The B-21 is intended to initially replace the 20 B-2 and 63 B-1 strategic bombers currently in the fleet. B-2s date from the 1990s; B-1s date from the 1980s.
When the B-2 was procured in the 1990s, initial plans called for 132 aircraft. Ultimately, 21 B-2s were procured…
That was from a good CRS paper by Jeremiah Gertler. A couple things that’d I’d like to point out.
Think about how long the requirements process was. The Next Generation Bomber (NGB) concept grew out of a 2004 Congressional strategy. In 2006, the NGB requirements were started, but the project got cancelled in 2009. The current B-21 project was revamped in 2010. Five years later, in Oct. 2015, the decision to contract with Northrop Grumman was made (basically the Milestone B equivalent).
Only after a decade of requirements generation did the project really get off the ground. Northrop had to carry quite a bit of overhead over that time I’m sure. And the B-21 was a rapid acquisition program that skirted many regulations! Even if we just count from 2010, that’s five years of requirements. (You could say six years because Oct. 2015 is the start of fiscal year 2016.)
Gertler notes:
At $3 billion a year, this program is significantly larger than those that have traditionally been the subject of rapid acquisition.
Another point of interest is the common pattern of overfunding projects in the near-term, then severely underfunding them in the medium-term. Usually, the expectation is that the contractor has skilled personnel standing around ready to ramp up within a year or two. The FY14 budget plan wanted to go from $300 million in FY14 to near $3 billion in FY17. Not all of that will go to Northrop, but that’s a 10x increase in funding in 3 years.
The behavior of the B-21 project in the early years is classic. We see progress moving slower than planned. Likely, the contractor cannot ramp up all the unique skills required in a short time. There just aren’t that many people who can work on a complex stealth bomber. So the budget plan is adjusted downward, but the expectation continues to be that they can ramp up quickly before ramping down. We see the most recent funding plan peak in FY21 before coming down.
Even if Northrop does ramp up according to plan, one can expect that such a massive and complex project will experience some delays and cost growth. I wouldn’t expect funding decrease in the outyears. Most likely, you wont see the R&D ramping down until the mid- to late- 2020s.
Certainly, the B-21 has followed the expected pattern of ramping up much slower than planned. It will remain to be seen whether the second part of the expected pattern will show itself — program stretch outs and cost growth. We cannot know this outcome yet.
The program schedule outlined by the Air Force is dependent on everything going according to plan:
The B-21 bomber is “progressing really well,” Global Strike Command chief Gen. Robin Rand told reporters … it looks like “in the mid-2020s, we’ll have the first one at one of our bases,” with initial operating capability “in the late ‘20s”. He reiterated his “strong recommendation” that USAF buy “at least 100” of the bombers and “make sure we get to that [number] by the late ‘30s.” At such a rate, production would be around five per year.
And equally dependent are the program costs:
In testimony, the Air Force Vice-Chief of Staff said, “The Air Force remains committed to B-21 affordability, with the average procurement cost of $564 million in base year 2016 dollars.”
Interesting. The Air Force was originally saying the aircraft unit cost was $550 million in FY2010 dollars. A simple inflation adjustment from FY2010 to FY2016 would make that $607 million. So the unit-cost actually fell quite a bit from the estimates back in 2015, from $607 million to $564 million (~7% decrease).
Again, this is potentially based on optimism. We don’t know how the aircraft will perform or what it will cost until after development, test, and evaluation. That’s years away. And a lot can happen in a technology project over the course of years. Committing to 80 or 100 units before significant work on development has started is premature, to say the least.
In some ways, the rapid acquisition framework requires rosy forecasts in order to get approved, which then preconditions bad behavior, which then invites oversight from all over, which then creates a whole new set of processes that stymies work even further. We can only hope this program ends up more like the B-52 (designed in 1948) than it does like the B-1A, the B-1B, or B-2.
Unfortunately for us now, the B-52 was developed in an iterative process and learned from other prototypes like the B-47. It was not a product of the modern acquisition process like the later bombers.
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