https://www.twz.com/air/gbu-57-massive- ... -the-works
The U.S. Air Force’s first combat employment of 30,000-pound GBU-57/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bunker buster bombs in recent strikes on Iranian nuclear sites draws new attention to work toward a successor. There was already very active U.S. military interest in a new Next Generation Penetrator (NGP) when the MOP first began entering service in the early 2010s.
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The most recent publicly stated requirements for the NGP come from a contracting notice the Air Force put out in February 2024. It called for a warhead weighing 22,000 pounds or less, and that would be “capable of blast / frag[mentation] / and penetration effects,” but did not specify a desired gross weight for the entire munition. No prospective dimensions were provided, either.
“The prototype penetrator warhead design effort should allow integration of technologies acquired and lessons learned under previous penetrator warhead developments to meet performance requirements for the HDBT target set,” the contracting notice added. “The USAF will consider novel, demonstrated, or fielded Guidance, Navigation & Control (GNC) technologies with viability for integration into a warhead guidance system design that can achieve repeatable, high accuracy performance in GPS aided, degraded, and/or denied environments.”
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The NGP contracting notice put out last February also mentions “possible integration of embedded fuze technology,” but does not elaborate. Reliable fuzing, in general, is particularly important for bunker buster bombs, the components of which have to be able to withstand additional forces as the munition burrows through hard material.
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The B-21 presents its own specific considerations for both MOP and a future NGP. The B-2 can already only carry two MOPs at once, and the smaller Raider is expected to be able to lug just one. Taking the example of Operation Midnight Hammer, it would’ve taken twice as many B-21s to carry out that mission. As such, a new bunker buster bomb that sits somewhere in the wide range between the GBU-72/B and the GBU-57/B could be a major boon for pairing with the Raider. It is also worth noting here that the Air Force does currently plan to acquire a B-21 fleet that will be significantly larger than its current B-2 force.
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An NGP bunker buster with standoff capability could also be not just valuable, but increasingly critical as the air defense ecosystem expands and evolves. The Air Force has separately assessed that anti-air missiles with ranges of up to 1,000 miles will be among the threats it has to contend with by 2050. Even very stealthy aircraft like the B-2 or the B-21 will be highly challenged to make direct attacks against heavily defended key targets of a peer state, especially during the critical opening days of a high-end conflict.
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