Are bombers obsolete?

[Starglider]

Another good possibility. The Indians appear to be heading in that direction; the Arihant is classed as a strategic submarine. I'm carrying her as an SSBN at the moment but she may be an SSGN. The flight profile may be interesting though; one possibility is a missile that launches like a ballistic missile but has a high-mach cruise missile instead of the second stage.

Presumably there will be no suitable strategic cruise missiles ready for either the British Trident replacement program or the Ohio class replacement program (starting design in five years or so I think)? Assuming that Tomahawk doesn't cut it for nuclear deterrence. Shame, but with the precedent of the Ohio SSGN conversions I imagine the designers will keep missile replacement options very much in mind.

[Shroom Man 777]

except those ones that can be

Which is none. No strategic ballistic missile can be aborted or retargeted once launched. Missiles that have been converted for test purposes or for use as targets can be but operational missiles cannot. None of them.

re-read your statement before getting all smug stu; you said "missiles" period. Not ballistic missiles. Turns out cruise missiles are strategic weapons relevant to a discussion about the obselescence of bombers?

re-read the conversation they were having and the context of stu's post, turns out that the missiles he was talking about were ballistic missiles, since they were talking about ICBMs and were posting pictures of silos and shit.

also it turns out that cruise missiles can also be launched from bombers lol

here is stuart's posts

The real question here is what do the various weapons systems bring to the table.

Positives for Missiles are that they are fast, they arrive at their targets within a few minutes. They give the enemy a low response time. They have a relatively low unit cost.

Negatives for Missiles is that they are completely inflexible. They cannot be retargeted in flight. They cannot be aborted once fired. They travel on fixed trajectories making them very vulnerable to defenses. They cannot defend themselves. They cannot shoot back when brought under attack. They are very expensive when considered on a system basis. They are unscaleable (adding another missile to the force means digging another silo, wiring it up etc). They reach their targets so fast that there is no time to reconsider or back off. Missiles are extremely vulnerable in their bases because they can't be fired until its certain an attack is under way That means they have to ride out an enemy first strike.

look at me I am JSF

The real question here is what do the various weapons systems bring to the table.

Positives for Missiles are that they are fast, they arrive at their targets within a few minutes. They give the enemy a low response time. They have a relatively low unit cost.

except the ones that are slow (and subsonic)

back to shroom mode:

notice how stu was talking about ICBMs, which is the primary nuclear deterrent of the USA and shit (and whose features he was describing, like how fast they were and how they were based in bases/silos and shit), and how I totally bring up features (slow [and subsonic]) which are not found in ICBMs but are in cruise missiles instead (like how retargeting and aborting are features not found in ICBMs but are in cruise missiles instead)

[Stuart]

re-read your statement before getting all smug stu; you said "missiles" period. Not ballistic missiles. Turns out cruise missiles are strategic weapons relevant to a discussion about the obselescence of bombers?

Actually, the only smug asshole statement was yours. Right from the start, it has been apparent that the discussion was concerning the use of strategic bombers and whether they were obsolete. The rival system, the one that was supposed to have made the bombers obsolete was, the ICBM; therefore the discussion related to those two and their opposed merits. Whether strategic cruise missiles will one day supplement or replace either system is an entirely different issue.

[Sarevok]

Are not nuclear armed cruise missiles above a certain range restricted under arms control treaties presently ?

[Stuart]

Are not nuclear armed cruise missiles above a certain range restricted under arms control treaties presently ?

They are indeed, primarily because they are a problem we really don't need at this time. Since we're on to the subject of long-range cruise missiles, I think it's worth having a closer look at them.

The present generation of long-range cruise missiles are primarily fast unmanned aircraft. The absence of a crew makes them much less expensive than aircraft but also reduces their flexibility. They are incapable of defending themselves and their limited payload severely reduces the countermeasures that can be employed by them. The low-flying varieties are quite vulnerable to low-level air defenses while the high-fliers are relatively easy to engage with area air defense systems.

Used strategically, they have a lot of disdvantages. They combine most of the weaknesses of aircraft with those of missiles. The same restrictions in a strategic context to apply to them as to missiles; they can't be aborted or retargeted. It's more technically feasible than with ICBMs but the operational concept is still undesirable. The uplink remains vulnerable and it would be sad if the cruise missiles simply aborted on launch or were returned to sender.

So, the ban on them was due to a perception that they were not very effective and just complicated things without any positive benefits to either side. Further into the future, things might change significantly. One concept being examined is a system that would use the booster stage of an ICBM to launch a scramjet powered cruise missile. Instead of arcing up and over the way a ballistic missile does, the new system would be launched in a low arc, the booster being used to get the cruise missile up to a speed where its scramjet becomes operable. The cruise missile would fly in at an altitude of around 200,000 to 250,000 feet and at speeds of around Mach 9 to 12. It would have pre-programmed evasive and course-correction maneuvers built into it so it would not have the easily-predictable course of a ballistic missile. It would be possible to build it so that it could sense a defensive system engaging and take pre-planned evasive actions while maintaining its original target.

Now, what this system achieves is that it combines a lot of the advantages of a manned bomber with most of the merits of a baliistic missile. It is travelling too fast and too high for realistic engagement by any existing SAM (yes, that does include the S-400) while it is too agile for engagement by any existing ABM. It doesn't offer insuperable defensive problems and it has quite a few penalties of its own but it's there. Now, who makes the connection to a recent experimental launch?

Most of the problems with this system can be solved if we put a crew on board it. With modern electronics, a two man crew could do quite nicely. Now, we have added abortability and retargeting capability plus human decision making on board which really has major benefits when defending the system. In effect we have a manned, hypersonic bomber. Which we could have had in the 1970s if that prize prat McNamara hadn't cancelled it.

[K. A. Pital]

If you have hypersonic small vehicles (missiles, etc.) which is obviously the way things went since Kholod tests were first run, why would you need humans though?

If the hypersonic two-stage missile is a combination of ICBM/cm tech to make a super-missile undefeatable by ABM, what's the point of putting humans on it? Too much cargo, too much stress on frame... expensive.

[Shroom Man 777]

But Stuart, what would the bombers use as weapons if not cruise missiles? Gravity bombs?

[phongn]

But Stuart, what would the bombers use as weapons if not cruise missiles? Gravity bombs?

They could use their own short-ranged missiles, gravity bombs and other weapons?

If the hypersonic two-stage missile is a combination of ICBM/cm tech to make a super-missile undefeatable by ABM, what's the point of putting humans on it? Too much cargo, too much stress on frame... expensive.

My first thought would be to keep a man in the loop. Otherwise we still have the disadvantages of other strategic missiles - they cannot be aborted, recalled or retargetted.

[UnderAGreySky]

By the way, the Indian ABM system is now three hits and one miss in four tests. That's pretty good going for a system that's come out of nowhere.

You probably know this but I'll mention it any way: The only 'failure' of the system was because the target missile failed to follow its programmed course (it was mimicking one of the Pakistani/Chinese missile paths) and so the launch of the interceptor was scrubbed.

The Mission Control Centre computer found that the interception is not warranted as the deviated target did not present the incoming missile threat scenario and accordingly the system intelligently did not allow take-off of the interceptor missile for engaging the target. The cause of the target malfunction is being investigated by analysis of tele-metered data.

from here.

Also, by the Arihant possibly being an SSGN, do you reckon this means that the PJ-10 Brahmos will be on it?

[Shroom Man 777]

But Stuart, what would the bombers use as weapons if not cruise missiles? Gravity bombs?

They could use their own short-ranged missiles, gravity bombs and other weapons?

But short-ranged missiles and gravity bombs will put it way within range of enemy interceptors and defense systems, won't it? This is why B-52s are armed with cruise missiles too, to give them long ranges (2,000km+). It's not like the bombers have fighter escort to defend them...

[phongn]

But short-ranged missiles and gravity bombs will put it way within range of enemy interceptors and defense systems, won't it? This is why B-52s are armed with cruise missiles too, to give them long ranges (2,000km+). It's not like the bombers have fighter escort to defend them...

The bombers were intended to fight their way through, remember. It'd be shooting back at incoming interceptors and air-defense installations with nuclear-tipped missiles (e.g. SRAM).

Back in the day, the US more or less intended to build giant escort fighters (e.g. F-108) to help the bombers penetrate, too.

[Shroom Man 777]

B-52s could have air-to-air nuclear missiles? Sweet!

[TimothyC]

B-52s could have air-to-air nuclear missiles? Sweet!

The way I understand it the SRAM could be fused for an airburst, and then targeted on approaching fighters.

[SVPD]

Now, who makes the connection to a recent experimental launch?

I'll take a crack at this and guess you're referring to the X-37 launch?

[Starglider]

The bombers were intended to fight their way through, remember. It'd be shooting back at incoming interceptors and air-defense installations with nuclear-tipped missiles (e.g. SRAM).

With modern AAMs, that have longer ranges and better guidance / off-boresight capability, mounting missiles on the bomber should be nearly as good as having escorts. The B-1R proposal included AMRAAMs.

[Spectre_nz]

Most of the problems with this system can be solved if we put a crew on board it. With modern electronics, a two man crew could do quite nicely. Now, we have added abortability and retargeting capability plus human decision making on board which really has major benefits when defending the system. In effect we have a manned, hypersonic bomber. Which we could have had in the 1970s if that prize prat McNamara hadn't cancelled it.

One thing that might replace them are unmanned, ultra-high speed, ultra-high altitude aircraft. People are getting very interested in those. To quote one of the people involved "speed and altitude are the new stealth". That made my heart warm.

Wasn't stealth originally the "New speed and altitude?" I thought all those hypersonic aircraft projects were mothballed because it was far easier to make a swarm of hypersonic SAM's that would punch slots in your high and fast bombers, so they changed tack from 'outrun the enemy' to 'hide from the enemy'

Are you saying the ballance of power ping-pong's between slow and stealthy and high and fast as your opponent optimizes defences against one or the other? Or just that hypersonic bombers would have been better in the long run from the beginning?

[Starglider]

I thought all those hypersonic aircraft projects were mothballed because it was far easier to make a swarm of hypersonic SAM's that would punch slots in your high and fast bombers,

Back in the 1960s, the missile developers were claiming that missiles would be able to do absolutely everything, far better than every other platform. It seems that these claims were not examined with the proper skepticism; SAM performance has actually been rather underwhelming and improved only slowly.

[Spectre_nz]

I'm familliar with the US experience of 'interceptor' fighters designed to dash around lobbing long range AA missiles getting caught out in dogfights, but SAM's vs hypersonic bombers too? Or Hypersonic interceptor fighters with missiles vs hypersonic bombers?
I'm just working from the assumption that if you can build hypersonic bombers, someone else can make a enough smaller, cheaper fighters with hypersonic missiles to ruin your day.

I know it's a pretty complex issue, escalating arms race and all that, Your missiles go faster so my bombers go higher so you make high altitude interceptors so I'll give my bombers better self defence so you just saturate the area with nuke tipped AA...

I can see where things like rods from god and project pluto come from. Gotta go higher, gotta go faster.
I just assumed that going stealthy was the cost effective option.

[JointStrikeFighter]

What about depressed trajectory ICBM shots Stu? How do they stack up against a hypersonic missile shot?

[Kanastrous]

There's a late 1980s film, By Dawn's Early Light which is set in part aboard a B-52 flying a nuclear penetration mission (I think that's what it was called) during an accidental ramp-up to war between the USA and USSR. In the course of the story they dealt with penetrating air defenses and fighter attack. From what I remember it was a very convincing depiction (but I have to leave it to people with real expertise, to say how technically accurate it may have been).

[D.Turtle]

I'm familliar with the US experience of 'interceptor' fighters designed to dash around lobbing long range AA missiles getting caught out in dogfights, but SAM's vs hypersonic bombers too? Or Hypersonic interceptor fighters with missiles vs hypersonic bombers?
I'm just working from the assumption that if you can build hypersonic bombers, someone else can make a enough smaller, cheaper fighters with hypersonic missiles to ruin your day.

I know it's a pretty complex issue, escalating arms race and all that, Your missiles go faster so my bombers go higher so you make high altitude interceptors so I'll give my bombers better self defence so you just saturate the area with nuke tipped AA...

I can see where things like rods from god and project pluto come from. Gotta go higher, gotta go faster.
I just assumed that going stealthy was the cost effective option.

At risk of butchering the explanation, I'll try to summarize what Stuart has said on previous occasions on this matter.

Basically, the faster and higher a bomber flies, the smaller the engagement envelope of any defenses are. Missiles (and interceptors) only have limited range. When you are fast enough, the time between detection and you being past them is only very small. Even if they see you coming, they only have a very small area in which they are able to get to a sufficient height and into a position from which they can attack you. At this point, the bomber's maneuverability (in comparison to ICBM's which are on a fixed trajectory) comes into play, as the bomber can simply route around detected enemy radars (or shoot them down). So, a slow and relatively low bomber might be engageable by a missile battery out to a range of a hundred miles or more. The same battery might only have an engagement range of a few dozen miles on a bomber flying significantly higher and faster. This requires a lot more dense defense, or a lot more expensive defenses because of larger missiles, radars, etc. - which then becomes more vulnerable to attack.

Another thing to remember, is that the defender has to defend pretty much everywhere, while the attacker can choose where to attack from one area, enabling the attacker to overwhelm the defenses and roll them back, taking out any defenses in the way, opening the way for following waves of attacks.

What about depressed trajectory ICBM shots Stu? How do they stack up against a hypersonic missile shot?

I think the problem with depressed trajectory ICBMs was that it is a lot more fuel intensive, lowering the amount of warheads on the missile by a significant number, meaning you have already "destroyed" a lot of warheads through virtual attrition.

[JointStrikeFighter]

What about depressed trajectory ICBM shots Stu? How do they stack up against a hypersonic missile shot?

I think the problem with depressed trajectory ICBMs was that it is a lot more fuel intensive, lowering the amount of warheads on the missile by a significant number, meaning you have already "destroyed" a lot of warheads through virtual attrition.

Won't the virtual attrition from a booster launched manned hypersonic bomber essentially be the same as a depressed trajectory ICBM anyway?

[K. A. Pital]

If the hypersonic two-stage missile is a combination of ICBM/cm tech to make a super-missile undefeatable by ABM, what's the point of putting humans on it? Too much cargo, too much stress on frame... expensive.

My first thought would be to keep a man in the loop. Otherwise we still have the disadvantages of other strategic missiles - they cannot be aborted, recalled or retargetted.

There's a lot of talk about "keeping a man in the loop", but really, in an all-out nuclear war, would you want to keep them in the loop just for tremendous engineering and cost issues?

Let's put it that way, there are unmanned hypersonic craft that can be used as missiles or parts of missiles today. However, there's a huge difference between them and a manned hypersonic craft.

Yes, an unmanned device can't be retargeted or aborted, but we've put up with these deficiencies of ICBMs just for the sole reason, the ability to end your enemy's existence as a nation in what, half an hour or about that, depending on just where that enemy is. Right?

In that case, if the problem is the possibility of shooting down ballistic warheads, the solution is to make the warhead a hypersonic maneuverable component, but why stuff a human onto it? A huge ICBM like R-36M can lift a huge amount of nuclear warheads, or it can lift a human (though possibly not, because rockets need to be man-rated before you can stuff human piloted modules on them). The human crew will take up so much volume that it would always require a very huge rocket to boost them up. At that point, you might as well use the Shuttle as a "hypersonic bomber". Better yet, it's orbital.

If the problem is attrition of ICBMs by modern SAMs/ABMs, the solution is hypersonic penetrators. Full end of line. There's no need to use a man, if only for safety reasons. And safety reasons fly out of the window when we're talking about how many KGs of nuclear material you're going to deliver to the enemy for a given cost.

[Sea Skimmer]

I'm familliar with the US experience of 'interceptor' fighters designed to dash around lobbing long range AA missiles getting caught out in dogfights, but SAM's vs hypersonic bombers too? Or Hypersonic interceptor fighters with missiles vs hypersonic bombers?
I'm just working from the assumption that if you can build hypersonic bombers, someone else can make a enough smaller, cheaper fighters with hypersonic missiles to ruin your day.

Hypersonic aircraft need so much fuel and so much heat shielding its doubtful that a 'fighter' version would be all that much smaller then a bomber. Indeed it might be vital for a hypersonic fighter to be very large, because it's going to be a pain in the ass to chase down a mach 10 enemy plane. The air battles could easily span a hundreds or even thousands of miles as a plane at mach 10 moves at over a mile a second. So basically what this means is enemy fighters may not be any more numerous then the attacking bombers, which makes interceptions very hard.

Hypersonic air to air missiles have similar issues, unless you put a scramjet on the missile too (which would be brutally expensive) its going to have serious trouble making anything but a head on intercept for lack of sufficient overtaking speed and sustained engine burn time. So the envolope from which a fighter can attack a hypersonic bomber will be very small.

I'll take a crack at this and guess you're referring to the X-37 launch?

X-37 is kind of past mere hypersonics. It is a full fledged orbital space bomber, though this is unlikely to be its main mision. I think the means the April 22nd test of HTV-2, which unfortunately failed after 9 minutes of flight.

[D.Turtle]

Won't the virtual attrition from a booster launched manned hypersonic bomber essentially be the same as a depressed trajectory ICBM anyway?

Well, I was thinking more of a comparison between a normal (though supersonic/hypersonic) bomber - something like a B-70- and ICBMs. In that case, they would use entirely different and separate Infrastructure.

A booster-launched manned bomber (I'm guessing some kind of suborbital bomber) would be quite a different case.

Comparing a conventional (hypersonic) bomber, an ICBM, and a suborbital bomber, I guess you could summarize the various advantages and disadvantages the following way:
ICBM: Advantage: Extremely fast time between lauch and hitting the target(s). Silos.
Disadvantage: No flexibility. Easy to shoot down with a competent ABM system. Silos.

Bomber: Advantage: Flexibility. Hard to stop/shoot down. Can operate out of many airfields.
Disadvantage: Comparably long reaction time between launch and hitting target.

Bososter-launched suborbital Bomber: Advantage: Flexibility. Hard to stop/shoot down. Extremely fast reaction time between lanch and hitting the target. Silos.
Disadvantage: I would guess a significantly lower payload. It also uses the same infrastructure as ICBMs. Silos. Expensive to launch and recover (compared to bombers).

*I mention silos as both a positive and a negative, as they are well protected, but they can not be dispersed like conventional bombers.

You can compensate for some the disadvantages: ICBMs: vulnerability: by going suborbital - cuts down on payload significantly. Decoys don't work, but would result in the same. Flexibility can't be compensated.

Bombers: Reaction time: In case of danger can take up positions closer to their targets, significantly cutting down on that time. They can also be launched earlier than ICBMs, as they can be recalled.

Booster-launched suborbital bombers: I don't see any way to really compensate for the disadvantages.

Basically, I would guess that booster-launched suborbital bombers combine some of the advantages of bombers with most of the disadvantages of ICBMs.