Which still doesn't make sense to me given that the UEF favors small craft deployments. Was it just something to make them different from the GTVA, which favors large numbers of reasonably tough, though slow and under armed torpedo delivery vehicles?
It does make a lot of sense, if you consider the situation.
The UEF was isolated with the Gefs being the only enemy. Since the Gef have no capital ships, bombers and destroyers were not needed and thus became a highly controverse topic. Their building was opposed by many within the UEF and thus only few were build.
And that's why they are so valuable and only brought out in emergencies. While they are highly effective, they simply have too few of them for widespread deployment.
Furthermore with the UEF ships being more maintanance intensive than their GTVA counterparts, I think each individual ship will spend more time in the workship thus further limiting the number of currently usable bombers (that last sentence is pure speculation on my part - except the high maintanance part, that's BP canon - but it would be a logical conclusion from the facts provided by the background story and the BP team).
