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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/...
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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.)
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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.
"...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.
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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."
No. Thats not the problem the post is referring to.
The reference you're missing is that the rain actually damages the coating on impact when flying at speed.
So the rain literally damages the stealth capabilities of the aircraft. Make a couple flights in the rain and you'll light up like a blinking christmas tree on radar even on a clear sunny day.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.