Weekly Debrief: Clarity Eludes USAF Bomber Plan As ‘Arsenal Plane’ Re-enters Discussion
Steve Trimble May 18, 2020
One number associated with the F-35 program has never changed, and it happens to involve the U.S. Air Force.
When Lockheed Martin received the contract in 2001, the Air Force’s requirement for F-35As stood at 1,763 aircraft and—although the justification seems increasingly brittle—so it remains nearly 19 years later.
Such consistency from Air Force leadership has not migrated to the bomber fleet. Until early 2018, official policy called for operating 80-100 B-21s with the existing fleet of B-1Bs, B-2s and B-52s indefinitely. Then, the Air Force released the “Bomber Vector,†which called for retiring the B-2s and B-1Bs as B-21s arrived, leaving B-52s as the only enduring aircraft from the current fleet. The “Air Force We Need†plan released in September 2018 reset the calculation again, with leadership now calling for a “minimum†of 100 B-21s to operate alongside 75 re-engined B-52s.
https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/budget-policy-operations/weekly-debrief-clarity-eludes-usaf-bomber-plan-arsenal-plane
