Arlington, VA | September 11, 2024 — The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies is pleased to announce a new entry in its Policy Paper series, The B-21 Bomber: A Cost-effective Deterrent for a Multi-polar World by Mark A. Gunzinger, Director of Future Concepts and Capability Assessments.
For the past 30 years, the U.S. Air Force sized its forces for lesser regional contingencies and struggled to modernize with inadequate budgets. This compelled the service to trade warfighting capacity to maintain current readiness. Today’s Air Force is now the smallest, oldest, and least ready for a conflict with a peer adversary in its history. Over the same timeframe, China modernized its forces to offset the U.S. military’s advantages in precision strike, stealth, information networks, and other capabilities. Moreover, China and Russia’s acts of aggression make clear they are willing to use military power to achieve their regional hegemonic ambitions.
The Air Force must reset its force design and grow its warfighting capacity. B-21 stealthy bombers provide unmatched survivability, large weapons payloads, very long ranges, and other capabilities integral to this new force design. The Raider’s capabilities cannot be matched by forces operated by any other U.S. service or allied military and are the most cost-effective option to increase the size of the U.S. triad to deter two nuclear peer adversaries, China and Russia. DOD must acquire sufficient B-21s to field a force of at least 300 bombers and do so at a rate that will grow its deterrence capacity this decade when the threat of peer aggression is most acute. This will require Congress to allocate additional resources to the Air Force to ensure it can acquire B-21s at scale without sacrificing the service’s other critically needed modernization programs.
The Mitchell Institute Policy Papers is a series presenting new thinking and policy proposals to respond to the emerging security and aerospace power challenges of the 21st century. These papers are written for lawmakers and their staffs, policy professionals, business and industry, academics, journalists, and the informed public.
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