No no no, you have to leave plenty of room for the new B-21!!! Remember, its a long range strategic nuclear bomber, meaning that it literally serves no purpose beyond rusting away in some hanger in backwoods Georgia. A perfect moneysink for the Airforce.
Isn’t it like half a billion dollars for one unit? This nation doesn’t give shit about its own people let alone others.
IDK, comrade, yankee rulers seems to really be itching for a nuclear war lately
True, but such a war would almost completely be fought with ICBMs, IRBMs, Cruise missiles, and SLBM armed submarines.
Nuclear bombers are at best a failsafe and fallback if all else fails, meaning that they are practically useless and the ultimate time and money sink. Which is why countries like Russia, Britain, and China don’t bother updating their strategic bombers and just keep using ancient 50’s planes like the TU-95, Avro Vulcan, Valiant, TU-16, and Xian.
Like you can at least use F-35s for small war crimes and terror strikes, but what can you use a strategic bomber for? Practically nothing, a lesson the US learned when they tried to use their out of production and expensive B-52 fleet for conventional bombing in Vietnam, where they irreplaceably lost half of them to SAMs.
Which is why countries like Russia, Britain, and China don’t bother updating their strategic bombers and just keep using ancient 50’s planes like the TU-95, Avro Vulcan, Valiant, TU-16, and Xian
Tu-160 and Tu-22 are getting modernized and upgraded right now. Source: some of the tech for it is developed in my city
True, that’s pretty standard for all older airframes in all countries, however that is mostly refurbishment and upgrades to internals such as electronics, countermeasures, fuel lines, crew comfort, navigation, and radar equipment. At the end of the day however, the airframes and their core designs along with major components are still woefully outdated.
Modernizations are basically just a band-aid on the problem, and only really done because its cheaper then designing a whole new airframe that will never be used due to its intended purpose.
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.
In the case of nuclear war, what are the actual defense possibilities?
Nothing. Its Game Over for Humanity. There is no salvation, and there is no defense. Even if by some miracle 50% of all nuclear munitions were intercepted, the 50% that got through would be more then enough to destroy the world multiple times over. There have been great strides in the field of nuclear interceptions since the beginning of the Cold War, but even in the most widely optimistic of estimates, no technology, defense system, or weapon can intercept enough nuclear warheads to prevent cataclysmic damage and destruction of the human race. For the United States for example, which has invested trillions into ballistic missile defense, they admit that they would only be able to intercept a handful of targets or prevent a limited launch from a smaller country like the DPRK. But against an arsenal such as Russia’s, or China’s, they admit that they would be able to do absolutely nothing.
Also, the entire purpose of SSBN submarines is that they are impossible to defend against or preemptively strike. Coupled with the fact that almost all modern nuclear munitions are MIRV based, and therefore carry multiple warheads that are next to impossible to intercept.
Like the AI WOPR said, “A strange game… The only winning move is not to play.” There is no winning or defending against a nuclear war
deleted by creator
Oh :/
