Long-Range Strike Bomber is evolving deep in secrecy. In fact, now that the Air Force has launched a competition with yesterday’s formal Request For Proposals (even the due date for proposals is secret), it’s promised to say even less. That’s impressive considering (as my colleague Colin Clark pointed out recently) that the Air Force has released almost no new information about the LRS-B since 2012. The Long-Range Strike Bomber is supposed to be stealthy, like the current batwinged B-2, but faster and significantly cheaper, at $550 million per system. We have to say “system” instead of “plane” because the LRS-B may actually be a collective of several aircraft, manned and unmanned, networked together into a single tactical unit.
Congressional Research Service analyst Jeremiah Gertler looked at planned funding trendlines in a recent report and inferred the Air Force must have already done most of the development work on the bomber already, even building prototypes, in the classified “black” budget. If true, that could make the yesterday’s RFP largely a formality rather than a real competition. But we simply don’t know.
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