At the sensitive moment when China's new bomber is about to be launched, the US military announced the B-21 in a high-profile manner. Judging from the preliminary information released by Northrop Grumman, unlike many people's speculation, the B-21 will be very different from the H-20.
For decades, the United States has been the only country in the world with stealth strategic bombers, but this only one will almost certainly be broken in the next few years. With the Chinese Air Force's propaganda video hinting at the emergence of the H-20, combined with the Chinese Air Force's increasingly improved aviation technology, the emergence of China's stealth bomber, the H-20, does not seem to be too far away. For the United States, if China's new generation of strategic bomber appears first than the US products, it can be regarded as a major blow to the Biden administration. Some American media described it as a "political disaster" for the Biden administration. Against this background, On December 2 local time, Northrop Grumman announced his long-demolished B-21 "Raider" bomber in Palmdale, California, USA. This is also the second time the US Air Force has announced strategic bomber after 34 years. Limited information shows that this is a new bomber with a very distinctive design.
According to the picture released by Grumman Company, the front of the B-21 shows that it still uses a flying wing layout similar to B-2, without vertical tail wing , which is also a layout that is quite helpful for stealth, which is expected. The air intake on the back of the aircraft is more integrated into the fuselage and is not as tall as the B-2, so it is more conducive to stealth, of course this may further sacrifice flight performance. In terms of size and ammunition load, although the size of the B-21 is much smaller than that of the B-2, its length is only 16 meters and its wingspan is 42 meters, compared with the B-2's wingspan is 52 meters. However, the US Air Force said that the B-21 still has the ability to carry the B-61 nuclear bomb , a new off-zone strike missile, and the GBU-57 giant ground-based bomb , which shows that the B-21's missile load capacity is at least greater than 13.6 tons. In addition, a very important information for is that Grumman claims that the B-21 not only makes great progress in the ability to share data across platforms, but also has the possibility of open improvements and has the ability to drive unmanned in the future.
Judging from the information currently released, we can roughly have a general impression of the combat design of the B-21, that is, this is an aircraft with low detectability in the full spectrum, high informatization level, more moderate price, further reduction in range and bomb load and speed, and has the potential for unmanned combat. Before , it was generally expected that the B-21 was a simple low-end version of B-2, relying on the lower cost to form a larger number in order to enhance the overall capabilities of the US strategic bomber fleet. But the B-21 is probably not just a "low-end version" of the B-2. Although has decreased in traditional flight capabilities such as range and bomb load, the B-21 is more informative, and its stealth performance has been further improved due to the reduction in size and the use of new technologies. If the driverless capability is added, the B-21 is likely to become a very threatening new opponent. The change in the B-21's tactical capabilities once again highlights the reality that the United States uses China as a target of imaginary enemies.
At the beginning of the development of B-21, the United States did not conceal its purpose of using it to fight against China, and how to attack China's deep high-value targets, such as the ballistic missile protected by air defense missiles and the Air Force, became a major problem for the United States. To this end, the US military needs to further improve the stealth performance of the B-21, to make it have full spectrum stealth better than the B-2, and to strengthen its informatization capabilities to make up for the shortcomings of the B-2's insufficient collaborative combat capabilities. After these two problems are solved, human pilots can be removed so that they can be used to combat extremely dangerous tasks such as China's deep targets. The price of making these new progress is to reduce flight capabilities, such as range and bomb load, but even after the reduction, the United States can still rely on the base of 's second island chain to use B-21 to continue its ideal strike mission to the mainland. In this sense, the US Air Force made targeted choices on the performance of the B-21, making the B-21 a smaller but more dangerous strike weapon.
In comparison, although the information of China's H-20 has not been released yet, considering that the PLA needs to penetrate the US air defense network in the first island chain to attack the targets of the first island chain to the second island chain or even further, the PLA's H-20 may be closer to the B-21 than the B-21, with a larger range and ammunition load, which is in sharp contrast to the smaller B-21. In other words, the new bombers of China and the United States may experience a reversal of size for the first time. In the future, a larger strategic bomber will be China's H-20. It should be said that China's H-20 and the US's B-21 are both weapons designed based on their respective combat goals, and are both very advanced military technology crystallizations, but these weapons are only part of the military system after all. to compare the specific tactical indicators of the H-20 and B-21. It depends on whether each of them can achieve the most important goals in their respective military systems.
