The focus this time around is for an 80-100 block build. Thats why there is a range and not a single number. Of course what happens in 2032 is anyone’s guess. your views however are hardly a guess on most matters US 😉
No matter which nation is developing which weapons system, if you are going to factor in the cost to develop technology, the system itself and build provisions into your service to accommodate the weapons system then the cost of doing this is going to be spread over the number of units you intend on buying. If that number comes down, the dollar amount instantly rises. If you intend on buying 100 aircraft, and end up buying only 30, the price would reflect that reduced number especially if you have built up the industry, sought a technical complexity that could only be justified by that amount of purchase. Same applies to the Typhoon, Rafale, PAKFA, or any other project. Of course, if the USAF were given a green light to buy 300 LRS-B’s, they could afford to spend a much greater amount on R&D to get capability into the vehicle but everything has to be balanced. The 80-100 range reflects what they intend on buying and their development allocations acquisition budgets (tentative) all assume that this range would hold. From a developmental perspective if you approach a design and delivery effort that factors in a production run ranging form 20 to 100 then you are going to be all over the place in terms of what designs are submitted and finally approved as the best cost-capability propositions. You do not approach a design effort with the notion that lets spend billions to develop a system, and then we’ll figure out how many we can afford. The capability and technology in your product is a function of how many examples you are likely to procure. Each OEM has to build its product from the ground up with that in mind.
At the end of the day with classified, and complex systems such as this you really do not want to be extremely focused on a capitative method since a lot of what you are going to be doing, or have been doing to get to this point has been cutting edge to a point that much of it is too sensitive to be de-classified. You need the flexibility to pay 50-100 million more per vehicle, if you are getting a bump in capability because of that. At the same time you have to be disciplined enough not add too much capability or tinker too much with the message that you have been sending as your RFP’s evolve so as to loose track and make the system unaffordable. Being the decision makers on such a program/effort is definitely not an easy task and generalizing, that this will go over budget and the death spiral would eventually kill it is being ignorant of the fact that they are actively trying to avoid these things. We know absolutely nothing what is happening and what happened since the NGB in terms of technology/capability development and prototyping. How much risk has been mitigated through previous efforts, through current efforts which are in their 5th year now, and how much confidence the team has to deliver on what they have been working on for some time. You also have to take into account that the B-2 was developed in the 80’s, and there are some accounts that suggest close to 700 Billion in classified spending since the early 90’s. We also have news reports that claim that 80% of what the Skunk works does is classified, and some even claiming that Boeing has had more focus in developing its “stealth credentials” compared to Lockheed in the early 2000’s thanks to its classified prototypes and developmental efforts. All this is known only to those that are working on this and without knowledge of what capability, and technology exists in the classified domain, how risky it is to put into a platform that needs to be affordable etc
Let’s just wait and see who gets in after the election next year. I think the 80-100 build is just about right, afterall the B-1B had a production run of a 100 aircraft.
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