http://www.janes.com/defence/news/idr/idr060404_2_n.shtml
One of the most significant decisions in the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), published in February (2006), is its support for a plan to develop a long-range strike (LRS) aircraft and bring it into service by 2018. The QDR states that the US Air Force (USAF) "has set a goal of increasing its long-range strike capabilities by 50 per cent and the penetrating component of long-range strike by a factor of five by 2025".
The timeline is tight, but neither USAF leaders nor the Fiscal Year 2007 (FY07) budget provide any specific answers on how the new capability will be achieved. The budget continues the Next Generation LRS (NG-LRS) study, which the USAF started in 2004, without any dramatic increases, and it does not indicate whether the USAF's share of the now-terminated Joint Unmanned Combat Air System (J-UCAS) budget will go to LRS. Some of these decisions should be covered by an analysis of alternatives (AoA) that the USAF started in late 2005, which should be finished at the end of this year. Budget charts indicate that system development and demonstration could start by 2009-10.
However, USAF Chief of Staff General T Michael Moseley says that "the backbone of LRS will be a bomber, or what we have called a bomber, with much longer range, more persistence and a much higher payload" than current aircraft.
Niche roles
The goal of the LRS is to provide the USAF with an aircraft that is less dependent on forward bases than its fighter aircraft - reflecting the increasing difficulty of finding friendly and secure bases close to Afghanistan and Iraq, and the potential for conflict with China. LRS will have to be able to penetrate defended airspace, unlike the B-1B and B-52. The USAF is looking for speed of reaction - the ability to hit targets very soon after they are detected - and persistence. Persistence tends to mean large payloads, because there is little point in designing a long-range aircraft that runs out of payload prematurely. These requirements have eliminated the FB-22, with its limited range and payload, together with the idea of a standoff "arsenal aircraft" armed with cruise missiles.
Nobody appears to be considering an aircraft with anything like the 20 t-class bomb load of the B-2: that is not only expensive to provide, but unnecessary given the lethality of modern conventional weapons. A report last year for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments by analyst Barry Watts suggests a weapon load of 4.5-9 t. As for range, a 4,700 km unrefuelled range is considered to be the minimum - covering a penetration depth of 1,850 km, both ways, into hostile territory, plus a 500 km distance between hostile ground-based defences and friendly tanker orbits.
