The US Air Force has 140 of its largest fighters – its heavy bombers – in active service: 76 Boeing B-52Hs, 44 Boeing B-1Bs and 20 B-2 stealth bombers built by Northrop Grumman.
But the Air Force has funding For 141 bombers. Its inventory fell to 140 in 2022, when a B-1 suffered an engine fire at Dyess Air Force Base in Texas – and burned to the ground. The B-1 is sometimes known as the “Bone” (from B-one).
Any other air force could make do with 140 bombers and redistribute the operating budget for the lost bombers. But the U.S. Air Force is counting on B-1s to play a leading role in a potential air war over the Taiwan Strait. It’s such a priority that the service is spending millions of dollars to recover, from long-term storage, a surplus of B-1s nicknamed “Lancelot” that are stored in the desert, aka “the Boneyard.” for three years.
This is an operation the Air Force has only conducted three times in recent decades. In addition to the B-1, the service returned two stored B-52s to flight – one in 2020 and another in 2015 – to replace bombers lost to accidents.
Recovering a machine as complex as a bomber from storage is difficult, expensive and time-consuming work. This can require hundreds of people working thousands of hours over several years and at a cost of millions of dollars.
That the Air Force is willing to invest speaks to the importance of big warplanes, as the service positions itself to, among other contingencies, defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion fleet.
The supersonic four-engine B-1, with a crew of four and capable of carrying 37 tons of bombs and missiles over intercontinental distances, is the Air Force’s primary anti-ship platform. It can carry 24 of the service’s best cruise missiles, including its long-range anti-ship missiles, or LRASMs.
A B-1 “can rapidly deliver enormous quantities of precision munitions as well as unguided munitions against any adversary, anywhere in the world, at any time,” the Air Force says. The bomber’s LRASM and its similar air-to-ground strike missile, or JASSM, are key weapons in an air and naval war over Taiwan.
A 1.3-ton LRASM travels hundreds of miles with GPS and inertial guidance, an infrared seeker capable of recognizing ships, and a 1,000-pound warhead that, with luck, can break the keel of a enemy ship.
To maximize the missile’s lethality, manufacturer Lockheed Martin recently configured it to fly in formations of four missiles. The recent first test of the four-missile formation “was the next big step in the evolution of LRASM,” Lockheed boasted. While an LRASM should be capable of sinking, say, a Chinese frigate, it might take four missiles striking simultaneously to knock out a Chinese aircraft carrier.
B-1s firing salvos of anti-ship LRASMs and JASSMs could devastate a Chinese fleet crossing the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait to land troops on Taiwanese beaches. That was one of the key conclusions when the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., planned a war against Taiwan last year.
“The inventory of several hundred LRASMs, with a range of (370 miles), combined with thousands of JASSM-ERs, with even greater range and modest anti-ship capability, allows US bombers and tactical aircraft to rapid attrition of the Chinese fleet beyond. the range of its anti-aircraft defenses,” CSIS discovered.
Conversely, in order to earn In a war against Taiwan, China must shoot down – or destroy on the ground – a significant portion of American bombers. But “this is difficult to do because the bombers can be based beyond the range of most Chinese ground attack missiles, approach the theater from multiple angles, and remotely launch missiles beyond of the range of defenses (surface-to-air missiles),” CSIS reported. .
It is therefore no wonder that the US Air Force carefully maintains the maximum number of bombers for which it has funds. Each active bomber is a flexible and resilient flying missile arsenal, capable of damaging or sinking dozens of enemy – that is, Chinese – warships in a single sortie.
The 1980s-era B-1s and newer B-2s are expected to retire in about a decade, while new Northrop Grumman B-21 stealth bombers will replace them and, alongside the super-upgraded B-52s, will return to service. roles – presumably including the B-52. -1 anti-ship role. In the meantime, the Air Force has plenty of inactive B-1s in stock to replace any additional active B-1s that crash or wear out.
That’s because Rockwell, which later became part of Boeing, built 100 B-1s, dozens more than the Air Force currently needs. A few were destroyed in accidents, but the rest – more than 40 – are lined up in neat rows in the Pentagon’s “graveyard” of old planes in the Arizona desert.
The dry climate and layers of plastic help preserve these precious cells. Each constitutes an insurance policy against accidents or incidents that would exhaust the US Air Force’s main means of sinking Chinese ships.
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