Air Force to earmark billions for new bomber

By Andrea Shalal-Esa

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Air Force will earmark
billions of dollars in its next five-year budget plan to help
meet the Pentagon’s goal to develop a new long-range bomber by
2018, a defense official told Reuters on Thursday.

The official said the timetable was aggressive but
achievable, given the new bomber would likely include
technologies already under development by the Pentagon’s
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S.
aerospace and defense industry.

“Substantial resources will be dedicated across the future
years defense plan from 2008-2013 to get there,” the official
told Reuters, speaking on the condition of not being further
identified. “It will be billions.”

Defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Virginia-based
Lexington Institute said it would cost around $20 billion to
develop and build a new bomber, unless it was based on an
existing aircraft such as the Lockheed F-22 fighter jet.

The Air Force began a formal analysis of the alternatives
for long range strike last October that could help shape the
requirements for a future bomber competition.

Officials now plan to split the analysis into separate
sections addressing the need for new long-range missiles, which
could hit targets within a few hours, and the requirements for
a next-generation bomber, which would be able to loiter over a
given area for a longer time.

Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin Corp., and Northrop Grumman
Corp. have already expressed interest in the bomber
competition.

The idea of developing an F-22 bomber variant, first
championed by former Air Force Secretary James Roche, was still
being considered, Thompson said, noting the aircraft’s
radar-evading characteristics and its supersonic speed could be
attractive features for a new bomber.

He predicted that the new bomber would be manned, despite
increasing speculation about an unmanned aircraft that could be
remotely piloted like the Predator flying missions over Iraq
daily, or fly autonomous like the Northrop Global Hawk, which
has also been used extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“No amount of software is going to allow you to cope with
all the things that come up in combat. You need a real pilot,”
Thompson said.