Nowadays strategic bombers, when up against a peer or near-peer enemy, are mainly used as a launching platform for standoff strike weapons, i.e. missiles. They have to stay out of range of modern air defense systems. This is a function that can be performed by much simpler and cheaper planes than any of these over-engineered billion dollar boondoggles that the US military industrial complex is spending so much of the US defense budget making. The only bigger waste of money are carriers which are all but obsolete in the era of cheap, long range precision hypersonic cruise weapons and global satellite ISR (which both Russia and China have). They are simply far too expensive to risk being lost to a handful of shore launched missiles. Sure these platforms can all still do a lot of damage to some poor developing nation, but would fail spectacularly going up even against a mid tier power like Iran.
Along with the problems you highlight in the beginning, strategic bombers are also too slow to outrun interceptor aircraft, to large and bulky to avoid SAMs and Radar, extremely resource and manpower heavy, fuel guzzlers, and a plethora of other problems.
Plus, carriers don’t even just have to worry about shore launched missiles, as for example almost every mission undertaken by a carrier task force during the mid to late Cold War wouldn’t be complete without a part of the mission being, “Then the carrier group pissed themselves, because a Mirage F-1 or a MiG-29 suddenly appeared and launched Exocet missiles from 180 km away”.
The US still thinks it’s the 1940s, and the generation of elites who came to power after the collapse of the Soviet Union have drunk their own koolaid. They actually believe the post war mythology that the US built up about itself and its war machine.
They are dangerously delusional and the fact that their beliefs are in constant conflict with reality is something they cannot understand and that only makes them more angry. They feel the empire weakening but they are unable to stop it.
Nowadays strategic bombers, when up against a peer or near-peer enemy, are mainly used as a launching platform for standoff strike weapons, i.e. missiles. They have to stay out of range of modern air defense systems. This is a function that can be performed by much simpler and cheaper planes than any of these over-engineered billion dollar boondoggles that the US military industrial complex is spending so much of the US defense budget making. The only bigger waste of money are carriers which are all but obsolete in the era of cheap, long range precision hypersonic cruise weapons and global satellite ISR (which both Russia and China have). They are simply far too expensive to risk being lost to a handful of shore launched missiles. Sure these platforms can all still do a lot of damage to some poor developing nation, but would fail spectacularly going up even against a mid tier power like Iran.
Along with the problems you highlight in the beginning, strategic bombers are also too slow to outrun interceptor aircraft, to large and bulky to avoid SAMs and Radar, extremely resource and manpower heavy, fuel guzzlers, and a plethora of other problems.
Plus, carriers don’t even just have to worry about shore launched missiles, as for example almost every mission undertaken by a carrier task force during the mid to late Cold War wouldn’t be complete without a part of the mission being, “Then the carrier group pissed themselves, because a Mirage F-1 or a MiG-29 suddenly appeared and launched Exocet missiles from 180 km away”.
The US still thinks it’s the 1940s, and the generation of elites who came to power after the collapse of the Soviet Union have drunk their own koolaid. They actually believe the post war mythology that the US built up about itself and its war machine.
They are dangerously delusional and the fact that their beliefs are in constant conflict with reality is something they cannot understand and that only makes them more angry. They feel the empire weakening but they are unable to stop it.