B-1 bombers to take more active role in Asia

Military.com:
The Air Force's B-1B Lancer bomber is about to move front and center in the U.S. military's power-projection mission in the Pacific.

As part of its mission "reset" for the B-1 fleet, the Air Force is not only making its supersonic bombers more visible with multiple flights around the world, it's also getting back into the habit of having them practice stand-off precision strikes in the Pacific, a dramatic pivot following years of flying close-air support missions in the Middle East.

The "nice thing about the B-1 is it can carry [the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile], and that's perfectly suited for the Pacific theater," Maj. Gen. Jim Dawkins Jr., commander of the Eighth Air Force and the Joint-Global Strike Operations Center at Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, said in an interview Tuesday.

"Not only are we resetting the airplane's mission-capability rates and the training done for the aircraft, we're also resetting how we employ the airplane to get more toward great power competition to align with the National Defense Strategy," added Dawkins, who supports the warfighting air component to U.S. Strategic Command, as well as operations within Air Force Global Strike Command.

According to the 2018 NDS, "China is a strategic competitor using predatory economics to intimidate its neighbors while militarizing features in the South China Sea."

Former Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson stated that China has become "a pacing threat for the U.S. Air Force because of the pace of their modernization" in the region.

The Pentagon's strategy prioritizes deterring adversaries by denying their use of force in the first place.

That's one reason four bombers from Dyess Air Force Base, Texas, have been launching from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, for patrols across the East and South China Seas since May 1, according to Air Force social media posts. The bombers deployed to Andersen after the service suspended its continuous bomber presence mission in the Pacific for the first time in 16 years....
There is more.

The long range anti-ship weapons make the B-1 a stand off platform for dealing with enemy threats.  My recollection is that these weapons were used in Syria to neutralize threats.  They were effective.

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