Janes Defence Weekly,
One of the most significant decisions in the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), published in February (2006), is its support for a plan to develop a long-range strike (LRS) aircraft and bring it into service by 2018. The QDR states that the US Air Force (USAF) “has set a goal of increasing its long-range strike capabilities by 50 per cent and the penetrating component of long-range strike by a factor of five by 2025”.
The timeline is tight, but neither USAF leaders nor the Fiscal Year 2007 (FY07) budget provide any specific answers on how the new capability will be achieved. The budget continues the Next Generation LRS (NG-LRS) study, which the USAF started in 2004, without any dramatic increases, and it does not indicate whether the USAF's share of the now-terminated Joint Unmanned Combat Air System (J-UCAS) budget will go to LRS. Some of these decisions should be covered by an analysis of alternatives (AoA) that the USAF started in late 2005, which should be finished at the end of this year. Budget charts indicate that system development and demonstration could start by 2009-10.
However, USAF Chief of Staff General T Michael Moseley says that “the backbone of LRS will be a bomber, or what we have called a bomber, with much longer range, more persistence and a much higher payload” than current aircraft.
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