Scratch one stealth bomber.
The US Air Force has decided not to repair a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber – one of just 21 of the radar-evading bat-wing warplanes that Northrop Grumman built in the 1980s and 1990s – that was damaged in a landing accident at the Missouri base of the 2nd Bomb Wing in December 2022.
The multi-billion-dollar write-off reduces the B-2 fleet to just 19 bombers. Another one of the two-person warplanes – each of which cost $2 billion – crashed and burned in Guam in 2008.
The timing couldn’t be worse for the world’s biggest air arm. The Air Force is struggling to position its squadrons for a possible war with China, one that would rage over the vast expanse of the western Pacific Ocean, where American bases – or bases the Americans can borrow from their allies – are few and far between.
That dearth of bases – and the vulnerability of what few bases do exist in the region – has compelled the US Air Force to lean more heavily on its bomber fleet, which also includes 45 swing-wing supersonic B-1s and 76 upgraded B-52s.
The plan is for the bombers to launch from the continental United States, the island territory of Guam and potentially the big American bomber base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and fly thousands of miles in order to launch cruise missiles at Chinese forces.
The bombers’ long range and heavy payload allow them to bring to bear massive firepower while also avoiding the Chinese ballistic missiles that threaten to render America’s bases in the western Pacific unusable during wartime.
It’s hard to overstate how important bombers are to US war plans. One 2023 war game organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC found that USAF bombers working in conjunction with US Navy submarines could blunt a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
But there are just 140 bombers in the USAF inventory. Each one is a precious resource until new B-21 stealth bombers roll off the Northrop production line in large numbers later this decade. The $600-million-apiece B-21s will replace the B-2s and B-1s and fly alongside B-52s that are undergoing their third or fourth major upgrade since entering service in the 1960s.
The Air Force is so keen to maintain its bomber fleet that, when separate B-52s crashed in Guam in 2008 and 2016, the service spent millions of dollars and devoted years of effort taking two old B-52s out of the boneyard and back to flightworthiness in order to restore the 76-plane inventory.
And when a B-1 suffered a catastrophic engine fire in Texas in 2022, the Air Force replaced that bomber, too – by restoring a boneyard B-1 at a cost of tens of millions of dollars.
But the situation with that damaged B-2 is different. There were never enough B-2s that any were retired to the boneyard, so refurbishing an old one isn’t an option. A B-2 gets its stealth qualities from its shape and from the delicate radar-absorbing coatings that cover its entire structure. Routine maintenance on a B-2 is difficult and expensive. Major repairs from a serious fire are even more difficult and expensive – and could take years.
The Air Force reasoned that, by the time it fixed the crashed B-2, there would be enough new B-21s on the tarmac to render the repaired bomber redundant. In a recent budget document, the Air Force described the damaged bomber as “uneconomical to repair,” and noted that not fixing the bomber would also result in $200 million in savings on fuel, parts and personnel – money the service presumably could spend on the B-21 program, instead.
Still, the B-2 accident leaves the Air Force one bomber short. And it underscores just how few B-2s there are – and how fragile the Missouri-based 509th Bomb Wing is. One of the wing’s B-2s is undergoing lengthy repairs following a 2021 landing accident. Another is dedicated to testing and others are tied up in routine deep maintenance.
It’s not for no reason that, when the 509th conducted a mass launch of every available B-2 in April, just a dozen of the bombers took off. That’s actually an impressive performance for the wing. A previous group launch in 2022 saw a mere eight B-2s take to the air.
For a wing that’s lucky to get a dozen planes into the air, losing one of them is a problem. A problem the Air Force has decided it can’t solve until a totally new bomber type replaces the ultra-expensive B-2 years from now.
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