The most recent US multirole fighter is the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II (first flight 2006) and the Russian is the Sukhoi-35 (2008). The same idea goes with the fighters but here the US really flexes its muscles by having not only more but also more expensive jet fighters than Russia has. As an example, the unit cost of a Tupolev 160 is about $40mill while the one of the Northrop Grumman B-2 is over $2 billion each (unit cost USD 737m – total program cost as of 2004 USD 44.75b with only 21 aircraft produced). Even though many of them have been upgraded since they came in service, the cost can not be compared to both the development cost as well as the unit cost of some of the extreme US projects like the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit bomber. Russia’s main bombers are still the Tupolev 95(Introduced in 1956), Tupolev 160 (introduced in 1981) and the Tupolev 22M (introduced in 1972). One of the main reasons for this is that Russia has many old bombers still in service that are cheap, instead of spending their money on new, costly projects to create the “bombers of tomorrow”. For instance, the fact that Russia has more bombers than the US is rather interesting.
But even though the United States spends more money on its air force than Russia there are a lot of things to contrast between the two.
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