Last fall, Pentagon acquisition chief Bill LaPlante gave the go-ahead to begin low-rate initial production (LRIP) of the U.S. Air Force B-21 Raider stealth bomber by Northrop Grumman [NOC], DoD said on Jan. 22 after the same day publication of news articles that the company has claimed that it won the LRIP contract after the start of flight tests late last year.
The B-21 had its first flight on Nov. 10 last year over Palmdale, Calif., near the aircraft’s development and production site at Air Force Plant 42 (Defense Daily, Nov. 13, 2023).
“Production of the B-21 “Raider” stealth bomber is moving forward,” LaPlante said on Jan. 22 in a release issued by DoD. “This past fall, based on the results of ground and flight tests and the team’s mature plans for manufacturing, I gave the go-ahead to begin producing B-21s at a low rate. One of the key attributes of this program has been designing for production from the start – and at scale – to provide a credible deterrent to adversaries. If you don’t produce and field to warfighters at scale, the capability doesn’t really matter.”
No B-21 LRIP contract has yet appeared on DoD’s daily contracts page. On Jan. 8, Defense Daily emailed the Air Force to ask whether B-21 contract negotiations with Northrop Grumman were ongoing, when the Air Force expected to award a B-21 LRIP contract to Northrop Grumman and for how many, but the Air Force did not respond.
In lieu of a response, Defense Daily received the DoD statement on Jan. 22 from LaPlante. Northrop Grumman has said that it expected an LRIP contract to come before the end of last year after B-21 first flight.
The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies has argued that the Air Force needs to more than double its bomber fleet of 141 to 300, including 225 B-21s, to counter China, achieve nuclear deterrence, and prepare for two simultaneous conflicts. The Air Force has said that it will buy at least 100 B-21s.
Retired Air Force Col. Mark Gunzinger, a former B-52 commander and the director of future concepts and capability assessments at the Mitchell Institute, has said that DoD estimates that B-21 production will peak at 10 per year in the mid-2030s–half the rate Gunzinger said is needed and half that of the original plans for the Northrop Grumman B-2A Spirit.
In 2015, Northrop Grumman was awarded the Long Range Strike Bomber contract to develop the B-21, beating out a Lockheed Martin [LMT]-Boeing [BA] team.
The B-21, which DoD and Northrop Grumman rolled out in December 2022, is to incorporate advances in low-observable maintenance to ensure the next generation bomber is ready to fly consistently when it reaches the field, the Air Force has said (Defense Daily, March 21, 2023).
The unit cost of the B-21 is to be $750 million while unmanned Collaborative Combat Aircraft that the bomber may launch to conduct strikes and other missions are to be less costly, but still possibly on the order of several hundred million of dollars, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has said.