Vol. 53, September 2024
Key Points
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.
e 2014 annexation of Crimea, the invasion of Ukraine, and
the threat of an assault on Taiwan demonstrate Russia and China’s
willingness to use their militaries to achieve their hegemonic ambitions.
is is why rapidly defeating peer aggression is now DOD’s keystone
force sizing and shaping requirement. A major challenge for the
Air Force is the fact that its current combat forces cannot meet this
requirement at an acceptable degree of risk. is force is a direct result
of DOD decisions over the last 30 years to downsize the Air Force’s
combat aircraft inventories and forgo modernization programs needed
to keep pace with emerging threats. e service’s fighter inventory is
now less than half the size of the force available to respond to Iraqi
aggression in 1991, and its bomber inventory is one-third the size of the
force that deterred the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
e Air Force is creating a new force design to defeat aggression
by a peer adversary, deter nuclear attacks on the United States, and meet
its other global operational requirements. is force design will require
it to field new capabilities like stealthy B-21s and a Next Generation
Air Dominance (NGAD) family of systems. Only B-21s—and 19 B-2s
while they remain in the force—will have the survivability, range, and
large payloads needed to strike targets at the required scale to defeat peer
aggression in the Pacific and then “swing” if needed to deter aggression
in another theater. And like B-2s, B-21s are dual capable, which means
they are designed to conduct nuclear as well as conventional strikes. is
dual capability creates an opportunity to rapidly grow the size of the
U.S. triad to deter two peer nuclear adversaries—Russia and China—as
well as rebuild capacity to respond to conventional threats in multiple
theaters as recommended by the Congressional Commission on the
National Defense Strategy. is “two for one” approach is a once-in-
a-generation opportunity to cost-effectively rebuild DOD’s deterrence
capacity and credibility at a time when the threat of peer aggression is
reaching an unprecedented high.
Abstract
The B-21 Bomber: A Cost-effective
Deterrent for a Multi-polar World
by Col Mark A. Gunzinger, USAF (Ret.)
Director of Future Concepts and Capability Assessments, the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies
MITCHELL INSTITUTE
Policy Paper
