Are bombers obsolete?

[Stuart]

Exactly No one threatens to attack Brazil. And they would like this state of affairs to continue, by making it impractical to threaten them. Easy to understand.

Perfectly phrased Simon. **Polite applause**

[K. A. Pital]

Crippling space infrastructure is a must in modern warfare, because sat recon has changed a lot in the nature of the game. That is why most nations put priority on the development of their missile tech. An anti-ballistic missile is just another high-energy missile capable of suborbital or, with some work, low-orbital target strikes. The C&C facilities needed to detect and track ICBM warheads are essentially the same as needed to detect and track space objects (and are utilized in the same fashion).

Any nation that would want to resist a possible American attack, or any attack by a modern military in the future should have a capability against American reconaissance assets first and foremost. Even if the US can invade and efficiently utilize airpower, crippling their recon would give them a hell of a trouble. Imagine U.S. occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan without continous satellite observation of the Middle East. Gets harder, heh.

[Count Chocula]

Stas' note above seems like the mission statement to bring back the SR-71 into active service. He makes a valid point: orbital platforms are predictable, and have limited on board stores of propellant for course changes, so could be vulnerable to (hypothetically of course) attacks from previously-launched Russian or Chinese "communications satellites," which due to bog-standard orbital mechanics may be less than 10,000km from any given KH-11 on any given orbit. A signal goes out from somewhere in Russia, a comsat fires its thrusters (or 12 do the same) and - oops, so sorry! - there go the KHs due to a regrettable software error in Goddamnitscoldivostok. An SR (or even better an A-12, with IR sensors) could see an attack and juke and jive to avoid. Hey, the guys on board may even be able to receive a warning from NORAD, a JSTARS, or a fuckiing sat phone that the shit's hit the fan and they'd better look out for MiG-31s! Too bad the MiG-31 top speed is hella lower than the SR's (like around 300 knots). Good thing they have a lot of them....oops. They only have 283 in service. Still, that should be good enough to protect Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vladivistok, and other vital locations...right?

Nope, probably not. Sea Skimmer's wonderful chart of drop distance versus airspeed, with an SR-71/A-12 in dorsal planform as the hypothetical launch vehicle, show that a high-Mach high altitude attacker could drop a cup of Earl Grey Thermonuclear Tea from as far away as 500 nautical miles from a target...well outside detection range of the S-400 radar. MiG-31s could be vectored to intercept based on GCI info, sure, but given their inferior speed and ~400 nautical mile combat radius at a 'piddling' Mach 2.5, against a Mach 3.35+ target with a 1,100nm radius and acceess to refueling, good luck Ivanski.

The B-1 as originally conceived, a high-Mach, high altitude, high volume strategic asset, would have creamed the Soviets if the horrifically unthinkable had occurred. And that was just a Mach 2 bomber. I don't think the Bones belong at NOE altitudes, even though that's the mission the Carter administration castrated the fleet to perform. They sure as shit haven't dropped from low altitude in Iraq or Afghanistan. Back to the OP, I don't think bombers are obsolete. We still have BUFFs in service, and they're the worst case scenario from a pilot's POV in combat.

[K. A. Pital]

Intercepting a Mach 2 bomber does not constitute too much of a difficulty for modern SAMs with prior warning. Extra Mach for a triplesonic craft - that's what adds a new layer of difficulty.

The only problem with Stuart's optimism is that there are no such craft being built, none in existence and none proposed, as far as I know.

[Norade]

Intercepting a Mach 2 bomber does not constitute too much of a difficulty for modern SAMs with prior warning. Extra Mach for a triplesonic craft - that's what adds a new layer of difficulty.

The only problem with Stuart's optimism is that there are no such craft being built, none in existence and none proposed, as far as I know.

Have the SR-71's been scrapped yet? If not they could likely be converted to drop some munitions. They'd be piss poor at it, but in a pinch they could still ensure some nukes hit Moscow or Beijing if the ICBMs and SLBMs are found to be too likely to get shot down.

[Sarevok]

Intercepting a Mach 2 bomber does not constitute too much of a difficulty for modern SAMs with prior warning. Extra Mach for a triplesonic craft - that's what adds a new layer of difficulty.

The only problem with Stuart's optimism is that there are no such craft being built, none in existence and none proposed, as far as I know.

That is what I posted earlier. Hypersonic bombers and how to defend against them are in the realm of "what would realistic space warships look like" discussions. They are a paper dream for the foreseeable future.

[Shroom Man 777]

The B-1 as originally conceived, a high-Mach, high altitude, high volume strategic asset, would have creamed the Soviets if the horrifically unthinkable had occurred. And that was just a Mach 2 bomber.

It's not like mainland USA has a comprehensive IADS and civil defense network, either. I wonder how they would fare against a bomber attack.

[K. A. Pital]

In the state the USA is now, an all-out strategic attack with either bombers, ICBMs, SLBMs would result in utter and complete devastation, and colossal loss of life.

Also, Norade - SR-71s are either scrapped, moved to the museums or whatnot. There's between two and zero flyable hulls. That's about it. NASA should have had two test hulls.

The only triplemach craft left in expoit is the MiG-31.

[Norade]

In the state the USA is now, an all-out strategic attack with either bombers, ICBMs, SLBMs would result in utter and complete devastation, and colossal loss of life.

Also, Norade - SR-71s are either scrapped, moved to the museums or whatnot. There's between two and zero flyable hulls. That's about it. NASA should have had two test hulls.

The only triplemach craft left in expoit is the MiG-31.

Ah, thanks for the info.

[[R_H]]

Never mind.

[TimothyC]

Have the SR-71's been scrapped yet? If not they could likely be converted to drop some munitions. They'd be piss poor at it, but in a pinch they could still ensure some nukes hit Moscow or Beijing if the ICBMs and SLBMs are found to be too likely to get shot down.

The last of the tooling (that would have been needed for spare parts and such) was destroyed 2005ish (Shep would know, he sent me the PowerPoint that had pictures of the destruction).

[Simon_Jester]

Have the SR-71's been scrapped yet? If not they could likely be converted to drop some munitions. They'd be piss poor at it, but in a pinch they could still ensure some nukes hit Moscow or Beijing if the ICBMs and SLBMs are found to be too likely to get shot down.

Converting the SR-71 into a light recon bomber would be difficult. The problem is that even assuming there are still some airworthy (not a given, not when the program was discontinued ten years ago), and even assuming the tooling still existed (which, as Tim says, it doesn't)... I'm not sure the plans to make a bomber on the SR-71 "pattern" exist.

Back during the Cold War there was a certain amount of work done on the A-12/SR-71 airframe to make into an interceptor (the YF-12), but I don't know if anyone ever seriously tried to make a bomber of it.

Converting an aircraft not designed to drop bombs into a bomber isn't trivial, especially if the modifications are more complicated than "shove the bomb out the cargo door in the back of the plane."

[Stuart]

Back during the Cold War there was a certain amount of work done on the A-12/SR-71 airframe to make into an interceptor (the YF-12), but I don't know if anyone ever seriously tried to make a bomber of it.

There was a bomber version of the YF-12 proposed; it was designated the B-71. The YF-12 itself was much more than just some work; prototypes were flown and the aircraft was actually ordered into production as the F-12B. 96 were ordered and funded but Macnamara refused to allow production. The B-71 would have been almost identical to the F-12B except it would have carried air-to-surface missiles instead of air-to-air ones. Its primary target would have been the big radars Stas and I were talking about.

[Starglider]

The YF-12 itself was much more than just some work; prototypes were flown and the aircraft was actually ordered into production as the F-12B.

One thing I was curious about on the YF-12; did they fix the tank sealing problems that forced the 'warmup run' and air to air refueling before sortie issues on the A-12 / SR-71 ? That presumably would not be practical for interceptor and bomber roles. If there was a fix developed, why didn't the operational SR-71s get it; did it require a new build of the tank structure?

[Stuart]

One thing I was curious about on the YF-12; did they fix the tank sealing problems that forced the 'warmup run' and air to air refueling before sortie issues on the A-12 / SR-71 ? That presumably would not be practical for interceptor and bomber roles. If there was a fix developed, why didn't the operational SR-71s get it; did it require a new build of the tank structure?

The problem was actually solved with the XB-70 AV-2 that fixed the fuel leak problem completely. The technology was then transferred to the F-12 and presumably the B-71.

As to why it was never applied to the SR-71, it was impractical to refit it to an existing aircraft, the entire fuel system would have to be stripped out and replaced. The XB-70 AV-1 never got the fix either. Also, the SR-71s were pretty much hand-built aircraft. No two were the same and each had its own individual set of manuals and needed its own chain of support. Their performance varied significantly as well. That's why they were so expensive to run. The f-12 would have been a production item and much cheaper to support in-service.

[Stuart]

The only problem with Stuart's optimism is that there are no such craft being built, none in existence and none proposed, as far as I know.

That's not strictly true; there's a lot of work quietly going on in an effort to reconstruct the state of the art in triple-sonic/hypersonic aircraft technology that was lost when the B-70 was axed. Some of the proposals for the future manned bomber are for hypersonic manned and unmanned aircraft. Everything going on is very research and proposal stage but it isn't true that nothing is happening. Whether anything will happen from the studies and experiments now being done is another matter of course.

[K. A. Pital]

That's not strictly true; there's a lot of work quietly going on in an effort to reconstruct the state of the art in triple-sonic/hypersonic aircraft technology that was lost when the B-70 was axed. Some of the proposals for the future manned bomber are for hypersonic manned and unmanned aircraft. Everything going on is very research and proposal stage but it isn't true that nothing is happening. Whether anything will happen from the studies and experiments now being done is another matter of course.

I thought you were pouring lots of money into stealth designs with lower speeds and tolerances, but also lower RCS. I know there's a lot of work on hypersonic technology (primarily in the missile field though).

[Stuart]

I thought you were pouring lots of money into stealth designs with lower speeds and tolerances, but also lower RCS. I know there's a lot of work on hypersonic technology (primarily in the missile field though).

Stealth is so 1990s. The problem with reducing RCS is that the initial steps are very easy and give a great deal of benefit for very little investment. Once the low-hanging fruit has been picked, progressive additional reductions in RCS etc get smaller and the price paid for them gets higher and higher. Price here includes performance and maintainability sacrifices as well as sheer dollar cost. By the mid- 2000s we'd pushed the technology about as far as it was going to go given the base available to work from. That's when attention started to shift away from stealth/RCS reduction to other avenues.

Also, about the same time, it became apparent that extreme RCS reduction doesn't actually have the benefits people thought it might. In short, there is an optimum level of RCS reduction and going beyond that really doesn't help much. This came out particularly with ships; you may remember all those uber-stealth ship designs that came out a few years back and how they've all quietly (or not so quietly, DDG-1000) vanished.

[Simon_Jester]

There was a bomber version of the YF-12 proposed; it was designated the B-71. The YF-12 itself was much more than just some work; prototypes were flown and the aircraft was actually ordered into production as the F-12B. 96 were ordered and funded but Macnamara refused to allow production. The B-71 would have been almost identical to the F-12B except it would have carried air-to-surface missiles instead of air-to-air ones. Its primary target would have been the big radars Stas and I were talking about.

I knew about the prototypes but had forgotten about the production order; coming from me "some work" is a very vague term.

Also, about the same time, it became apparent that extreme RCS reduction doesn't actually have the benefits people thought it might. In short, there is an optimum level of RCS reduction and going beyond that really doesn't help much. This came out particularly with ships; you may remember all those uber-stealth ship designs that came out a few years back and how they've all quietly (or not so quietly, DDG-1000) vanished.

I seem to recall you mentioning an intrinsic problem with stealth ships: while you can lower the ship's radar cross section, you cannot lower the radar cross-section of the spray being thrown up off the bow... with the result that you get the stealthiest ship in the world as long as it never moves.

[Highlord Laan]

Can an enemy truly launch an attack without warning?

Only with missiles. A missile-only attack can be truly a surprise one with very low response time (hence the obsession with huge phased-array radars which would allow detection of missile warheads from 3000-6000 km away). Anything else will blow your cover.

The USSR even had a special military term - 'raketnoye napadenie', missile attack. It was a special type of attack, the Soviet command speculated that it could be a missile-only decapitating strike.

I have to ask, but how doesn't the mere existence of the B2 render that line of thought faulty? As stealthy as it is, I've always thought one could launch a nuclear attack and disappear, leaving deniability with the US, since according to radar there was no bomber there.

Or am I overestimating the B2's ability to be a knife in the dark?

[Simon_Jester]

If only the US has B-2s, then a nuke from nowhere is as obviously our fault as a nuke from a (highly visible) B-70 would be.

[Sea Skimmer]

Any talk of deniability in a nuclear attack is just pure nonsense. Political considerations alone will make it clear who the hell did it. Even if the B-2 was truly invisible to radar which it is not, any stealth plane will be spotted in spurts, which is when stand off jamming comes into play, someone would just do tests on the fallout and identify the device as being American. Over the horizon radars are particularly capable of spotting stealth aircraft because they track the wake of an aircraft as much as they do the aircraft itself. But the high frequencies they use are so imprecise and updates so infrequent that this doesn't really translate into 'tracking' the target. You just know something is coming. The main point of radars like that is just to make a surprise mass attack impossible. Its perfectly possible for one of them to just fail to detect even a conventional aircraft because they detect so absurdly much clutter ranging from waves to meteorites.

The main reason for the B-2 to be stealth was not so that it could attack totally without warning. It was so that after the first thousand nukes went off and took apart most of the Soviet air defense system, it'd be able to loiter and search over Soviet territory for long periods and hunt down mobile ICBM launchers as well as striking targets which had survived the first wave of strikes. This way a single surviving Soviet fighter or SAM battery would be something the B-2 could just fly around at 50,000 feet, while a B-52 or B-1B would need to be down in the weeds the whole time, making it impossible for the bomber search large areas with its radar for the damn missile launchers. A B-70 could do the same thing, only using its speed and height instead of stealth to neutralize the threat of defensive remnants. The shear speed of the B-70 would also simply let it accomplish its mission much more quickly.

[Sea Skimmer]

Bah I also meant to add, OTH back scatter radar has a huge minimal range and a fixed scan sector, so a stealth plane, particularly one with very long range like the B-2 can expect to slip around the coverage area. No one has ever fielded an air defense system that had total OTH coverage in all directions, though it seems like newer cheaper designs like AN/TPS-71 ROTHR could make that coverage economical in the future should it be desired.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Stealth is so 1990s. The problem with reducing RCS is that the initial steps are very easy and give a great deal of benefit for very little investment. Once the low-hanging fruit has been picked, progressive additional reductions in RCS etc get smaller and the price paid for them gets higher and higher. Price here includes performance and maintainability sacrifices as well as sheer dollar cost. By the mid- 2000s we'd pushed the technology about as far as it was going to go given the base available to work from. That's when attention started to shift away from stealth/RCS reduction to other avenues.

Also, about the same time, it became apparent that extreme RCS reduction doesn't actually have the benefits people thought it might. In short, there is an optimum level of RCS reduction and going beyond that really doesn't help much. This came out particularly with ships; you may remember all those uber-stealth ship designs that came out a few years back and how they've all quietly (or not so quietly, DDG-1000) vanished.

It's not even as though RCS is the most important aspect now anyway. The improvements in IRSTs, satellite surveillance or other AEW measures and novel ways of detection make the focus on minimising RCS more a measure for reducing the ability to be shot down so quickly, rather than making you truly invisible. Even if the planes of the future were coated in metamaterials covering all available radar bands, they'd still have turbine signatures, atmospheric wake and a huge IR signature for anything moving at any appreciable speed. Same with ships and acoustics or objects that simply can't be covered by RAM or shaped specially.

I always saw stealth as a means to aiding the likes of DASS and ECM/ESM, rather than what some viewed as the ability to wage war and the enemy not knowing what hit them or even making a single counterstrike.

[Shroom Man 777]

People making stealth out to be a super-duper invisibility cloak that allows you to nuke people without anyone even knowing what hit them is silly. The Yugoslavians, of all people, showed that stealth isn't some kind of fancy shmancy greased lightning. That colonel who's SAM battery shot down the F-117? He retired and became a baker, and he kept a piece of the stealth fighter in his garage. How's that for an indivisible dark knifeswordfighterplane in the shadow of the black night's blackened darky shadowy blackdarkness?