President Donald Trump announced an order for an upgraded version of B-2 bombers during a speech to the Israeli parliament marking a peace agreement between Israel and Hamas that he helped broker.
I had no idea they could do what they did. Frankly, we just ordered another 28 of them. A little, a little improved version. We ordered a whole bunch, Trump said [video time 2:56:15], apparently referring to strikes on iran's nuclear program that reportedly involved B-2s.
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This is not the first time Trump has mentioned an upgraded B-2 and a new order: in early August he made a similar claim while showing what he called a new model of the B-2 and commenting on the same Northern Hammer operation. The small model he displayed is indistinguishable from the original B-2, and the president did not specify what upgrades the improved plane would include.
Northrop Grumman reacted to that earlier speech on X by agreeing with Trump's praise that the B-2 is a great aircraft.
From Defense Express's perspective, this is very likely a slip of the tongue. Trump regularly makes factual errors in public statements for example, he has confused Armenia with Albania on multiple occasions and he most likely meant the new B-21 Raider sixth-generation bombers, not resuming production of the B-2.
There has been no official announcement of any large orders for B-21s, and certainly nothing on the scale of 28 aircraft, which would represent a deal worth tens of billions of dollars and could not be quietly hidden. It is also hard to imagine, even hypothetically, that the U.S. is secretly restarting production of some mysterious upgraded B-2 variant: B-2 production ran from 1989 to 2000 and ended 25 years ago.
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