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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The answer obviously depends on the country, doctrine, time period and exact definitions. These days, “bombers” don’t really exist anymore, so I’ll focus on WWII, as that’s the period where these things were really starting to get defined.
There were certainly heavily armed and armored bomber craft, probably most famously, the US’ B-17 “[Flying Fortress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-17_Flying_Fortress)”. There were other heavy bomber designs like this, which featured either heavy armor, heavy armament or both. But ultimately, that’s not what defined a “bomber”. The defining characteristic was the ability to carry a lot of bombs or one very big bomb.
There were bombers that were made to just fly higher than fighters could reach, there were bombers that were just fairly fast, there were close-air support bombers which could do some dog fighting as well, if it came down to it and there were poorly armored, non-armed bombers which relied entirely on escorts. In other words, just about any design you can think of has been tried at some point.
The reason they’re so large mostly comes down to the fact that they a) carry very heavy bombs and b) often have to travel very large distances. In other words, they carry a lot of boom and a lot of fuel. This requires a lot of room to store those payloads, as well as large wings to lift it. Additionally, large engines to propel the heavy weight.
Having said that, there were also some extraordinarily maneuverable “bombers”, in the form of fighters that got small bombs strapped on them. Which happened to far too many designs to list here, but one notable mention would the Japanese Zero, which was an exceptionally maneuverable aircraft and could still carry a decent boom. Nothing you’d call “bomber”, but enough to ruin someone’s day.
Long story short, it basically comes down to the rocket equation. In other words, if you want to transport a heavy thing, you need to take more fuel, which is heavy as well, so you need more fuel to carry the fuel and so on and so forth. Ultimately, if you wanna fly a big chunk of metal, you need a big plane.
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