America's Next Bomber: Unmanned, Unlimited Range, Aimed At China 400
An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. military is developing its next generation bomber with Chinese anti-access strategy — the ability to stop any enemy force from coming to fight with things like carrier killer missiles — in mind. The new bomber will replace older platforms like the 1950's B-52, the 1970's B-1, and 1990's B-2 stealth bomber. The new bomber will sport some unique qualities. It will have an option to be unmanned, will act similar to a UAV, have better stealth capabilities, will be connected to U.S. intelligence networks to create a 'smart' battlefield environment, and have near unlimited range thanks to in-air refueling."
Hold on a second... (Score:5, Insightful)
We give them all our money and jobs, and then spend a fortune to arm ourselves against them. Something.....is.....wrong.....here.
U.S. loves to kill things (Score:2, Insightful)
Why else would they build this thing to fight an enemy that doesn't even exist. Most likely it will be a trillion-dollar blackhole like the F-22 Fighter debacle. Do the politicians not care that the national + state debt is almost 19 trillion dollars? (almost $190,000 per household). Guess not.
And whoever modded this as "funny" (Score:3, Insightful)
If you modded the parent as "funny", I assume that you mean in an ironic sort of way. Because, the parent is right on target - so to speak. As a matter of fact, my Taiwanese friends are under the impression that if China decides to assert her ownership of Taiwan, the US would huff and puff and wouldn't do shit about it; hence why the Taiwanese diaspora here in the US.
If you ever wanted to know what it was like to live in Rome during its decline, come to the US- we know.
Re:U.S. loves to kill things (Score:4, Insightful)
Anybody who thinks China isn't 'the enemy' is smoking something good (come on, share it, dude). The next set of wars will be resource wars (just like the last ones). Likely by proxy and likely 'low intensity' but they will be wars nonetheless. The chance of the US and China going full out turn-the-the-guy-into-molten-glass is pretty low (but non zero).
There will be too much competition for oil (and possibly water) in the next 50 years. We're not doing anything to mitigate growth - our economy requires growth to survive - and so does China's.
That said, the idea that we need half billion dollar UAV bombers to pound somebody's jungle into a parking lot seems a tad over the top. TFA was really just an exercise in Pentagon babble, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing....
Here we go again... (Score:3, Insightful)
The F-22 kickbacks have been paid off for a weapon that will likely never see service.
The F-35's on their way to suck at the budget teat in Canada and the US both. Planes which just happen to be ill-suited to patrolling the arctic, which is the main reason Canada wanted them in the first place, effectively making them as useless as the F-22s are for the US.
How many BILLIONS are they planning to spend on bombers to attack an "enemy" that shows no signs of military buildup or aggression THIS time?
Just how long is it going to take the world to stop feeding the military-industrial pigs that design this overpriced crap? When are our governments going to realize that you reach a point where no matter how much you've spent to date, you have to CANCEL a project because it will NEVER pay for itself nor deliver what it promised?
Re:Meanwhile ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Before then, it'll be destroyed by itself, at this rate.
Re:near unlimited range thanks to in-air refueling (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how easy it would be to turn a B52 into a UAV?
There are $55 billion reasons not to turn B-52s into UAVs
The new "Long-Range Strike Bomber" [...] just $550 million per copy for up to 100 copies, with production beginning in the early 2020s. The U.S. Congress approved the first $300 million in development funding late last year. The Pentagon has vowed to cancel the Long-Range Strike Bomber if the total projected program cost exceeds $55 billion.
Maybe they should just strip down the F-22 fleet and make them unmanned.
I bet they could do that for ~$100 million per plane.
Not possible, Ace. (Score:5, Insightful)
It would take the concerted effort of the majority of the world to "destroy" the USA militarily, leaving aside nukes or really good sneakiness. They have the strongest military in the world and very good logistics, and have adequate food, water, and oil supplies to sustain any war. Although industrial capacity has diminished in recent decades, a combination the military industrial complex and the U.S. auto industry means that it is still capable of the industry necessary for war. In terms of underwear bombs, the United States is so huge that while a proliferation of bombs would of course radically change life in the country, they would not destroy it.
Destruction is more likely to be wrought from poor incentive structures in U.S. government, which makes effective and necessary change very difficult.
Re:Not possible, Ace. (Score:5, Insightful)
Rome wasn't burnt in a day, either.
Re:Not possible, Ace. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that's the point: they're going through their resources (and morals) so quickly out of fear of those scary muslims that they'll eventually destroy themselves in non-military ways. Rather than being conquered, they'll be rendered irrelevant by their own actions.
Re:Meanwhile ... (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, the hysteria over Muslim terrorists is preventing the US from investing its time and money in competing with China (and EU, and BRIC, and the rest of our global competitors). The underwear bomb isn't going to destroy America. But forcing every traveller through the underwear bomb detectors that don't work is surely destroying America. Along with all the other colossal wastes inspired by Muslim terrorists in our insane backlash.
A few hundred $billion invested in intel and assassinations, under a new legal regime that allows legitimate, Constitutional US courts to determine that certain specific people and militias are legitimate targets, would destroy the Muslim terrorist threat. Combined with a few hundred $billion more invested in education, trade and counter propaganda in the cesspools where these terrorists fester.
But instead, we're playing head-pong over "CHINA!" "TERRORISM!", responding badly to each. Because we insist on rage and paranoid overreactions, instead of careful strategy that uses force only as a last resort, not the first and only method.
Re:near unlimited range thanks to in-air refueling (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically they are just a way to baboozle 55 billion dollars out of the US treasury with whispers in the dark of the yellow terror. With stealth cruise missiles that can be fired from land, ships, submarines and aircraft, why the hell would you stuff around with a 550 million dollar bomber whose only real purpose is to cost 550 million dollars.
You could imagine US corporations paying kickbacks to Chinese Officials to ramp up war talk and publicly advertise and exaggerate military capability. I wonder how big a bribe someone like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman would pay a few Chinese Officials to make threatening noises and to go on a militaristic marketing spree. A 10 million dollar investment out of one of those off shore tax haves, sure would, has, will go a long way to get some hostile words out of officials from China.
Besides it's in the Government of China's best interest to send the US broke by allowing the US military Industrial complex to spend trillions preparing to fight a fictitious war and with US lobbyists in the game, treasonous US politicians are right in it up to their necks.
Re:Hold on a second... (Score:5, Insightful)
Think of it from the Chinese end: "We're loaning these guys money which they're using to buy weapons that can defeat our defenses. Something is very wrong here...."
Gearing Up for War With China (Score:1, Insightful)
The military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned the US about is focused on China. Its using China to justify its existence. It needs China to sustain its budget. And I think it is subtly behind the propaganda that got this author to suggest the weapons development is focused on China.
We could say China has been around 60 years or 2000 years. But in either case, China has has a pretty good track record of not engaging in wars that were not within or adjacent to its borders. In 60 years the US's can make no such claim. That the US would need a bomber to strike targets in China "for self defense" is not reasonable. And suggesting that the US would be in a defensive war against China flies in the face of what we know about Chinese ambitions.
Re:near unlimited range thanks to in-air refueling (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:near unlimited range thanks to in-air refueling (Score:5, Insightful)
And the pilots cost less than the flight crew, and the flight crew costs less than the maintenance base, and the maintenance base costs less than the logistics supply chain...
$55B is just airframe production + R&D, the real expense is in deployment.
Re:Not possible, Ace. (Score:5, Insightful)
The country is doing okay. The government... not so much. Many of the policies put in place over the last 50 years have been directly detrimental to the interests of the peoples of the United States.
When I, and many others, took the military entrance oath, it included the phrase ,"defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic". Many of the actions taken by the government, and its myriad subordinate entities, would easily fall into that category. The problem is that even if you throw out the old rascals, the new ones probably won't be much better for very long.
The people that want to "use the methods of the system to clean it up" are stuck in a bad place. They want to fix the system, but the system has protected itself by making sure that the methods in place quit working. Instead the methods simply point out which ants need to have a finger put on them.
I love my country. It's people are my family. It's natural resources and history are my treasures. I understand now why my 97 year old grandmother was so ashamed of what our government had become. It hurts my family. It steals my treasures. It makes me a criminal in my own home.
It's setting up the conditions for the Second American Civil War. Too many people have little to nothing left to lose.And that number is growing despite the claims of a "recovery". The current policy makers seem to think that if they keep us distracted by constant foreign war, we'll not notice the corruption of our leaders, or the growing impoverishment of the people. That we're not informed enough, or smart enough to take a step back and see the big picture.
They know it would only take a spark in the right, or wrong, place to set the country ablaze. The internment camps have been built and in place for decades, and various agencies, policies, and procedures created to help control a popular uprising. It's understandable, of course. Any organism without a sense of self-preservation dies quickly, and a government is definitely an organisation. But it's poisoned itself for so long, it's starting to choke and wither. Soon, it won't even be able to defend itself against its own people, who've been disenfranchised and made into modern Huns. So many people are already enslaved in the American penal system, that numerically it's a country in its' own right.
Forget the scary "muslims", be afraid of the politicians, and the homeless, and the vanishing middle class who will soon be homeless.
Re:U.S. loves to kill things (Score:2, Insightful)
Uranium can only be used in gun-type designs which are 1) inherently unsafe and 2) extremely inefficient.
And 3) work as the US demonstrated. Point 3) overrides the other two points. Plus, if you look at any weapon, 1) holds. Weapons are inherently unsafe by design. Else they wouldn't be weapons.
If you think Iran would waste perfectly good uranium in a weapon, you're wrong. They wouldn't.
Sure, they would. Even crude, working, uranium bombs provide a lot of value vastly in excess of the raw materials used to make the bomb.
The bottom line is that everyone thinks with good reason that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon. This issue pretty much was settled a few years back during the Wikileaks revelation of US embassy communications with such things as the King of Saudi Arabia urging the Bush administration to strike the "head of the snake" (that is, a military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities) or Turkish officials talking it over with Secretary Clinton about the risks of nuclear proliferation (particularly, neighbors, Egypt and Saudi Arabia), if Iran builds a nuclear arsenal. None of these discussions were intended to be public.
And Stuxnet and assassinations of Iranian scientists involved in the program are rather high risk operations. I don't buy at all that someone would use them on a program that was merely developing medical isotopes.
Re:Not possible, Ace. (Score:5, Insightful)
The country is doing okay. The government... not so much. Many of the policies put in place over the last 50 years have been directly detrimental to the interests of the peoples of the United States.
Not if you count corporations as 'people'. If you do then the policies have been a fantastic success!
Re:And once it's connected to US military networks (Score:2, Insightful)
It will also be a great way to take out some hacker's ex-girlfriend's house in Nevada. Damn bitch left him for a cop.
And after the damn bitch, the cop, then everyone else.
Excerpted from wikipedia
Skynet was originally installed by the military to control the national arsenal on August 4, 1997, at which time it began learning at a geometric rate. On August 29, it gained self-awareness[1], and the panicking operators, realizing the extent of its abilities, tried to deactivate it. Skynet perceived this as an attack and came to the conclusion that all of humanity would attempt to destroy it. To defend itself, Skynet launched nuclear missiles under its command at Russia, which responded with a nuclear counter-attack against the U.S. and its allies. As a result of the nuclear exchange, over three billion people were killed in an event that came to be known as Judgment Day.
This, people, is where we are heading.
Re:Not possible, Ace. (Score:3, Insightful)
The USSR wasn't destroyed militarily, it collapsed under the effort of paying for all the military dick waving.
Nope. As I have mentioned many times before, USSR "paid" for its military production to itself, because the whole production was government-owned and ran as a nonprofit. The only real "payments" were salaries -- consistent with the rest of the industry, and with full-employment policy those were unavoidable with or without military production. US propaganda projects the "expenses" sucked from the US government and society by military-industrial complex onto other countries, in an attempt to present them as normal, acceptable and justified. They are not.
This is getting repeated WAY too often, I smell a Republican propaganda campaign.
Re:Not possible, Ace. (Score:5, Insightful)
The USSR 'paid' for its military production by sacrificing investment in it's people, education and consumer goods in order to maintain expenditures in it's military. Where the resources are allocated matters. It also did so using a very inefficient (though theoretically nonprofit) model. The corrupt officials didn't need profits to move most of the remaining production into their pockets. When Perestroika kicked in and let people see what they were missing things started to fall apart and when they didn't quickly and oppressively use the military it came totally apart.
The US has also allocated resources to its military which don't improve people, education, consumer production or create consumer goods. These might be necessary expenditures but the fact is that the government spends on behalf of each family about $6k for defense. The wars have run another $10k. If part of that could have gone elsewhere without imperiling safety other benefits would have been received.