The U.S. Air Force is to ask lawmakers to reduce the number of tankers that the service must have to face the threat from China and to carry out other service responsibilities, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said on June 1.
“We’ve got a cap of 479 [tankers], and we’re going to ask the Congress to let us go down to 455, and we think that’s adequate to deal with the [China] pacing challenge but also do the other things we’d have to do,” Kendall told a Heritage Foundation forum on Air Force readiness. “We are having to prioritize in the department. We can’t do everything all the time. Given the threats that we face, the idea that we can do a major war and major contingencies simultaneously is a stretch. That’s a lot to ask any power to do, great power or otherwise.”
A Heritage Foundation report in March took an opposing view and said that the Air Force needs a minimum of 691 tankers–a number in line with the “Air Force We Need” framework of former Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson during the Trump administration.
The Heritage report said that Congress should prohibit the retirements of KC-135s and KC-10s until the Air Force achieves a total tanker fleet of 691 to include the latter aircraft and the Boeing [BA] KC-46A and a KC-Y commercial derivative tanker. Heritage also said that lawmakers should mandate the 691 floor across the acquisition timeline of the KC-Z future tanker.
The Air Force plans to move back discussions with companies on a possible KC-Y tanker from this fiscal year until fiscal 2023 (Defense Daily, May 31).
By Sept. 30, Air Mobility Command at Scott AFB, Ill. plans to submit the final KC-Y Capability Development Document to the Joint Requirements Oversight Council and conduct an “early strategy and issues session,” but the KC-Y program office has pushed back a possible industry day and a Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System to define DoD requirements and evaluation criteria for KC-Y until fiscal 2023.
The Air Force is examining what design features KC-Z should have, but it appears that the future of a KC-Y “bridge tanker” is in doubt (Defense Daily, May 3).
The KC-Z design may include stealth, as the aircraft may have to survive adversary air-to-air and missile threats hundreds of miles away from U.S. forces’ ground targets.
The KC-Y commercial derivative tanker could fill the gap between the fielding of the 179th KC-46 in 2029, or later, and the KC-Z. The KC-46 fleet and possible future tankers would replace more than 400 KC-135s and KC-10s in the coming decades.
Kendall told the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 3 that “as we looked at the requirements, it doesn’t look as necessary or as cost effective as it once did to introduce another aircraft as KC-Y.”
Lockheed Martin [LMT] has been gearing up for a KC-Y competition and, in January, said that the company plans to build the LMXT refueler, based on the Airbus A330, in Mobile, Ala., and Marietta, Ga. (Defense Daily, Jan. 31).