Target China and North Korea: America’s B-1B Lancer Bomber Fleet to Permanently Refocus Operations to East Asia

The U.S. Air Force’s B-1B Lancer bomber fleet will ‘reset’ its orientation to provide full support to American power projection operations in the Pacific. This represents part of a broader reorientation of American assets towards the region underway since the Barak Obama administration initiated the Pivot to Asia initiative in the early 2010s, which has placed China and North Korea in particular in the crosshairs of a growing number of American assets. The reorientation of the B-1B fleet will involve not only more deployments to the Pacific, but also carrying out more mock standoff precision strikes in the region. The Lancers have already maintained a strong presence in East Asia, carrying out multiple mock sorties against North Korean targets in 2017 at a time of high tension between Pyongyang and Washington - leading Pyongyang to threaten strikes on U.S. military facilities on Guam which housed the long ranged aircraft. Both China and North Korea deploy a wide range of intermediate range missiles capable of neutralising bases housing American bombers in the Pacific, which poses a major threat to the viability of the B-1B fleet in East Asia.

Major General Jim Dawkins Jr., commander of the Eighth Air Force and the Joint-Global Strike Operations Center at Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, stated regarding the Lancers that the "nice thing about the B-1 is it can carry [the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile], and that's perfectly suited for the Pacific theater… Not only are we resetting the airplane's mission-capability rates and the training done for the aircraft, we're also resetting how we employ the airplane to get more toward great power competition to align with the National Defense Strategy.” This strategy has increasingly emphasised deployments of U.S. assets within strike range of Chinese targets to ensure the balance of power in East Asia continues to favour the American-led Western Bloc. China’s military modernisation has otherwise presented the greatest challenge to the centuries long Western-dominated order in East Asia since it was established by European colonial powers, with other Western states such as France, Canada and Australia making conspicuous contributions to American military efforts in the region.

B-1B combat readiness rates have been exceptionally low in recent years with under 10% of the fleet combat ready in 2019. The Lancer is the only Western supersonic bomber in service, and deploys a wide range of standoff munitions both for ship hunting, namely the LRASM, and for ground attack, primarily the JASSM-ER. The fast ageing design was designed for low altitude penetration of Soviet airspace, although it is now effectively obsolete in any mission other than as a platform for long range missiles due to its considerable vulnerability when operating at shorter ranges. Although its design is sleek, the bomber can carry over 34,000kg of ordinance which facilitates a payload of 24 cruise missiles. The bombers have an intercontinental range and benefit from a reduced radar cross section, and due to their inability to deploy nuclear weapons they provide a potentially less hostile means of threatening American adversaries to the deployment of B-52H or B-2 nuclear capable platforms. The B-1B is set to be retired in the mid-2030s in favour of the B-21 Raider stealth platform, and is likely to spend the remainder of its service life carrying out the vast majority of overseas operations in the Pacific theatre. The platform's extremely high operational costs mean that a significant portion of the fleet is likely to be retied before then, with full retirement of the Lancer before 2030 also reportedly under consideration.