Can we really afford an aircraft at $1.2 billion when it could just.........crash!?

Question

Can we really afford an aircraft at $1.2 billion when it could just.........crash!?

Answer 1

Do you think its the very first military aircraft to just....crash?

Answer 2

it is made to avoid radar waves, not planetary surface.

it is designed to deliver munitions, where even a squadron of classic bombers would not pass. that is, it provides more work for less money than any other plane, assuming it would really encounter the radar threats.

Answer 3

It's the 1st one. Ever. In 20 years (came out in '88), that's pretty amazing. I know of no other aircraft or flying ship that can claim that. The Shuttle hasn't done that well and it is even more expensive.

Answer 4

We can't afford NOT to have an aircraft at $1.2 billion that can completely avoid and surprise all enemies with strategic bombing runs that originate from American soil.  

Any plane can just crash.  That is the first one of it's kind.

Answer 5

The US can and does.

Answer 6

Im sure that seems like alot of money to you, but you dont even begin to understand how much that actually saves us.

If we wanted to attack a single target with conventional aircraft, we would need a flight of attack aircraft, a flight of escorts, a flight of electronic warfare aircraft, and at least one flight of defense suppression aircraft, usually 16 to 24 aircraft.

Now our fighters run about 20-30 million each, so in the best case scenario you have over 300 million dollars worth of planes.

Those aircraft require a billion dollar Awacs aircraft to detect threats, and several 100 million dollar inflight refueling aircraft if they have to. On top of that, they require personnel to plan and administrate the flight, and literally dozens of support personnel per plane. It turns into a 2 to 3 billion dollar 1000 man investment pretty quickly. Then add in hundreds of gallons of fuel per flight hour of each aircraft, probably 4 hours each. Then add in the extra cost of the extra weaponry fired to suppress defenses.

The stealth bomber on the other hand requires one refueling aircraft, no Awacs aircraft, no other aircraft besides that at all.

It has a single ground crew and it uses very little fuel.

It can destroy litterally 20 targets in a mission, which now means its the equivalent to about 10 billion dollars in conventional aircraft, before accounting for logistics and support and personnel.

We may have only 24 of these things left, but they are as powerful as the ret of the worlds airforces combined, it would literally take over 9k conventional aircraft to attack the 480 targets that our force of B-2s could attack in the same time period.

Remember the beginning of the war in Iraq? A shock and awe campaign that startled other industrialized nations actually was just a few stealth aircraft, there were only a few dozen attacks but it was considered a show of power because most nations cannot mount more than a handful of hit and run low level attacks into a defended airspace with there entire air forces combined. Being able to waltz into a defended airspace and blow up everything you want is mind blowing to any other country than ours, even Russia cannot operate freely in even a lightly defended airspace. They lost ridiculous amounts of aircraft to cavemen with stinger missiles back in Aphganistan, how do you think they feel about us walking all over their best system like they didnt even exist? Thats why we have B-2s.

Answer 7

if we can afford to have all the government sponsored social programs i think the military can have a few planes that wind up digging holes  in the dirt

Answer 8

Yes. We must be able to buy aircraft for $1.2 billion so we can just crash em. Jeez.

Answer 9

yeah, it could just crash, thats why there are insurance companies...

but.

it cost $1.2 billion becuase it has so many safety things that it won't.

Answer 10

Keep n mind that one reason the aircraft cost so much

is because Congress only allowed the Air Force

21 aircraft.  Now it was going to be an expensive aircraft

anyway because of the new technology required to build

a stealth bomber. But had more aircraft been built

unit cost would have gone down.

Only 100 B-1 bombers were built.

Several of those have crashed too.

the B-52's have been flying over 50 years.

Answer 11

yes

can we afford a war in a country that doesn't want us costing in excess of 20 billion a month?