Whether the Defense Department is successful at building and procuring a Long-Range Strike Bomber is dependent largely on the level of control the Air Force has to manage the program, according to an American Enterprise Institute report released this week.
The October report, which refers to the LRS-B as the B-3, poses that years of acquisition reform efforts within DOD have not led to the necessary improvement in weapon system procurement, and instead have made the system more centralized and arduous. The report links failures in past major acquisition programs -- including the B-1, B-2 and F-22 -- to this phenomenon and warns that LRS-B could be in danger of a similar fate.
"The prospects for successful B-3 procurement rest on the Air Force's ability to be left alone to manage the program -- and the service fulfilling that trust," the AEI report states. "The best way to do that is to focus on the need to field the B-3 within that 'mid-2020s' time frame; program urgency without program concurrency ought to stand as the B-3 creed."
The Air Force is expected to be responsible for the day-to-day management of the program, but large-scale budget control will fall to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The report argues that under this construct, which gives centralized budget authority to OSD, the "central secretariat" will have the most influence on the program's success.
"The Air Force will, at best, be a junior partner under OSD direction," the report states, noting that if the program is delivered on time and on budget, that will be "despite the current procurement system, not because of it."
The report cautions against a drawn-out development effort, while acknowledging that the information released to date about the largely classified LRS-B indicates the service is relying heavily on already-proven technologies and that the competitors -- Northrop Grumman and a Boeing/Lockheed Martin team -- appear to have matured much of their designs through a rigorous and costly early development effort.
"The program is highly classified, but the very short time for 'down-select' between the two competing industry teams and the aggressive funding plan -- which ramps up to several billion dollars per year in very short order -- suggests to many observers not only that the technological hurdles are well understood but also that the competing contractors have built prototypes," the report states.
A contract award was expected last spring but has been delayed and is now expected before the end of the year, service officials have said.
The Air Force plans to purchase 100 new bombers, at least initially, at a cost of $550 million per aircraft. That unit price is a key performance parameter -- a feature that service officials have touted as an important cost-control mechanism.
But the service's apparent "reasonable approach" to technology and cost could increase the program's susceptibility to politics and bureaucracy, the AEI report states. It also notes that support for the program is "not necessarily deep," which could be owed to the level of secrecy DOD has maintained.
And without a deeper level of support, the program, dependent on a consistent funding stream, becomes more vulnerable to budget cuts.
"In the era of the Budget Control Act and with the Pentagon annually held under the threat of the law's sequestration provision, the program's funding profile is also optimistic, to put it gently," the report states.
