As I've heard from professionals, Kyiv will not stand more than three days against Russia in a full scale military conflict.
Strategic bombers make little sense, that's why everyone (even russians) are pushing for ballistic missiles instead. Strategic bombers used by Russia manly for terror with stockpile of soviet missiles.
Strategic bombers still make a lot of sense if you need to, let's say, hold Iranian nuclear facilities at risk with large conventional bunker buster bombs. This is the primary mission that B-2 squadrons train for, and just the existence of that capability provides a lot of negotiating leverage. Of course it's also enormously expensive.
It is in fact stealth. Look up any information on it and it will tell you, it's a stealth bomber. Its primary capability is defeating enemy air defenses and holding their most valuable assets at risk.
B2 is much easier to intercept than ballistic missile. Also B2 has order of magnitude higher sticker price than ballistic missile. Good for bombing mujahedeen in the mountains and bad against someone with SAM. But for such bombing you don't need a strategic bomber, even frontline bomber could be enough.
> B2 is much easier to intercept than ballistic missile. Also B2 has order of magnitude higher sticker price than ballistic missile. Good for bombing mujahedeen in the mountains and bad against someone with SAM.
Where do people get these things? The B2 is awful for bombing low-tech insurgent forces - far too expensive to operate. Its whole purpose is defeating SAMs in particular and the best defenses in the world.
Eventually you need new a new plane; that doesn't mean the old one is a failure.
The US has only ~20 B-2s, to go with ~60 B-52s (originally built in the 1950s), and ~40 B-1Bs (~1980s tech). Only the B-2 could survive war with a peer, afaik; that was fine after the Cold War when there was no peer threat but now that China is a near-peer threat, the US needs many more bombers capable in a peer conflict and the B-2 production line was shut down decades ago (production was discontinued when the Cold War ended). They plan to build the B-21 in much larger numbers.
Also, the B-21 was built for conflict with China, where distances are much greater than in Europe.
Oh, I wasn't being sarcastic: I was trying to convey that B-2 has been a great success (at least in the eyes of the Pentagon). The B-21 looks almost exactly like the B-2 (but is half the size / weight).
Nah. Conventionally armed ballistic missiles or small strike aircraft aren't effective against deeply buried hardened bunkers, like Iranian or North Korean uranium refinement facilities. Only something like a B-2 carrying a GBU-57 will be effective for holding such targets at risk. This is considered a strategic imperative so cost is irrelevant.
Right. I'm repeating what actual experts say - including settled, consensus conclusions from decades of expertise. I'm not doing personal hot takes and if I did, they should be ignored. I'm not even posting expert hot takes, which also aren't so valuable (but much more valuable than my own).
I responded to this comment: "Destroying their entire strategic aviation forces would not meaningfully impact MAD."
Strategic bombers make little sense, that's why everyone (even russians) are pushing for ballistic missiles instead. Strategic bombers used by Russia manly for terror with stockpile of soviet missiles.