One of the other new skills that the B-21 offers is the potential for unmanned flights, whereby pilots can fly them remotely from American soil.
The Air Force has not announced when it will use the new aircraft, although military analysts assume that the first aircraft will be put into operation in 2026 or 2027.
The bomber is part of the efforts of the pentagon to modernize all three pillars of its nuclear triad, which includes silo-gestious nuclear ballistic rockets and submarine-started explosive heads, while it shifted from the anti-terrorist campaigns of the past decades to do justice to China's rapid military modernization.
China is well on the way to disposing of over 1,500 nuclear weapons by 2035, and its progress in hyperschall, cyber warfare, space skills and other areas are "the most consequent and systemic challenge for the national security of the USA and the free and open international system," said Pentagon this week in its annual China report.
"We needed a new bomber for the 21st century, which would enable us to provide us with much more complicated threats, such as the threats that we fear that one day we would expect them from China and Russia," said Deborah Lee James, the secretary of the Air Force, as that of the Raider Treaty in 2015. "The B-21 is more survival and can accommodate it with these much more difficult threats."
While the Raider may resemble the B-2, the similarities stop as soon as you come in, said Ms. Warten.
"The way it works internally is extremely progressive compared to the B-2, since the technology has developed in relation to computing power so far that we can now embed it into the software of the B-21," she said.
Ms. Warten could not discuss the details of these technologies, but said that the bomber would be more stale and claimed that he was the most frequently produced.
"If we speak of little observability, it is incredibly low observability," she said. "You will hear it, but you really won't see it."
Six B-21 Raider are in production; The Luftwaffe plans to build 100 that either use nuclear weapons or conventional bombs and be used with or without human crew. Both the Air Force and Northrop also indicate the relatively fast development of the Raider: The bomber went from the award of the order to the debut in seven years. Other new hunter and ship programs have taken decades.
The costs of the bombers are unknown. The Air Force previously estimated the price for the purchase of 100 aircraft to an average of $ 550 million per piece in 2010-around $ 753 million today-but it is unclear how much the Air Force actually spends.
The fact that the price is not public is worried about the government's wax dogs.
"It could be a big challenge for us to carry out our normal analysis of a large program like this," said Dan Grazier, Senior Defense Policy Fellow at Project on Government Over.
"It is easy to say that the B-21 is still on schedule before it actually flies. Because only when one of these programs goes into the actual test phase will real problems discover. And that is the point where the schedules really start to slide and the costs really start to rise."
The Raider will not complete his first flight before 2023. However, Northrop Grumman has with advanced computers, said Ms. Warten, testing the performance of the Raider with a digital twin, a virtual replica of the revealing.
The B-2 should also be a fleet of more than 100 aircraft, but the Air Force only built 21 of them, due to cost overruns and a changed safety environment according to the case of the Soviet Union.
Due to the significant requirement of maintenance of the aging bomber, only a few are ready to fly on a certain day, said Todd Harrison, aerospace specialist and managing director of Metrea Strategic Insights.
The B-21 Raider, which has its name from the Doolittle attack from 1942 via Tokyo, will be somewhat smaller than the B-2 to increase its reach, said WARDEN.
In October 2001, B-2 pilots set a record when they flew 44 hours at a time after the attacks of September 11 to drop the first bombs in Afghanistan. But the B-2 often makes a long time and return flights because there are only a few hangars worldwide that can absorb their span. This limits where B-2S can land for the required maintenance after the flight. And the hangars had to be air -conditioned because the windows of the spirit cannot be opened and hotter climate zones can heat the cockpit electronics.
The new Raider will also get new hangars to meet the size and complexity of the bomber, said Ms. Warden.
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