rational defense

The U.S. Air Force (USAF) alone operates some 2,500 front-line fighter jets. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps combined bring more than 1,200 additional combat fighters to the table. (Indeed, counting its hundreds of helicopters, Marine aviation by itself is counted among the ten largest air forces in the world.)

With only about 160 heavy bombers, the long-range bomber fleet is a tiny fraction of that size, and just over half are B-52H Stratofortresses. Though a venerable aircraft that has been heavily upgraded, the B-52 design is the product of 1950s aerospace engineering, and even the youngest airframes are approaching fifty years of service. On the other end of the spectrum are the twenty remaining B-2A Spirit stealth bombers. A crash on Guam last year, which resulted in the loss of a single airframe, reduced the operational fleet by nearly five percent.

This was not always the balance. After World War II, it was the bomber community that was ascendant. Hundreds of airframes of each new bomber design were built (nearly 750 B-52 airframes were built before construction ended in the early 1960s). From 1961 when General Curtis LeMay (the mastermind behind the incidiary bombing of Imperial Japan) became Air Force Chief of Staff until 1982, only a single fighter pilot held the top post (in the late 1960s). An uninterrupted chain of bomber pilots held that top job for more than a decade.

But after that, it was the fighter community that ran the show until 2008, when a reform-minded special ops pilot was given the job by Defense Secretary Robert Gates specifically in order to break the fighter community’s grip on the service. Air combat losses in Vietnam were a formative experience for that community and raised concerns about the importance of close-in dogfighting in establishing and maintaining air superiority and air supremacy. The ultimate outgrowth of this concern is the new F-22 Raptor, by most reports an exceptional fifth generation air superiority fighter capable of both long-range engagement and close-in dogfighting. Indeed, with the Joint Strike Fighter program underway as well, the USAF has two separate fighter jet development and procurement programs running at the same time. In comparison, what is known as the ‘next-generation bomber’ is not only potentially on the chopping block but (even if all goes well) is not scheduled to have a testbed airborne for nearly a decade.

However, the current balance of fighters and bombers is not simply a matter of institutionalized proclivities. The original intention was to procure more than 130 B-2 airframes. The B-2 program has not been efficient or cheap, but it produced a high-end capability unmatched in the world, and offers the U.S. the capability to hold nearly any target on earth at risk. The USAF knew it wanted to invest in and build the transformational B-2 before it could actually do it (leading President Ronald Reagan to kickstart the B-1 program and aggressively produce the B-1B as an interim capability).

But the Soviet Union collapsed just as the first airframes were taking flight. The combination of 1990s defense spending cuts and the fundamental shift in the global military balance doomed the ambitious program to 21 (now 20) airframes with no replacement program on the horizon, and contributing directly to the current composition of the USAF bomber fleet.

In short, that fleet is essentially a fixed reality for the next decade. But one of the key points missing from the ongoing debate over the right balance of aircraft for the USAF is that range matters — and not just within the narrow band of distance between the reach of the F-22 and estimates of F-35 capabilities.