Because I frequently look up military aircraft a lot on Wikipedia, and time and time again, I keep hearing how bombers are slower and less maneuverable than either fighters, attackers, or multirole aircraft. So does that mean that bombers are more heavily armored than the other three types of military aircraft? If not, and armor just weighs down *any* plane, why are bombers the largest, slowest, and leave maneuverable of the military aircraft, anyway?
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Armor is useful only if you are shot at.
Generally, light armor was used only on fighters between 1940-1945. Sometimes on few bombers with no success (makes slower and heavier an already heavy slow plane, making it a poorly armored sitting duck) Then missile era started and armor became useless. The only armor you see nowadays is on planes which only role is close to ground air support, where basically you want to avoid a lucky shot from a ground general purpose machine gun to cripple the plane or pilot.
Bombers can’t be faster or fly higher than interceptors, because they carry bombs. If you can get that fast and that high with bombs, so does an interceptor which has no bombs. There’s no way to escape.
So bombers always relied on escort or stealth. Stealth can be anything from weather (night, clouds) to very low flying to avoid radars, to very high flight to gain time onto your interceptor (did work for very few years) to actual radar stealth.
There was a brief time where bombers had defensive armament, which had the main purpose to force the attacher to shoot from further away, for less time and needing more effort in maneuvering. On defense, you don’t need to win the fight, you need to dissuade the attacker, or inconvenience it, or make it pay a cost.
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