AF cargo, tankers need more platforms

The US military will need more high tech systems to be able to fight, if another war emerges, according to high level planners.

On Friday, the US military sounded a loud warning that a war with Russia or China will require new, more technologically sophisticated systems than are now in America’s arsenal.

The Air Mobility Command is planning cargo planes and tankers that can do more than carting fuel and supplies.

The history of military development and testing in our Aerospace Valley indicates that many more highly important systems will be invented and produced for future aircraft here on the high desert, thereby producing an inflow of thousands of additional well-paid jobs.

“Look at the competition that we’re in right now,” Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost, head of Air Mobility Command, said at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies on March 31.

“Why wouldn’t we change the calculus by doing different things, moving away from the antiquated view that (Air Mobility Command) just brings stuff ... and (stays) outside the threat ring to be a maneuver force to support inside the threat ring because that’s really where we’re going.”

Mobility aircraft, particularly tankers, will be “forward in the fight,” Van Ovost said, making them well suited to be primary or back-up “nodes” to process and relay information to other aircraft and outposts.

“Our last experiment had a C-17 as the forward node to crunching of data,” she said. “It was on the ground, but we showed that a C-17 with a current setup of antennas could do that work, so why wouldn’t we put that on all the airplanes?”

The new KC-46 tanker, which is still struggling with other aspects of its mission, will be the first to get a new pod developed as part of the Advanced Battle Management system, the Air Force’s contribution to a broader Pentagon effort to digitally connect military forces.

“That’s a pod on the airplane” that can provide command and control, translating information between aircraft and processing data, and it could in the future be hooked up to other aircraft, such as the KC-135 tanker, Van Ovost added.

“I absolutely believe that all the platforms need to be connected to provide the resilient and inter-operable pathways not just for Air Mobility but to be able to allow F-35s and F-22s to talk, to be able to talk to the Valkyrie, and to have resilient forward odes that can process data and send out orders,” she said.