DoD undersecretary William LaPlante gave the go-ahead to begin producing B-21 Stealth Bomber. Previously revealed budgets and information indicate that Northrop will get $5.3 to 6 billion in 2024 and there will be a slow escalation of the annual budget. This will be enough for 3 new B-21 each year and then increase to 4-5 bombers per year by 2027. They have already built six B-21s and expect to add 18-24 by 2030 during a 5 year low-rate initial production contract phase.
“Production of the B-21 stealth bomber is moving forward,” DoD undersecretary William LaPlante says in a statement. “This past fall, based on the results of ground and flight tests and the team’s mature plans for manufacturing, I gave the go-ahead to begin producing B-21s.”
— Anthony Capaccio (@ACapaccio) January 22, 2024
The Pentagon had tied award of the program’s low-rate initial production contract to the aircraft’s first flight, which took place in November and has been followed by at least one other test flight at Edwards Air Force Base. Executives at the plane’s maker, Northrop Grumman, have long warned, however, that early production lots might not be profitable for the company due to inflationary impacts.
Northrop warned January, 2023 that a loss of up to $1.2 billion on the LRIP contract is possible. Northrop expects the B-21 to contribute to future growth. This would be the first of five low-rate initial production lots on the B-21.
“We are planning at a zero profitability” on the B-21 for now, Warden said. “But we have to perform, and we are working hard to ensure that plan is what we achieve.”
“As shared by the U.S. Air Force, the Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider has entered low-rate initial production. Our team received the contract award after B-21 entered flight testing within the program baseline schedule. Our production representative test aircraft indicated readiness for production, achieving all flight performance and data requirements,” Northrop Grumman said in a statement.
“As the world’s first six-generation aircraft, B-21 forms the backbone of the future for U.S. air power, delivering a new era of capability and flexibility through advanced integration of data, sensors and weapons, and is rapidly upgradable to outpace evolving threats,” the company added.
FY 2024 Program: Continues Engineering and Manufacturing Development of the B-21. Procurement funds will support the program’s transition to low rate initial production, which includes long lead parts. Additional details are classified.
This will probably support building about 3-4 units per year for the next five years.
The Air Force might have a whole 24 to 30 operational B-21s on a ramp somewhere by 2030. There are six being built now. If there are 24 in 2030 then they built about 3 new ones per year from 2024-2030 and if there 30 in 2030 then they built 4 per year.
Full production in the 2030s would be about 10 per year for 7-10 years.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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We don’t need this. It is an utter waste of money. Cruise missiles/ICBMs work just fine. We could invest in cruise missile manufacturing to bring down unit cost. They should not cost $2 million each. But even so, you can buy 2,000 of them for the cost of one stealth bomber. Those 2,000 cruise missiles will be far more effective than one bomber.
You need a platform like the B-21 to deliver weapons like the B61 which is a nuclear bunker buster. You cannot deliver a nuclear bunker buster via cruise missile or ICBM. At the 400 kiloton setting an earth penetrating B-61 delivers the equivalent amount of energy of a >10 megaton weapon set to “ground burst” (the actual value is classified and likely an order of magnitude higher).
With that sort of energy transfer there is not a command and control bunker on earth that could survive a strike from the United States.
You see all of that money spent on the F-35? I wonder how much of the technology and new fabrication techniques and millions of lines of software coding are being transfered over into our most advanced drones and this new bomber?
I’d argue that any air superiority that the US now possesses is largely a result of the F-35 research efforts…
I think it’s been pretty openly acknowledged that a lot of the technologies that went into the F-35 were transferred over to the B-21. So, yes, the much criticized F-35 program is beginning to pay dividends.