to come up with.
Look, we need different types and numbers of aircraft for any given military engagement. They should be:
1. A small, elite force of the best stealth and precision-targeting weapons we can muster as a nation, flown by the most rigidly-trained men and women our nation has to offer. These forces lead the initial attack, destroying command and control facilities, air defenses, air bases, and logistics. Given our huge lead in these areas of technology over our hypothetical foes, these missions should have a very high success rate and low attrition rate.
2. Once the enemy air force and air defenses have been beaten down, the value of stealth is greatly diminished. At this point we're far better served by cheaper, less maintenance-intensive forces like a B-52 or A-10. Their ruggedness and numbers make them ideal for this lower-threat environment where stealthy options would be too expensive to maintain and too valuable to lose in a protracted fight.
3. When all major targets are bombed into oblivion by the forces in item #2, you need to keep a constant presence around to deter regrowth. But things like B-52's are expensive to keep flying around waiting on something to bomb. Far better to spend money on armed drones which can orbit for a full day, out of sight, waiting to deliver a "bolt from the blue" when a bad guy steps outside for a piss. All the destructive power of a precision-guided munition married to the omnipresent terror of a sniper in an unknown and unreachable location.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The B-17 was the first to earn that moniker. I've seen that monster fly over our neighborhood a couple of times. Once you see it fly over you'll know why they called it Aluminum Overcast. You never forget how those big engines sound.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
They had Wild Weasels (and other methods to suppress air defense) in Vietnam too, but that clearly didn't stop B-52s from being shot down. Heck, the North vietnamese only had *14* surface to air missile batteries, and the US was clearly unable to knock them all out.
As with all things, we have an arms race. Air defense suppression techniques have got better, but so have air defenses. Unless advances in supression techniques have far outsripped advances in air defense (unlikely), we're in the same boat and B-52s will be shot down when facing a modern military.
Why is it that some AC's feel like they should always add to the text of their comment whatever they had to type for the captcha that was required to submit the post? The above is an extreme example of this where the AC actually made a separate post just to announce what their captcha was. I'm asking sincerely... is there actually a real demographic of people out there that actually give anything more than two-tenths of a shit what captcha word somebody else had to type?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The US tried the same method in Vietnam, and look what happened. Just to reiterate, the North vietnamese only had *14* surface to air missile batteries capable of hitting B-52s, and the US was clearly unable to knock them all out. B-52s will be shot down when facing a modern military. Period.
It's not clear that the B-52 was much used for its original design purpose either. The B-52 was introduced in 1955 and the S-75 was introduced in 1957. The USSR also had a lot more fighter aircraft that North Vietnam. The bombers will not always get through, and it's not clear that enough B-52s would reach their targets to be effective. There's a reason the US moved its nuclear focus to ballistic missiles.
Example video here. Wait, no ... even models of B52s sound amazing!
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I disagree with that sentiment. You don't just pop out new equipment on a short time frame to meet a current threat. You start a war with what you have and hope that you can hold your own until the projects that you started before the war can be finished.
That idea may have worked out in the relatively lazy days of WWII, but even that is an aversion. Most of the best projects that were designed for WWII like your Tigers and your P-51 Mustangs were the result of programs that had started before the war, and in fullest anticipation of an upcoming major war with a known enemy. And they still took a couple of years to be produced, even with their programs working in overdrive on a Total War footing.
That's not going to happen today. Even a major war in the present time is going to take a lot less time than you think. While it could bog down into insurgencies after the main battle, the clash of modern armies will be very brief. Iraq was run over twice, very quickly, and Iraq had a large, battle tested army in the first Gulf War to boot. While it was no Soviet Union, it did have some first line equipment for the time.
Also, modern equipment takes longer to research and produce. What is really going to happen is that we manage to improve what we have already.
However, if we only have B-52s to improve, then we're screwed because a B-52 isn't ever going to be able to do much more than it is doing now which is release lots of cruise missiles under cover of complete air superiority. There's no point in improving a B-52, it's doing about as well as it is going to do. The real advantage will come from wartime experience which improves platforms like the F-35 which are underwhelming, but have considerable room for improvement.
Standoff weapons would probably help, but given air defense systems with a 250 mi range (like the S-300s Iran bought), the B-52s would have to stay pretty far away, and fighter aircraft could still be a problem.
I think that launching standoff weapons from a stealthy ship makes more sense (unless the target is too far from shore). There's a reason the USN is ripping out the ICBM tubes from some submarines and replacing them with the capacity to launch up to 154 cruise missiles.
Most of the best projects that were designed for WWII like your Tigers and your P-51 Mustangs were the result of programs that had started before the war
Germany was already on the kind of "full mobilization for war" footing that I am talking about in the mid 30's, in violation of the treaty of Versailles. They were sending plenty of materiel to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and were taking over territory by 1938. So while America entered the war in 1941, Germany had already been going through a military buildup for about 5 years, and advances like the Tiger tank were designed and produced while the German economy was fully mobilized for war.
Interestingly, even though the P51 is seen as a piece of quintessentially American tech of WWII, its initial development was done at the impetus of the British with British funding. So even though it was developed while America was still at peace (and technically neutral), the resources that produced it came from Britain, which because of its proximity to Germany, had established a war footing much earlier than the US did.
Good Stuff talking about a Deadbeat club...
One word:
Rock Lobster.
And while you're at it, another aircraft they keep trying to kill off and just won't go is the A-10. Ya gotta love a flying tank whose sole mission is ground support. And then there's the AC-130!
"Ya gotta" ABSOLUTELY HATE ANY AIRCRAFT "whose sole mission is ground support " if you are an Air Marshal who has no job unless they're doing strategic bombing. Fixed that for you.
Close-air support hands over an AF asset to some Army(!!) lieutenant to boss around with a walkie-talkie. That's why the AF has been trying to kill it for decades.
what was most amazing about this story, is that it took a few folks - the right folks - to make this happen. It was just the right guys, right time type of thing. Had they just hung out (by the pool ? in Cleveland ? ) that weekend, it's likely this story wouldn't have been.
Don't ya just love self-serving politics?
Um, that's the whole point of non-SAC mission aircraft honestly, either Navy or Airforce. Once you've eliminated the few hard targets or someone's laughable air force, you are supporting the boots on the ground. If you are an air marshal and bitching about some Army or Marine butterbar "bossing" you around on the radio, you shouldn't be an air marshal.
we didn't have weapons that could take out those *14* missile batteries. We had dumb bombs
No, the US had the AGM-78, which was a second-generation anti-radiation missile (i.e. a missile that homes in on radar emitters). By the time of Operation Linebacker I & II, the US had guided ordnance that was recognizably modern (e.g. laser guided bombs) and were used to great effect (example).
OTOH, we have bombed other countries since Vietnam that did have modern air defenses... Balkans
As far as I can tell, the Serbian milatary was using S-125 surface to air missiles. The S-125 dates to 1961, so it's barely more modern than the S-75 used in Vietnam. It looks like Iraq was using S-125s too along with the slightly newer 2K12, which dates to 1970.
So no, we haven't bombed a single country with modern air defenses since at least the Korean war. The closest we got was in Vietnam. In Serbia it was a 38-year-old-system. In the Gulf war it was a 21-year-old system.
The A-10 is a well-designed, rugged plane. However, putting the engines back there doesn't make the plane invincible. A-10s have been shot down by surface-to-air missiles in the past, and missile designs are only improving while the A-10 is staying the same.
I'm not agreeing with the air force that we should get rid of the A-10s, but there's a fair amount of myth that surrounds the aircraft, and not all the myths are true. If the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan had man-portable surface-to-air missiles and knew how to use them, then there would be A-10 losses. Probably not a lot, but it might dispel the notion that the A-10s are magically invincible.
It looks like the Serbs also had 2K12s, in which case their air defense system had components that were only 29 years old.
It's the whole military industrial complex coupled with DARPA and you get what we paid for.
The B1-B has a part manufactured in every congressional district in the US.
Talk about non-partisan teamwork!!!!!
Or as Dr. Gwynne Dyer put it over 40 years ago, "The next war is a come-as-you-are war". It isn't just that nobody would be able to invent a new type of weapon during the course of it; they couldn't manufacture a single copy of any weapon. In WW2, it was a battle of factories: could we build tanks and planes faster than they could? Faster than they could shoot ours down?
Dr. Dyer pointed out that the next war is very unlikely to exceed 30 days duration, much less the 30 months needed to put out a single tank or plane these days.
Military brass get sensitive about anything alters their mission and fiefdoms. Its all about budgets and who owns how much of the pie.
That idea may have worked out in the relatively lazy days of WWII, but even that is an aversion. Most of the best projects that were designed for WWII like your Tigers and your P-51 Mustangs were the result of programs that had started before the war, and in fullest anticipation of an upcoming major war with a known enemy. And they still took a couple of years to be produced, even with their programs working in overdrive on a Total War footing.
Lazy?? They were popping out one B-24 EVERY HOUR AND A HALF at one point during WW II...
And they were constantly popping out new variants of aircraft throughout the war, too, just as fast as they could figure out the improvements.
except that the B-1 doesn't carry nukes anymore. :(
This reminds me of some software which my company relies on which STILL is in operation almost 20 years later, having survived at least 3 separate attempts to be replaced.
It is clear to me now that the discipline of engineering does indeed lead eventually to 'near-optimal' solutions, and that organizations have to recognize when they have achieved that. This is something that most organizations fail miserably at, for many reasons. But one reason is perfectly clear to me: if you don't talk to the people who have hands on experience with the hardware or software, then the automatic assumption seems to be that it can be replaced with something better.
I see the same thing happening with programming languages as well. We are at 'near-optimal' in at least 4-5 languages, and yet I continually see proposed replacements for them, with no good reason.
Yes, B-52's exist in a niche environment which happens to right now be the predominant need (combat against foes without good AA support). Frankly, if I was the military, I would be concentrating on building airplanes that can make that niche happen. IE: Build something to take out the AA support of your foes, so that you can then send the B-52's in to annihilate them after. Stealth fighters, cruise missiles, and better satellite intel could fit that role.
If there ever was a major war, the remaining civilian engineers would be busy trying to rebuild cities from nuclear blasts. Given the time frame for development of new weapons systems, the war would be over before the designs were finished.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Yay! The US is buying 5000 silver bullets! Nothing could possibly go wrong!
True, but I am assuming that somehow we are restricted to a conventional war. Otherwise, this whole debate about the quality of your bomber force versus air defenses is made moot by ICBM's.
I corrected my comment about "distributed over the entire country" two minutes after I first posted.
The fact that 750 missiles were used to bring down 15 aircraft is interesting, but it doesn't change my conclusions. 15 planes is still 15 planes, and the missile system was a couple generations old at the time. See guestapoo's post (above) about how the missile systems were operated to avoid detection. If true, it's a knock on the B-52 that the north vietnamese hit a single B-52. A newer missile system could have made a world of difference.
B-52s did a fair amount of carpet bombing in Afghanistan not too long ago. The airforce definitely still practes carpet bombing, so it's not a bygone tactic that has been totally replaced by standoff weapons. (Yes, JDAMs aren't quite dumb bombs, but they sure aren't standoff weapons either.)
I agree that standoff weapons with a long enough range would help the B-52 stay out of harms way, but the US already has plenty of systems that can shoot standoff weapons: specially modified subs, regular subs, surface ships, other aircraft, and ground vehicles. Of those options, the B-52 is one of the least stealthy; China, Russia, etc. would sure see them coming.
I still don't see a good use for a B-52 against a modern military.
If the improvements in fuel economy of civilian airliners are anything to go by, we could probably build a somewhat better B-52 today(either longer range, larger payload, or some combination of the two); but it would be a sufficiently modest and incremental improvement that the cost and uncertainty of a new development project would be a really hard sell compared to incrementally worse performance; but markedly lower project management risk, through repairs and incremental upgrades of the aircraft we already have.
It doesn't have to be, and probably isn't, the best possible implementation; but it is a good enough implementation that the airframes are really going to have to be falling apart before "Yeah, basically a B-52 but with more carbon fiber" is something you'd be willing to risk development hell on. Even with the substantially larger production numbers of airliners, the current generation improved fuel efficiency models had some serious teething issues; and similar problems would really blow up the unit cost of a smaller production run.
"Ya gotta" ABSOLUTELY HATE ANY AIRCRAFT "whose sole mission is ground support " if you are an Air Marshal who has no job unless they're doing strategic bombing. Fixed that for you.
Close-air support hands over an AF asset to some Army(!!) lieutenant to boss around with a walkie-talkie. That's why the AF has been trying to kill it for decades.
Which is why I think the A-10 program should just be transferred from the Air Force to the Army by an act of Congress, and the Air Force told to shut the hell up. The Army will always need close air support. The A-10 is really really good at it. The Army should just fly it themselves.
It would be nice to stop bragging about war capacity against Russia and China.
USA, Russia and China are all nuclear powers, which means a war involving them cannot only have losers. Please think about diplomacy instead.
When they use technology for technology's sake.
Soon we'll be seeing 3D printed warplanes.
And everyone on slashdot will say it's a great idea until they take them out to Syria and they melt in the heat.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
It's not that the designs are shitty. They are just meeting the requirements they are given. And as planes have gotten more advanced they have required more maintenance between flights. Also much of the maintenance that is being done is preventative. During a war much of it could be put off.
I can find you lots of experts who said the next war couldn't last more than a few months, certainly not a year, in 1913 and 1914. After that, they anticipated that the economies of the belligerents would fall apart.
If the next war doesn't involve nukes (much as WWII was fought with darn few chemical weapons), it could last a lot longer than people think.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I assumed they were also counting the XB-70 Valkyrie which was the next generation bomber that was intended to replace the B-52, but never made it past the prototype stage.
If memory serves, we got really lucky on chemical weapons in WWII. Pesticide research had just started to stumble onto the potential of organophosphate nerve agents when things heated up. Luckily the allies were not yet fully aware of the potential of their research; and the axis, based on published patents and research papers, thought that the allies were further along than they in fact were, and feared retaliation. V-2s full of Sarin would not have improved the situation.
things that don't don't.
Decades Ive heard the refrain "there's no need for bombers in the modern world" yet time and time again, the mere existence of bombers has proved this wrong on the world stage.
"Fighters are fun but bombers make policy".
As far as I can tell, chemical weapons were only used in WWII when there was no possibility of retaliation.
While the Allies didn't have Sarin, they had large quantities of other chemical agents, primarily mustard gas. They had the means to put it where they wanted. Finally, the Western Allies did not depend on horses, and the Germans did. You can put protective clothing on a horse, but you won't get any work out of it. p. So, Allied retaliation would have killed horses, destroying the mobility of everything but the Panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions. It would have effectively destroyed German industry (machine tools can take a lot of bombing, but decontaminating them is difficult). V-2s with Sarin would have caused Germany a great deal more harm than it would have caused the Brits.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Perhaps a bad way of putting it. They worked very hard at production, but the pace of the war itself was pokey. War was intense, but a lot slower paced than a modern war. A four year war in the 40's against an enemy at parity would probably be over in a few months today.
Popping out an already designed B-24 isn't want I'm talking about. Certainly your total war production is going to let you produce materiel faster using already researched designs on proven assembly lines. Although I do wonder if the war would even last long enough to bring the factories up to speed in this day and age.
And variants are variants. They aren't new designs. They were using Shermans all the way up to the end, and were able to up-rate their guns and everything, but they were still merely uprated Shermans with all of the other deficiencies of an older Sherman with the exception of the things that got upgraded.
Today, a variant on a bomber would have to be a tweaked B-52 or B-1. You're not going to be able to wait until the war starts to design and then put into full production the XB-3 or whatever unless that plane is already in testing before the war starts.
Old design, rugged, does the job, still in use.
B-52 or AK-47? Both.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
3D printing is not limited to plastic, it can be done with metal as well.
Still, it would be a horrible idea.
The airforce has not been trying to kill off the Warthog, the Pentagon has been. The airforce refuses to let go of it, and have been basically telling the Pentagon to fuck off over this plane for decades.