The B-21 Raider skipped its own coming-out party. While three bombers flew over Washington for the July 4th flyover, America’s newest stealth aircraft stayed 2,300 miles away at Edwards Air Force Base — and that wasn’t an accident. This is the story of how the Air Force learned from the B-2’s mistakes: only 21 ever built, each one a maintenance nightmare, a bottleneck disguised as a deterrent. The B-21 was designed to fix all of that — built for volume, serviceability, and speed. And in 2026, the program did something almost no stealth bomber program has ever done: it got ahead of schedule. We break down: Why the B-2 became a $2B-per-plane cautionary tale How Northrop Grumman compressed a 180-day flight test into 73 The billions flowing into the program and Ellsworth AFB’s transformation Why the Air Force insists on two human pilots, not autonomy China’s H-20 program — a decade of promis

Source: How America’s New Stealth Bomber Successor is Causing Panic in China