The percentage of U.S. Air Force bombers available for missions is in the 50s—a trend consistent with service-wide aircraft availability statistics, Gen. Thomas Bussiere, the head of Air Force Global Strike Command, said last week.
Such availability takes into account aircraft in depot, while mission capability rates are typically higher, as they do not count such planes in depot.
“Between the B-1, B-2, and B-52 force we hover around the 50s for aircraft availability just because of spare parts and the legacy weapons systems’ sustainment,” Bussiere said at a Tuesday May 20 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces panel in response to a question from Sen. Angus King (I-Maine).
King said the committee is examining a provision for military services to buy the intellectual property “when acquiring new platforms..so that we can build our own spare parts.”
Bussiere testified that “the bomber fleet is challenged by what we call legacy vendors that don’t actually make the parts we need so that’s a challenge for the acquisition community to get those contracts put on order.”
In addition, as the Air Force awaits the fielding of the Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider to replace the Boeing B-1s and Northrop Grumman B-2s, the service is using its decades-old bombers “a lot,” he said. “The demand signal for our bombers is at the highest level that I’ve seen in my career, while we’re also challenged to get the sustainment parts on the shelf.”
The B-21 is designed to have the dual capability of carrying both conventional and nuclear weapons, which the National Nuclear Security Administration is responsible for producing and maintaining. As of October, the 2025 Stockpile Stewardship Management Plan said that the B61-12 life extension program, which completed its last production unit in December, is continuing to certify the B-21 to carry the gravity bomb.
A version of this story was first published in Exchange Monitor affiliate Defense Daily.
