The USAF is now heavily touting its next generation stealth bomber, the B-21. It will supposedly have such and such capabilities, will be available by the mid-2020s, and will cost X amount of money. All of these assertions are blatant lies, or at least they are lies if the track record of similar projects is any indication. There is a one hundred percent certainty that the aircraft will not enter service until, at best, the early 2030s, that it will cost two or three times as much as currently projected, will be plagued by bugs and performance problems that will take years and oceans of cash to correct, and will be far more expensive to operate and maintain than promised.
The fault ridden F-35 is a perfect example of this baleful trend, only worse, much worse. It should be straight out cancelled forthwith before we end up with unreliable, poorly performing, and already obsolete fighters costing half a billion dollars each, but of course it won't be. One shudders to think what the B-21 program will ultimately cost, but two billion dollars per aircraft is not out of the question. It's insane. We can build naval destroyers for half that much. Arleigh Burkes that is. The ill-conceived Littoral Combat Ship program mirrors the problems of the F-35.
Every major new weapons system fielded in the last forty plus years has followed that dreary template. Every. Single. One. There are many reasons, some good, most bad, why this is the case, but nevertheless the pattern has proven robust. And Congress buys it because of the sugarplums dancing in their heads engendered by a manufacturer's intentional spreading of the build around as many polities as possible.
There may well be a need for an ultra-stealth penetrating bomber, but all parties concerned will have to lie through their teeth to get it built. Even more bizarre is that everyone knows everyone is lying. Not even the dimmest congresscritter accepts at face value the promises of developers, but they climb on board anyway since the multi-billion dollar largesse will be spread far and wide.
Not even dictatorships can escape this phenomenon. Russian and Chinese development regimes take the same baleful path, although in the Chinese case development is aided by wholesale theft of western technology which, luckily for us, tends to be countered by wholesale corruption and technological inexperience.
If the B-21 project is approved it will progress as outlined above and there does not seem to be any power on Earth capable of preventing it, or anyone much interested in preventing it. Unfortunately, if this particular Big Lie was not in effect, if developers stated realistic timelines and costs, then it's highly doubtful these projects would ever be approved in the first place, even if the weapons are desperately needed.
Virtually all new weapons systems, airborne or otherwise, suffer from the same problem, especially new seaborne systems. The problem is so pervasive and without exceptions that it scarcely qualifies as unusual anymore. It's just the current way of doing business. The western way of low casualty warfare is brutally expensive and steadily getting more so, as the Chinese are rapidly discovering. Even stolen technology has to be built and fielded, a process which quickly reveals the ruinous expense of doing so. The Indian military has honed this art to such a fine degree that major new in-house weapons systems can expect to be deployed, never. Turgid waves of corruption and incompetence surge back and forth through development programs for decades until the government throws up its hands in surrender and buys foreign hardware. A decade or two after that troops and pilots might actually receive the weapons, by which point they will be thoroughly obsolete.
Just remembered an article I read back in Sept. 2016. It reported that the design and initial testing phase of a new hand grenade for the military has taken, so far, five years. It was also reported that with continued testing and evaluation the grenade will not be supplied to troops for another five years. Well there you have all of the woeful circumstances listed above in a concussive nutshell. It will take a full decade to design, test, manufacture, and field the new device. This is a hand grenade mind you. Not a fighter, not a tank, not an artillery piece or even a rifle, but a flipping hand grenade. I have no doubt that it will be the first hand grenade consisting of parts made in all fifty states and will cost several thousand dollars each to obtain.
Addendum: The F-35 appears to have solved enough of its teething problems to enter service in increasing numbers. All to the good, but it doesn't alter the frightening costs of its development and maintenance expenses. The only hopeful note in evidence is that the Chinese and the Russians are finding that catching up to the U.S. level of technology is proving much harder than they thought.
They can steal specifications the livelong day, but it doesn't excuse them of the need to duplicate and integrate stolen tech into their industrial bases and thence into home-grown systems. The one thing they can not steal is the reliability of a system built elsewhere by experts with much greater knowledge bases. The Chinese J20 is a case in point. An alleged competitor to the F-22, its development began in the 1990s and has yet to enter service in any numbers because of reliability and performance issues. Its development could easily span thirty years before the aircraft enters normal service in front line squadrons, and very well may not match the performance of the aircraft which was its target. C'est la guerre dudes.
Second addendum. The B-21 Raider bomber has had its public debut, and, supposedly, it has come in on time and on budget, but I've yet to see any figures on cost. If the program continues on without major and expensive hiccups, it will be the first time a major weapons system has done so.
