By Robert Farley
How will the U.S. Air Force pay for its newest advanced bomber?
How will the Air Force pay for Northrup Grumman’s Long Range Strike Bomber? A recent article from Lara Seligman delved into the debate over paying for the bomber, which will eat up an enormous chunk of the USAF’s procurement funds, even if it remains on budget. Seligman suggests that the Air Force may seek to set aside funding for the bomber, outside the normal USAF procurement budget, just as the Navy has sought for the SSBN-X replacement boomer.
The problem goes to the core of how the United States procures weapons. The LRS-B (we all pray for the day we can simply write “B-3”) fulfills joint requirements, but will operate within the United States Air Force. While reforms such as Goldwater-Nichols have improved “jointness” by creating connections between the services, and emphasizing the combatant commands, budgeting has remained tied to service priorities.
And so we have an aircraft that the Air Force believes will play a central role in the joint projection of American power for the rest of the century, but that must come out of the Air Force budget. The Navy, for its part, continues to jealously defend its own procurement priorities, including the CVN-78 aircraft carriers that remain the centerpieces of the future fleet. The potential conflict is particularly relevant to the U.S. force posture in the Asia-Pacific, which requires close collaboration between the Air Force’s long range strike assets and the Navy’s surface and subsurface assets in order to crack China’s robust A2/AD system.
Congress may create and fund set asides for both the SSBN-X and the LRS-B. If it doesn’t, we could see the first serious, public inter-service fight over procurement in several decades. This would hardly be the first inter-service fight stemming from conflict between long range strike and carrier aviation.
Read the full story at The Diplomat