- The B-21 Raider, the US Air Force's newest bomber, has already entered production.
- A top Pentagon official revealed that he gave the green light shortly after the aircraft's first flight.
Production of the B-21 Raider is underway, a top Pentagon official revealed this week, a little more than two months after the US Air Force's newest bomber completed its maiden flight.
"This past fall, based on the results of ground and flight tests and the team's mature plans for manufacturing, I gave the go-ahead to begin producing B-21s at a low rate," William LaPlante, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, said in a statement shared with Business Insider on Tuesday.
"One of the key attributes of this program has been designing for production from the start — and at scale — to provide a credible deterrent to adversaries," LaPlante added. "If you don't produce and field to warfighters at scale, the capability doesn't really matter."
LaPlante did not elaborate on the details of the B-21 contract, but a spokesperson for Northrop Grumman, the aircraft manufacturer, confirmed to Business Insider that the Raider "has entered low-rate initial production."
"Our team received the contract award after B-21 entered flight testing within the program baseline schedule. Our production representative test aircraft indicated readiness for production, achieving all flight performance and data requirements," the spokesperson said on Tuesday.
Development of the B-21 began in 2015, and the Pentagon unveiled the sleek aircraft to the public in December 2022, making it the US military's first strategic bomber in more than three decades.
The long-range B-21 can be equipped with stand-off and direct-attack munitions — capable of delivering both conventional and nuclear payloads — and has a range that's "unmatched," according to the Pentagon.
"It won't need to be based in-theater, it won't need logistical support to hold any target at risk," Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said during the B-21's flashy unveiling in Palmdale, California. He noted that the aircraft will be outfitted with weapons that haven't even been developed yet.
"Fifty years of advances in low-observable technology have gone into this aircraft," Austin said. "Even the most sophisticated air-defense systems will struggle to detect a B-21 in the sky."
Eleven months after it was unveiled, in November 2023, the Raider finally took off on its much-anticipated first flight — a major step that paved the way for production to begin. Meanwhile, the bomber last week completed its second publicly acknowledged flight.
The B-21 is expected to enter service in the mid-2020s and the goal is to produce at least 100 of them, a US defense official said in comments shared with Business Insider on Tuesday, adding that the Raider is slated to replace the B-1B Lancer and B-2 Spirit "to provide strategic deterrence for emerging global threats."
Northrop Grumman has touted the B-21 as "the world's first six-generation aircraft."
"The B-21 forms the backbone of the future for US air power," the company's spokesperson said on Tuesday, "delivering a new era of capability and flexibility through advanced integration of data, sensors and weapons, and is rapidly upgradable to outpace evolving threats."