$7 billion boost for aging B‑2 Spirits amidst B‑21 Raider's rise

Despite introducing the successor in the form of the B-21 Raider aircraft, the United States is not giving up developing and operating the older, hard-to-detect strategic bomber, the B-2 Spirit. Although there are only 18 of them, they will allocate as much as $7 billion for these aircraft.

This is the amount of the contract signed by the Pentagon with Northrop Grumman, the manufacturer of the B-2 aircraft. The contract supports maintaining operational readiness, introducing various improvements, software updates, or servicing the machines at their stationing location.

The agreement concerns only 18 machines. Although 21 specimens of the B-2 bomber were produced, two were lost in accidents (one crashed, the other was damaged by fire), and one serves as a test machine.

Events like the recently conducted "elephant walk," which involved as many as 12 machines, mean that as part of the exercises, Americans sent into the air the majority of their fleet of hard-to-detect strategic bombers.

The B-2 Spirit is an aeroplane developed according to the assumptions from the final period of the Cold War. The first of these machines took to the air in 1989. Still, the planned mass production did not happen – geopolitical changes and the dissolution of the Soviet Union meant that the United States settled for building only 21 examples. The cost of one is estimated at £1.6 billion.

The B-2 Spirit aircraft is built in a flying wing configuration with extensive use of composite materials. The machine is 21 metres long and has a wingspan of 59 metres, and in a side view, its cross-section resembles a horizontally laid drop. The construction of the aircraft was subordinated to lowering its effective reflection surface and, thus, the possibility of detection by radar.

The aircraft's weight exceeds 71,000 kilograms, it can carry more than 22,000 kilograms of weapons, and its operational radius exceeds 4,000 kilometres. Thanks to refuelling in flight, the machine's range is almost unlimited.

Thanks to this capability, any targets worldwide are within reach of machines taking off from their home base in Whiteman, Missouri. Despite this, the Pentagon sometimes relocates part of the B-2s, an example of which is the deployment of three such aircraft at Keflavik Air Base in Iceland.