The US Air Force has awarded Northrop Grumman the contract for the next-generation Long Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B), the largest aircraft procurement since the F-35 roughly 15 years ago. In his just published piece, Codirector of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies Thomas Donnelly weighs in:
In shaping the B-3 project, the Air Force has been ostentatiously conservative in formulating requirements for the aircraft. …The most difficult of those is likely to prove the challenge of keeping to the projected $550 million-per-copy price tag, a task made increasingly difficult by the constant reductions and unpredictability of defense budgets. Moreover, the Air Force hopes to use streamlined and accelerated procurement rules to field the B-3 in a timely way. That’s a wonderful idea, but one which swims against a 50-year tide of centralization and sclerosis in the Defense Department, the executive branch writ large, and the Congress. America’s new bomber might have the ability to defeat Chinese, Russian, and Iranian air defenses, but it remains to be seen whether it can defeat the American defense bureaucracy.
Read the full piece here: Buying the bomber: Now comes the hard part.
For more on the B-3 bomber, read “Buying the B-3: Procurement reform and the Long Range Strike Bomber.”
To request an interview with Thomas Donnelly, please contact Meg Cahill at meg.cahill@aei.org (202.862.7155) or AEI media services at mediaservices@aei.org (202-862-5829).
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