http://youtu.be/H-vkdUBNOOc

It will be one of the great weapons competitions of the 21st century. Northrop Grumman is competing against a team of Boeing and Lockheed Martin to build the Long Range Strike Bomber. The company has also created design teams to work on so-called sixth generation fighters for the Air Force and the Navy.

Northrop XB-35

With the Pentagon budget due out on Monday — and the bomber program expected to occupy a proud place in the Air Force budget — Northrop Grumman will air its new ad during America’s hottest television ad event — the Super Bowl. The shrouded aircraft at the end of the ad is clearly intended to suggest either the LRSB or the next-generation fighter — or both.

The ad begins with the very old and very cool YB-35, a tail-less blended-wing plane. Next up is the B-2 bomber, followed by the X-47B aircraft, which did what many thought would be very difficult, if not impossible — land and take off from an aircraft carrier without a human on board.

Northrop X-47 carrier landing

We don’t know much about the highly classified LRSB program, beyond the fact that the plane will be optionally manned, will boast advanced low observable characteristics, highly advanced sensors and may also include drones controlled by the bombers.

Northrop, of course, built the LRSB’s predecessor, the fabulous and fabulously expensive B-2 bomber, of which only 21 planes were built.

How big will this new program be? Todd Harrison, one of the country’s top defense budget experts, estimates the bomber will cost up to $25 billion for the bomber’s research and development costs. The Air Force plans to buy 100 aircraft and says the flyaway cost will be about $550 million per plane in 2010 dollars. Harrison notes the plane would already cost about $600 million in current dollars.

Harrison notes that funding the LRSB will swell to significant levels around 2020 just as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will be reaching full production numbers, the effort to build America’s next-generation nuclear missile submarine — the Ohio Replacement Program — will be ramping up, the KC-46 airborne tankers built by Boeing will be hitting full production and the Air Force’s next-generation trainer aircraft —T-X — will be bought in bulk.

That will make the competition for dollars within the Air Force and between the services intensely competitive, not to mention the competition between the defense companies for all that new revenue. Northrop is clearly positioning itself early and big to make sure taxpayers know what it is doing and to try and convince them it should be getting a big slice of what may be a shrinking or static budget pie.

I don’t think any defense company has advertised during the Super Bowl, but I didn’t live in the US for a long stretch during the 1970s and 80s, so I may be wrong. Regardless, Northrop’s bold strike is a clear sign of just how high the stakes are for the company as it competes for the bomber and for the next generation of fighter aircraft for the Navy and Air Force in a time of declining budgets.

If you want to know what a B-2 pilot thinks the LRSB should be capable of. read the op-ed we ran by Lt. Col. Jeff Schreiner.