Pentagon debuts its new stealth bomber, the B-21 Raider | Hacker News Reader

Pentagon debuts its new stealth bomber, the B-21 Raider

apnews.com

The military always keeps the real game changing stuff under wraps for strategic purposes. The very public parading of this plane, along with other "cutting edge" planes like the F35, makes me think that manned airplanes are already obsolete. It's been perfectly obvious for a while that unmanned aerial vehicles have the potential to be greatly superior - the lack of life support requirements alone creates an enormous amount of possibilities for maneuverability and observability. Highly recommend checking out the following article for more details on this: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/3889/the-alarming-case...

Nevertheless I have to imagine there are serious barriers to putting an actual nuclear bomb on an unmanned aircraft. Just as our nuclear missile silos are still manned, you want a human(s) at the button as close to the bomb as possible, to avoid accidents resulting from errant, erratic or unexpected behavior, or to be able to clean up after them before they lead to the apocalypse.

Imagine if an unmanned bomber was sent on a mission and you lost contact. There was a movie (Fail Safe) about a manned bomber that happened to and it was scary enough

We have technology to address the problem in that Fail Safe movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_action_link

And that's one reason manned bombers are a very important part of the nuclear triad, they can be launched "on warning" and sent the codes to arm their bombs and missiles later.

> The very public parading of this plane

My thinking was maybe they are building public support to effectively cover any budget surprises later on. Especially since we know there are big concerns about the budget.

And, I'm not sure this isn't a modular platform, where manual control / remote is concerned.

> Other changes likely include advanced materials used in coatings to make the bomber harder to detect, new ways to control electronic emissions, so the bomber could spoof adversary radars and disguise itself as another object, and use of new propulsion technologies, several defense analysts said.

> “When we talk about low observability, it is incredibly low observability,” Warden said. “You’ll hear it, but you really won’t see it.”

> Six B-21 Raiders are in production. The Air Force plans to build 100 that can deploy either nuclear weapons or conventional bombs and can be used with or without a human crew. Both the Air Force and Northrop also point to the Raider’s relatively quick development: The bomber went from contract award to debut in seven years. Other new fighter and ship programs have taken decades.

> The fact that the price is not public troubles government watchdogs.

> The Raider will not make its first flight until 2023. However, using advanced computing, Warden said, Northrop Grumman has been testing the Raider’s performance using a digital twin, a virtual replica of the one being unveiled.

> The new Raider will also get new hangars, to accommodate the size and complexity of the bomber

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