Summary and Key Points: The B-21 Raider bomber is successfully reshaping U.S. stealth aircraft procurement by delivering significant cost savings and adhering strictly to budget and schedule constraints.
-Under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Air Force negotiated lower production costs, cutting approximately $1 billion from the FY2025 budget alone.
-Advanced digital design, open software architectures, and streamlined production processes have accelerated development, unlike previous stealth aircraft programs.
-This disciplined approach provides confidence for future sixth-generation aircraft such as the F-47 and Navy fighters, ensuring America maintains air dominance affordably without sacrificing capability or readiness.
The B-21 Raider Bomber Cost Question
Even in the era of DOGE, President Donald J. Trump is doubling down on American investment in sixth-generation aircraft. The Air Force F-47 fighter and a new Navy carrier plane will restock American airpower.
While air dominance is priceless, the fact remains that experience with the B-21 Raider bomber has quietly given Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg, and the new leadership team the confidence to invest in advanced aircraft programs. Saving money and executing on a predictable schedule is now a must for the survival of Pentagon programs.
The B-21 is a “bomber on a budget.” One of the most overlooked insights from the recent Air Force budgets is that the B-21 program is proving a new business case by keeping costs under control. During the 2025 budget cycle, smooth progress on the production line enabled the Air Force to negotiate lower rates for the B-21 bombers now in production.
The Air Force trimmed about $1 billion off the B-21 program’s cost for Fiscal Year 2025 alone and bagged additional savings for future years.
Coming in under budget is a first for a stealth aircraft – and quite a victory for the bomber leg of the nuclear deterrence Triad. Contrast that with the snarls affecting nuclear shipbuilding and the Columbia-class submarine program. It is also a great vote of confidence for future sixth-generation programs for both the Air Force and the Navy.
The B-21 was planned from the outset to “bend the cost curve” for advanced aircraft procurement. A cost cap of $550 million per bomber (averaged over 100 aircraft, and in 2010 dollars) was set as a performance parameter for the competition.
Northrop Grumman was widely believed to have won the B-21 program due to the combination of its experience in stealth bombers and its low bid price. However, executing the B-21 plan has been a testament, first and foremost, to the Air Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO), the team that ran the B-21 from source selection onward but likes to stay out of the limelight.
The Air Force is also capitalizing on progress with digital design, open software approaches, sophisticated aerospace composites, and a host of other advances in the American aerospace industry. The net effect is smoother progress through design and early production.
For example, in 2021, a “major redesign” of the B-21 engine inlets was completed while the first two B-21s were being assembled, without incurring cost or schedule overruns. “There’s nothing going on in that program that is leading to either a cost or schedule breach,” Air Force Lieutenant General Duke Richardson said at the time.
New approaches to software are also paying off. One example is the shorter time anticipated for weapons integration. “It would take me years to integrate a new standoff missile on the B-2,” Air Force Global Strike Command chief General Timothy M. Ray said in March 2021. “It will take me months with the B-21.”
By 2022, the Air Force announced that the engineering and manufacturing development contract was producing a quality build B-21, with significant design maturity. “The B-21 test aircraft are the most production-representative aircraft, both structurally and in its mission systems, at this point in a program, that I’ve observed in my career,” concluded Randy Walden, who was then the Director of the RCO.
This was a critical time period. The B-21 achieved its roll-out at Palmdale, California, in December 2022 and its first flight in November 2023.
Of course, inflation in the wake of the COVID pandemic hit the B-21 along with other defense programs, leading to increased costs for wages and supplies for both prime contractors and their hundreds of suppliers. The B-21 program quickly digested those costs.
In January 2024, Northrop Grumman reported that it had taken a one-time after-tax charge of $1.2 billion due to macroeconomic factors that increased the costs of manufacturing the B-21. The cost was swallowed as the first low-rate production lot began.
As a result, by spring 2024, the Air Force was reporting success in lowering costs for the next four lots of B-21s. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall informed the Senate that B-21 unit costs had decreased during contract negotiations with Northrop Grumman. The Air Force saved money on the B-21 without reducing the planned quantity.
In turn, the Air Force was able to reduce its own procurement line for the B-21 down from $6.3 billion to $5.3 billion for the enacted Fiscal Year 2025 budget. The Air Force was also confident enough to harvest the B-21 cost savings across the out-years. An Aviation Week report noted nearly 28% savings across the five-year defense plan.
The situation was very different for the B-2 Spirit back in the 1980s. The Air Force requested significant design changes, including the requirement for low-altitude flight capabilities. The Northrop engineers responded with “a miracle a day” to build the bomber.
Meanwhile, President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, received personal briefings every three months on the progress of the B-2 and often had to allocate additional funds to keep the program going.
Forty years later, stealth bomber manufacturing is leading the way for efficient production of sixth-generation aircraft. With the B-21, the Air Force has a robust program that is delivering on schedule and is ready for a production increase if the Trump administration decides to increase quantity.
As other sixth-generation programs follow the discipline of the B-21 Raider, America won’t lose a step in dominating the skies.
About the Author: Dr. Rebecca Grant
Dr. Rebecca Grant, Vice President of the Lexington Institute, is a national security analyst based in Washington, DC specializing in defense and aerospace research and national security consulting. She has researched and published hundreds of articles on national security and spoken at numerous forums. In addition, Dr. Grant has often appeared on television as an expert on national security for Fox News, Fox Business, CNN, and MSNBC and as a series regular on The Smithsonian’s Air Warriors. Dr. Grant also writes on China, Russia and other technology and national security topics for Fox News Opinion. Her military books include 75 Great Airmen (with Lt. Gen. Chris Miller), The B-2 Goes to War, and Battle-Tested: Aircraft Carriers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Dr. Grant graduated from Wellesley College and earned a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics, University of London. This first appeared in RealClearDefense.
