IMO the reason we have manned bombers in the SIOP today is simply that they predated the advent of missiles. Budgetary politics has preserved them since.
OTOH, manned nuclear bombers do have some real advantages for less than WWIII wargasm scenarios.
e.g. If we need to drop one nuke on some NK target to prove a point, the Chinese and Russians would get real excited seeing an ICBM or SLBM headed generally their way only to watch it fall into NK. And what happens if the guidance goes stupid and the darn thing overflies the intended target and does land in Russia or China? Oops. It would also be very embarrassing if it landed on target but was a dud*.
The sneakiness and targeting reliability of a, say, B-2 means we can send it out, have it locate the no-kidding target or abort if it can’t, drop the weapon, and get away. If all goes to plan the first anyone (Russia, China, or NK) knows is the explosion. And if anything goes wrong anywhere in the kill chain the whole world, including those three, may never be the wiser.
That capability has a lot of politico-military value.
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Remember that reliability is a statistical property of multiple trials. Any single shot will either work right or not. You have to be able to deal with both outcomes, not just blithely assume the more likely outcome will be the one you get.
Stranger has written eloquently about this problem as applied to space launches; we simply don’t have enough samples to reduce the error bars on our statistical estimates. So they become something like (totally made up numbers) “80% chance of success, plus/minus 40%” Which says something pretty close to nothing.
Also, bombers could conceivably deliver a nuke to Yongbyon, North Korea, without triggering Soviet launch detection systems and requiring a Stanislav Petrov to prevent an ensuing World War III in case Gorbachev doesn’t believe what he hears over the hotline. (The specific names and places might be different, but the general principle holds.)
I always read that the main reason why the US has manned bombers is that both the the bombers and the anti-bomber systems are VERY expensive-and the US has more $ than the USSR.
As was famously said about the Reagan military build-up: the US and the USSR were in a race to see who could go bankrupt first and the USSR won.
[Shrug] it is alway nice to have options. Aircraft are much more flexible then ballistic missiles.
Missiles have only two options. You either fire them and a large percentage of the human population dies or they sit in their tubes. This goes even more so with subs as in theory at least the enemy can’t detect them. So you don’t even have the option of showing activity around ground bases in the hopes of warning your opponent off.
In conjunction with #1 above aircraft can be put on alert or even flown toward their targets with the hope of showing the other side you are serious and the current confrontation is a line they can’t cross and then called back when cooler heads prevail.
Aircraft can have multiple uses in warfare. Bombers and fighters are weapons that can be used in nonnuclear roles.
Aircraft can have multiple targets and can evaluate what targets to hit on the fly. While MIRVs can hit multiple target due to the angle that they come in on and when the warheads are released they have a somewhat limited geographic area they can hit with their warheads. Bombers can evaluate weather a target has already been destroyed and then move on to secondary targets.
(More for the cold war) Bombers can be kept in the air and thus prevented from destruction in an opponent first strike situation. During the cold war bombers guaranteed we could respond to a surprise first strike because we kept a rotation of bombers in the air at all times for retaliatory purposes. We obviously don’t do that anymore.
Does the B1-B “Bone” have any impact on this issue? It’s certainly a faster and more maneuverable bomber than the B-52. I do also believe they are nuclear delivery capable. Plus it’s such a cool looking plane. Perhaps the budgetary issues surrounding the B1-B and it’s subsequent cancellation reduced it’s impact on the B-52’s role.
The B-1 was intended to do high speed, low altitude, stealthy-ish penetration after ground radars and SAMs got long enough range. If there isn’t a significant air defense, B-52s would provide more tonnage per dollar.
Then again, if a bomber is doing its bombing with cruise missiles by launching 1000km from the target, there may not be much need for the B-1’s abilities.
The impression I get is that today, bomber survivability depends chiefly on EW, stealth and stand-off strike, not speed, maneuverability or shooting back at the defenders. If you want to shoot back at the defenders, have a fighter escort with a tanker to give the fighters enough range.
The B-1B was originally a nuclear-only platform. In the mid-'90s the nuclear weapon arming & fusing equipment was permanently removed, so the aircraft is now a conventional-only platform.
The B-1B was not cancelled - the full production run was bought. The B-1A was cancelled in '77 due to cost overruns and mission changes.
There are things the Bone can do that the BUFF cannot (operational things, not things like break Mach 1 or sweep wings), and vice versa. They are complimentary platforms.
As an unclassified/non-sensitive example, a Bone with a Sniper pod can datalink real-time target info to a BUFF, to allow for precision JDAM employment from the BUFF with no JTAC/TACP involved.
