US Air Force unveils new B-21 Raider nuclear stealth bomber | Hacker News Reader

US Air Force unveils new B-21 Raider nuclear stealth bomber

bbc.com

13 pointsmarban9 comments

I'm surprised the B2 was the part the nuclear triad the military decided to update. Using close-up manned bombers for our nuclear capability seems archaic now that intelligent long-range cruise missiles that can be launched out of a Stratofortress way out of enemy range are the norm now. It's not like the B2 itself is outdated either; I know a lot of talk has been made by other countries of radar able to detect them, but like all military propaganda those measurements are always in best conditions. It's great that you can detect stealth craft in a sky clear of clouds, smoke, solar interference, nuclear interference, jammers, or anti-radiation warheads, but war tends to be messier than that.

Overall it seems a better investment would have been to just keep blurring the line between missile and drone and creating a reaper/tomahawk/hypersonic hybrid that can accept aerial refueling. Having a missile that can patrol around in the sky all day before ejecting its cruise stage and making a mad rush towards its eventual target seems a lot more versatile in general than continuing development in planes who's only purpose is to drop things.

There's nuclear deterrence and there's conventional deterrence. ICBMs and SLBMs are very good at nuclear deterrence, but that's it.

B-21 (and B2) can help with the nuclear deterrence, but only marginally.

But B-21 can help a lot with the conventional deterrence. You can think of them as an alternative to aircraft carriers. Carriers carry F-18s and F-35s, with a range of about 700 miles. B2's have a range of about 7000 miles (and most likely B-21s will match that). Which means aircraft carriers need to get fairly close to China to deter. Well inside the range of China's carrier killer missiles.

B-21 can just go 1000 miles away from China and patrol there for many hours. Maybe not now, but in a few years, they'll have loyal wing-man drones with them. A squadron of B-21s and their associated drones will probably match or exceed the entire bombload of the air complement of an aircraft carrier.

B-21s will not match B2's range, because of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law

For other parts, mostly agree.

100 at 700 million each? 70 billion dollars?

This program by itself is as large as the economy of Uruguay or Croatia, around the 80th ranked GDP in the world.

This single program!

In 2021 US spent ~801 billion in defence.

That’s around the same size as the GDP of Switzerland, Poland or Taiwan, and bigger than Argentina, Sweden or Belgium’s.

Staggering!

It's an impressive number indeed, although comparing it to the GDP's of the (at best) regional powers you mentioned is not particularly relevant. Defense spending as a percentage of US GDP is actually relatively low by historical standards at 3.3%

> This program by itself is as large as the economy of Uruguay or Croatia

You mean as the annual GDP of Uruguay or Croatia? This is not a program that goes on for one year, it spreads over decades. You are not comparing apples and apples.

this single program is almost twice as expensive as twitter!

Lol. I think in that respect, this program seems pretty good value. Twitter doesn’t add much vis a vis a world where Reddit exists.

This is stealth bomber capable of deploying nuclear weapons. Likely to maintain part of the nuclear deterrence for a few decades.

Twitter is just a thing.

Yes, the US GDP is staggering. It is bigger than all those countries combined.

What percentage of GDP is spent on defense?

It has actually gone down over the decades.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/mili...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com