Flying in the Face of History

At first glance, it looked like one of those stories that turn up from time to time railing about the fact that the US does not buy the things it needs and spends too much on things it doesn’t need. At second glance, it looked more like one of those defense industry stories about how some contractor or other is going to improve the nation’s defense against attack by weaving safety nets made out of actual dollars and then running their operations from a building made entirely out of gold and gullibility. And at third glance it looked like yet another story about how an aircraft that is older than I am is showing no signs of retiring anytime soon, provided we keep pouring money into it – which is actually a subset of the first two stories…

For those not familiar with it, the Boeing B-52 “Stratofortress” strategic bomber was originally designed and built over sixty years ago (first flight in 1952), primarily as a carrier for nuclear weapons during the Cold War. A lineal descendent of the famous “Flying Fortress” and “Superfortress” types of World War II, the B-52 combined a number of new design elements and new technologies to produce the largest, most powerful and most effective strategic weapons platform of its time. Since then, the aircraft have seen action in every major conflict the United States has fought in, slowly evolving from carrying giant thermonuclear gravity bombs to stand-off weapons, smart bombs, missiles, and anything else you could ask for. It even stepped in as a cruise missile launch platform when the B-1A was cancelled during the Carter Administration. Meanwhile, regular updates of its avionics and control systems have kept these airplanes flying decades after the intended end of their service life…

What usually gets lost in all of the shouting is that while the mission for which these aircraft was designed (e.g. dropping massive hydrogen bombs on the Soviets) has long since vanished, the utility of a large flying truck that can carry forty tons or more of assorted weapons to pretty much anywhere you might want them to be launched from has not. It’s debatable as to whether or not the B-52 could ever have accomplished its primary mission as designed (rather than simply being hacked out of the sky in droves), but as long as its systems are kept compatible with the rest of the military, and as long as you can still find things for it to carry, there’s no real need to build another huge, radar-friendly, gas-guzzling, smoke-spewing, noisy, ugly and incredibly adaptable flying machine…

The new story is really just another case of finding new things for the B-52 to carry. According to the press information on Boeing’sMedia Room page, the company has signed a small contract to develop modifications to existing launcher systems that will allow these venerable airplanes to carry the latest generation of “smart” weapons in their internal weapons bays, instead of having to carry all of them on external mounts. This will enable the aircraft to carry larger loads, or to avoid external mounts (and their attendant drag) and operate more efficiently. It won’t enable them to fly through contested airspace, ignore active threats, or do anything else they don’t already do, in fact. But if you just went off the original story headline (“Boeing to extend B-52 life span by increasing smart weapon capacity by half”) you could easily get the idea that this is a massive deal that will drive the company’s bottom line for decades to come…

Instead, we’re just looking at a $26 million upgrade to the airplane’s weapons stations – a nice project, and potentially very useful, but not particularly significant compared to the $33 billion in business that Boeing’s Defense, Space & Security division does in a year. I don’t know what the next big thing in manned strategic weapons platforms is going to be, if in fact there is every going to be one, but I can tell you with a fair amount of confidence that this isn’t it…