{"id":16316,"date":"2012-02-28T01:30:34","date_gmt":"2012-02-28T04:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/?p=16316"},"modified":"2012-02-28T02:45:17","modified_gmt":"2012-02-28T05:45:17","slug":"new-bomber-on-air-force-horizon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/28\/new-bomber-on-air-force-horizon\/","title":{"rendered":"New Bomber on Air Force Horizon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Despite ongoing budget issues, the US Air Force intends to develop and field a new bomber colloiqually known as the Long Range Strike Aircraft.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The Air Force has already set aside $292 million in research dollars for the bomber in their fiscal 2013 budget request. The service plans to spend $6.3 billion into the effort over the next five years. Once developed, the new bomber will replace B-1Bs and B-2s. The new plane will be designed to evade advanced aerial defense systems, employ stealth <!--more-->technologies and carry nuclear weapons.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The Air Force is reportedly targeting a cost of $550 million per aircraft, which <a href=\"http:\/\/defense.aol.com\/2012\/02\/15\/dod-fast-tracks-new-bomber-planning-number-is-550-million-pe\/\">AOL Defense notes<\/a> is<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>a bargain compared to the $2.2 billion per-plane cost of the stealthy B-2, but it dwarfs the $228 million per plane cost of the B-1B&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>While that may be true dollar-for-dollar, it ignores the fact the B-2 would have been cheaper per aircraft if the planned buy had been completed.\u00a0 Had the <a href=\"www.cbo.gov\/doc.cfm?index=7752\">132 planned bombers<\/a> not been cut to 20 (eventually, 21), the substantial sunk development and procurement costs would have been spread across 6 times as many aircraft.\u00a0 While the program cut technically saved money off the total cost of the program, the net effect was to increase the price of each individual aircraft.<\/p>\n<p>The F-22 suffered a similar fate, with program cuts &#8220;driving up&#8221; the cost of each aircraft as the program was cut from the original 650 airframes to 187.\u00a0 In fact, it is likely virtually every aircraft acquisition program has gone through similar cuts, resulting in similar cost-per-aircraft increases, and future programs &#8212; including the F-35 and Long Range Strike Aircraft &#8212; likely will, as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Despite ongoing budget issues, the US Air Force intends to develop and field a new bomber colloiqually known as the Long Range Strike Aircraft. The Air Force has already set aside $292 million in research dollars for the bomber in their fiscal 2013 budget request. The service plans to spend $6.3 billion into the effort over the next five years. [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[134,13,716,2920,343,5285,2918,2,2919],"class_list":["post-16316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fighter-pilot","tag-air-force","tag-aircraft","tag-b-1","tag-b-2","tag-f-22","tag-fighter-pilot","tag-long-range-strike-aircraft","tag-military","tag-new-bomber"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}