The Pentagon should plan to build 170-plus Long Range Strike – Bomber aircraft rather than the 80-100 in current plans, and should reconsider its $550-million unit cost ceiling for the aircraft, according to a new report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The report’s authors are veteran USAF strategist Lt Gen David Deptula, who retired as the service’s chief of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance programs in 2010, and the CSBA’s Mark Gunzinger.
The Pentagon has set a purely budget-driven limit on the size of the LRS-B force, according to Deptula. “Has anyone heard of a strategy associated with those numbers? There isn’t any,” he said at a briefing on Monday to launch the report. Under the US Air Force’s deployment plans, built around ten numbered air expeditionary forces that can each support a combatant commander, each AEF should have a squadron of 12 combat-coded bombers, translating into a 174-aircraft total inventory, the authors suggest.
Imposing a cost cap could be a false economy, according to the report, if it means that the new bombers “are optimized for today’s threats and missions and have little margin (excess space, weight, power, cooling and low observability characteristics) to adapt over time.” The final cost of such a program may be higher if it has to be prematurely replaced or superseded, the report suggests.
This year’s defense budget disclosed that LRS-B research and development was funded at $358 million in FY2014 (the number was previously secret) and will be $931 million in FY2015, rising to $1.59 billion in 2016 and $2.37 billion the following year. The program is set to cost $11.4 billion over the current future years defense program, up to 2019.