Daniel Allen, Marco Volpitta
In June of 2025, Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb proved that 117 cheap drones were sufficient to cripple a third of Russia’s bomber fleet overnight. Ukraine’s massive operational success underlined a simple fact: the logic of previous aircraft basing no longer holds. Remoteness is no longer as effective a shield as once thought, and threats towards high-value assets can come in the form of small drones and large, expensive missiles. What was once efficiency is now complacency, and the U.S. Air Force needs to learn from the mistakes of our adversary to minimize the risk of a strike that could cause irreparable damage to the U.S. bomber fleet. Solutions to this problem exist, and if implemented by the United States, can provide increased resiliency to our strategic assets in the 21st century.
Irreplaceable and Concentrated
Much like Russia’s far interior, the United States bomber fleet has benefited from its relative isolation from the rest of the world. Two oceans separate the continental United States (CONUS) from its major adversaries, and the north and southern borders present no significant threats to some of the U.S.’s most valuable strategic air assets. As a result, the U.S. bomber fleet’s footprint since 1988 has been consolidated to bring all U.S. bombers to just five home bases across three time zones: Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri; Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana; Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota; Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota; and Dyess Air Force Base, Texas. There are a few bombers stationed at any given time at Edwards Air Force Base, California, for flight testing, and others are deployed abroad. However, the overall picture is clear: a successful attack on just a handful of American airbases using small, cheap drones could cripple the U.S. ability to use bomber assets for the foreseeable future.
Long life cycles of modern bomber aircraft mean that the United States has no immediate capacity to produce legacy aircraft beyond maintenance and upgrades. Much like the Russians, our current crop of bombers went out of production long ago. With the exception of the B-21 Raider — itself still early in its production cycle — any bombers destroyed or significantly damaged could not be replaced on the shortened timescale an attack on the U.S. homeland would require.
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