The Air Force wants to purchase 100 Long Range Strike Bombers (LRSB), service Secretary Deborah James said Wednesday, the high end of the 80-to-100 aircraft range the service has previously stated.
LRSB is considered one of the Air Force’s top programs. Service acquisition officials anticipate spending $564 million per bomber in fiscal year 2016 dollars (Defense Daily, Oct. 27).
B-2 incumbent Northrop Grumman [NOC] beat out a Lockheed Martin-[LMT]-Boeing [BA] team in October to win the lucrative deal. The contract award is currently under protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
James also said she directed her staff to see how the Air Force can speed up its part of the Foreign Military Sale (FMS) process and work with partner nations to ensure United States security cooperation efforts are responsive to evolving needs, such as additional munitions for partner nations, based on engagements in the Middle East. She said the Air Force is working to speed up the FMS process by setting pre-approved technology transfer baselines for major Air Force systems.
Air Force spokeswoman Capt. Becky Heyse said Wednesday a technology transfer baseline is an Air Force position on the transfer of technology to foreign partners. She said these are technically not a pre-approval, but a pre-coordinated position across the Air Force enterprise in the event the Pentagon is interested in pursuing a FMS case involving critical technology or information.
As opposed to today’s FMS process where a partner nation requests a technology or platform, James said she wants to identify capabilities that the Air Force would like to see its partners acquire, allowing the service to better forecast and prepare for future FMS activity. James believes this pre-approved baseline should cut the FMS process by weeks, if not months, at least for certain technologies.
James noted that the service is only one cog in a FMS machine that also includes the State Department, Congress, the Pentagon and industry. Partner nations typically request a sale, DoD reports it to Congress and then lawmakers decide whether to approve the sale.
James’ remarks came during a presentation at the National Press Club in Washington.