If the U.S. Air Force follows through on its ambitious plan to add 75 new squadrons, it either will have to buy a lot more new bombers, or hold on longer to older bombers.

The service apparently is reluctant to confront this hard choice.

Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson in February 2019 re-affirmed the service's 2018 plan for its bomber fleet.

Under the plan, the Air Force in the 2030s would retire its 62 1980s-vintage B-1B bombers and, a few years later, would also retire all 20 '90s-vintage B-2 stealth bombers.

Meanwhile, the service would upgrade its 76 B-52s that first flew in the early 1960s and buy at least 100 new B-21 stealth bombers. The result in the 2040s would be a force of 175 bombers composed of factory-fresh B-21s and 80-year-old B-52s.

"That plan has not changed," Wilson said, according to Air Force magazine reporter John Tirpack. "We need a minimum of 175 bombers, is what we announced last year,” Wilson added, "and that they will be a mix of B-21s and B-52s."

But Wilson's announcement raises a multi-billion-dollar question. How does the Air Force plan to equip the five new bomber squadrons the service said it needed as part of its September 2018 plan to grow from 312 squadrons to 386.

Since the Air Force announced that plan, it has shuttered one F-22 squadron and redistributed the unit's planes, meaning that in early 2019 the service had just 311 squadrons. It would need to add 75 new units to meet the expansion goal.

Those units could require hundreds of new aircraft costing hundreds of billions of dollars.

In early 2019 the Air Force maintained nine front-line bomber squadrons at bases in Missouri, Texas and North and South Dakota. A bomber squadron typically has eight aircraft. The balance of the bomber fleet belongs to training units or is undergoing deep maintenance.

Adding five new squadrons could compel the Air Force to acquire around 75 extra bombers in addition to the 100 it committed to buying when, in 2015, it awarded Northrop Grumman the B-21 development contract.

The flying branch expected a single new B-21 to cost around $600 million. It could set back U.S. taxpayers $45 billion to equip the extra bomber units with new planes.

The Trump administration's 2017 tax cut for wealthy Americans drove the annual federal budget deficit to around $1 trillion, a level that some experts consider unsustainable. With the national debt ballooning, Congress might not be willing to fund the additional bombers.

Anticipating budget restrictions, the U.S. Navy in early 2019 began walking back its own plan to expand from 280 front-line warships to 350.

But in early 2019 the flying branch seemed to stick by contradictory plans. It would retire the B-1s and B-2s and also nearly double the bomber force. The $45-billion cost of doubling B-21 production is a problem the Air Force apparently preferred to ignore.

So why not just keep B-1s and B-2s flying for longer? As recently as 2016, the Air Force estimated the B-2s could continue operating into the 2060s. The swing-wing B-1s mechanically are unreliable and suffered heavy wear and tear during the air campaigns over Iraq and Afghanistan. The Air Force in 2016 assumed the B-1s would retire in the 2040s.

The Air Force is spending billions of dollars upgrading the B-52s with new engines, electronics and weapons. Similar upgrades in theory could extend the useful lives of five squadrons' worth of B-1s and B-2s at lower cost than 75 new B-21s.

The Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies endorsed bomber upgrades. "The good news is that a pathway exists for the Air Force to grow its bomber force," institute experts David Deptula and Douglas Birkey wrote. "This will require retaining and modernizing the B-1B, B-2 and B-52, with B-21s procured additively."

David Axe serves as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels  War Fix, War Is Boring and Machete Squad.

Image: Creative Commons.