By Marina Malenic
The Air Force now hopes to field a new bomber aircraft in the 2020s and does not expect the next generation platform to be a major technological departure from its current fleet, according to the service’s top uniformed official.
“A question will be, how aggressive, how ambitious do you want to be?” the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Norton Schwartz, said yesterday. “Do you want [the new bomber] to be evolutionary or revolutionary?
“My hunch is, it will be evolutionary, and we’ll strive to bring something to the field early in the 2020 decade,” he told reporters at the Pentagon.
Prior projections have held that the new aircraft would enter service in 2018.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates last month recommended that the president forego seeking funds for a new bomber development effort in Fiscal Year 2010 to further study the plan.
Schwartz confirmed that the effort is still very much alive and is being more carefully defined within his organization.
“I don’t sense that the Secretary of Defense or his team believe that there is any less need for a long-range strike capability in the department portfolio,” he said.
At issue, according to the general, is the need for a more thorough definition of the new platform’s characteristics such as range, payload, stealth capabilities, nuclear weapons-carrying capability and whether it will be remotely piloted.
“We had not done our homework well enough to satisfy him that we had the parameters defined properly,” he said.
Schwartz said the service plans to present its plans during the Pentagon’s major nuclear posture and overarching weapons reviews this year.