Back in 2009, the Navy and the Air Force secretly shook hands on a new way to work together to fight future wars against major powers. It’s called AirSea Battle, and not much about it has been made public. But the Air Force’s second in command publicly fretted on Wednesday that some of its core components might not be affordable.

The basic concept behind AirSea Battle is to maintain U.S. dominance of the air and sea, as the Navy War College’s Milan Vego writes in this month’s Proceedings, and overpower any nation that might try to push the United States back from its shores through advanced missiles, stealth aircraft or a blue-water fleet of its own. (If this nation sounds like China to you, you’re paying attention.) “Central to AirSea battle,” said Gen. Philip Breedlove, Air Force vice chief of staff, is the Air Force’s planned new “long-range, penetrating bomber aircraft.”

Ah, the next bomber: first announced in January by then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and successor to the failed, unaffordable “2018 bomber.” The idea is for the new long-range bomber to be “optionally manned” — that is, have a drone mode — and carry either nukes (gulp) or conventional bombs to anywhere on earth.

But it’s got to be “designed and developed using proven technology,” Breedlove told a crowd convened by the Mitchell Institute for Air Power Studies. “We have talked to the potential competitors for this business. Where we want to start is today. We don’t want to lean very far forward.”

Why? To make sure the new Long-Range Bomber doesn’t go the way of the 2018 bomber. “We need to be able to afford this system, so we can afford to buy 80 to 100 of these platforms,” Breedlove said. That’s a lot — between four and five times more planes than the Air Force’s fleet of B-2 Stealth Bombers.

Now factor in the budget pressures the Pentagon is under to reduce its budget by $400 billion over 12 years. Breedlove appeared positively spooked. “We are coming under increased and what seems to be prolonged fiscal pressure that will challenge our ability” to remain technologically ahead of the Chinas of the world, Breedlove said. “We’re flying the oldest air force we have ever flown.” The Air Force has to find a way to refurbish its air fleet, modernize its satellites and design a new bomber — even as it chops $49 billion out of its five-year budget.

The bomber isn’t itself the end-all and be-all of AirSea Battle. It’s got work with a “family of systems” in the Navy and Air Force, from aircraft carriers to the future Navy/Air Force/Marine Corps F-35 stealth fighter — err, already the most expensive weapons system in history. “Exquisite systems,” the voguish military buzzword for single-purpose tech, is outre in the era of budget cuts.

But long-range strike is the heart of AirSea Battle, Breedlove said. Whether that’s from a carrier, a bomber, a sub, a flying jammer, or all of them working together, the point is that the Navy and Air Force have to come from anywhere in the world to overwhelm weapons systems that would otherwise keep the United States at bay. “It allows us to penetrate from lightly contested to severely contested airspace and networks,” he said.

And AirSea Battle is central to how the Navy and Air Force intends to fight in the western Pacific. It doesn’t help that the Navy is facing its own maintenance crisis, with over a fifth of the fleet assessed as unready to fight and the looming obsolescence of over 70 Reagan-era ships. If the Air Force’s next bomber gets to be as pricey as its intended, junked predecessor, then the whole plan might have to be revisited.

Breedlove didn’t stick around to address what happens then, or to discuss how the long-tange bomber program will plan for cost controls. He said he had to get back to the Pentagon. For a budget meeting.