has already fallen behind before it was put into service. In the past, it often referred to the embarrassing situation faced by main battle equipment in countries with backward industrial and military technology during the development and testing process. Who would have thought that this situation would soon appear in the next-generation main battle bomber being developed by the superpower. Since the founding of the superpower , it has been leading the world in air power for a long time. As the most important external feature of its strong military power, that is, the strength of its aviation force has long been far ahead in the world. Most people tend to focus on the advanced meaning of the air force power, which is its tactical air force, that is, how many advanced fighter jets there are and how powerful the performance of these fighter jets are; but in fact, no matter how many and powerful fighter jets are, the tactical air force is the leader. The air power of the superpower has long stood out from the crowd, and it is mainly reflected in the strategic air force; and the strategic air force is represented by the strategic bomber . So far, the three types of bombers equipped by the superpowers are all intercontinental bombers with global strike significance.
is still the only one in the world today. However, these three strategic bombers are all relics of the Cold War era, and a third of a century has passed since the end of the Cold War. This means that although the superpower's strategic bombers are still powerful in terms of total size and comprehensive performance, the number of bombers that can actually be dispatched at any time is less than a quarter of the nominal total size. Under this situation, it is okay to carry out some strategic harassment-style blackmail against other major powers in peacetime, but if a large-scale war breaks out, only twenty or thirty strategic bombers can be launched at most. It really does not match the word "strategy" at all. Therefore, in the past 10 years, the superpower air force has been in urgent need of a new bomber that can be put into batches and take full advantage of the scale effect to replace the existing three major models that are getting older and older and the overall dispatch rate is getting worse; this is the B21 Strategic bomber project. However, the biggest bug of this project is that it has not yet completed research and development and batch production, and it is already lagging behind similar projects in other major countries. This is also an unprecedented "new thing" in the 110-year development history of military aircraft of superpowers. So since the B21 strategic bomber has not made a public appearance so far, and has not even been photographed by the outside world for its first test flight, what is the basis for saying that it has fallen behind? The first point is that the overall aerodynamic layout of the B21 is still the same large aspect ratio stealth flying wing shape as the B2. In this shape, the stealth performance is indeed good, but it essentially does not have any supersonic capabilities. This means that B21 still needs to rely entirely on the "sneaky" method like B2 to penetrate into the airspace of other countries to drop bombs from the air. This attack mode would not have been a big problem 30 years ago, or even 20 years ago. After all, stealth and anti-stealth technologies at that time were very challenging even for other global powers. But today, 30 years later, the world has conducted more and more in-depth research and cracking methods on anti-stealth.
Even some regional middle powers have the ability to completely capture or shoot down high-end drones with stealth capabilities of superpowers. Stealth drones that are much smaller than B2 and B21 can be directly cracked, so for large manned stealth bombers, the risk of breaking into other countries is already very high. Assuming that the stealth capabilities are discovered, the B2 and B21, which have no supersonic escape capability at all, are pure targets in front of the supersonic stealth fighters intercepting them. What's more, the B21's maximum range and maximum bomb load are greatly reduced compared to the B2. The shorter the actual combat range, the less sudden the attack will be, and the greater the probability of being successfully intercepted.Therefore, in addition to adding a dispensable full-range unmanned driving function, the B21 is obviously not advancing or retreating compared to the B2; to put it bluntly, it means that it does not want to make progress, or it can be said that it relies on the second hand of the military aviation industry of the current superpower. The strength of the sword cannot even be repeated once the development of B2!
On the contrary, a certain type of strategic bomber that is about to be unveiled by a certain major country not only has the same stealth capability and combat radius as the B2, but its maximum flight speed is very likely to be above Mach 2.X. In fact, if a certain bomber and a certain fighter can fly above Mach 2 at the same time, then it will be impossible for any fighter to intercept and track such bombers for a long time. Because once the afterburner is turned on, the high-speed bomber will fly one or two thousand kilometers at an extremely high speed. Even if the fifth-generation fighter jets turn on afterburner, they can only last for a high-speed flight of 700 to 800 kilometers. It can be seen that if a new supersonic stealth strategic bomber can perform two aerial refuelings, it will be able to fly freely over the entire North American continent in the future!
