WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force’s plan to field a next-generation refueling tanker by the mid-2030s could possibly be in jeopardy if the service has to operate under lengthy continuing resolutions, a top service official said Tuesday.
Andrew Hunter, the assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, said in an interview with Defense News on the Pentagon that a lengthy continuing resolution in fiscal 2024, and possibly the next yr, could hinder how quickly the service begins work on the next-generation aerial refueling system, or NGAS, program, thus resulting in problems down the road.
“The longer you are taking to start, obviously, that has back-end consequences,” Hunter said.
When asked if those consequences could affect the mid-2030s goal, Hunter replied: “Correct.”
The Air Force still plans to launch a proper evaluation of alternatives for NGAS in early fiscal 2024, Hunter said, adding that “hopefully we’ll get an FY24 budget sometime soon.”
That evaluation is anticipated to supply recommendations on what a future NGAS tanker would wish to fulfill the Air Force’s goals.
If Congress cannot pass a proper budget on time and the Air Force has to operate under a seamless resolution, Hunter said, the service will have the option to proceed its preparatory work on the evaluation now underway. The NGAS evaluation doesn’t require numerous money, he explained, which makes it easier to reallocate funds to maintain it going under a seamless resolution.
But once NGAS moves beyond the evaluation and “to the stage of really wanting to work directly with industry — establish vendor pools, those sorts of things that we’ve talked about for NGAS — we’re going to wish an actual budget to try this,” Hunter said.
And other, larger recent programs — meant to deal with “operational imperatives” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall believes are essential to rework and counter a possible threat from China — may also require extra money in an FY24 budget to start, Hunter said.
“The longer we wait on ’24, the further we are going to fall behind on addressing our operational imperatives,” Hunter said.
The Air Force earlier this yr shifted course on the 2 tanker recapitalization stages that may follow the continued KC-46 acquisition. Originally the service envisioned following up with KC-Y, a so-called bridge tanker acquisition of roughly 150 refueling planes, after which a next-generation KC-Z within the 2040s.
But China’s rapidly developing air capabilities prompted the service to maneuver up the next-gen tanker it now refers to as NGAS to the mid-2030s, and cut back its interim KC-135 recapitalization to roughly 75.
Hunter also said the Air Force hopes its revamped strategy for its next refueling tanker, in between the present KC-46 purchase and NGAS, will allow it to proceed with a less extensive engineering and manufacturing development phase than the previous KC-Y approach would have required.
Hunter said the service still plans to complete the KC-135 recapitalization’s joint capabilities integration and development system, or JCIDS, process and release a request for information later this month. Boeing and Lockheed Martin are expected to compete for the subsequent tanker, with the previous more likely to offer a rather modified KC-46, and the latter pitching its LMXT tanker.
Hunter said this RFI will ask industry to detail what it could provide that’s “more aligned with the KC-X [or KC-46] requirement than with the KC-Y requirement that we had originally talked to them about.”
“We desired to be certain that that we went back to industry to provide them a possibility to supply information relevant to that [new] requirement, which is most of the way in which through the JCIDS process,” Hunter said. “It’s gotten very firm.”
The Air Force also wants to higher understand how industry sees the timing of how quickly they may deliver a follow-on tanker to switch KC-135s, Hunter said. The length of time it’d take for industry to deliver a KC-Y tanker was one factor that prompted the Air Force to rethink its technique to speed up NGAS and cut back its interim tanker purchase.
When Hunter announced the brand new tanker strategy in March, he predicted Boeing would have the option to deliver modified KC-46s in 2032, and Lockheed’s LMXT tanker, if chosen, would likely are available in 2034.
Lockheed Martin and Airbus, partners on LMXT, disagreed that delivery of its tanker would take that long. Hunter later said industry asked the Air Force to elucidate in greater detail its concerns about timing.
“They weren’t understanding how we saw things folding out,” Hunter said. “Now we’ve had rather more opportunity to provide them details about how we see deliveries happening, and for them to then take that and are available back and say: ‘That is what we predict we will really deliver on.’ ”
The Air Force’s current strategy is targeted on how necessary it’s to deliver the subsequent iteration of tankers as quickly as possible after the tip of the present KC-46 contract, with out a significant gap. The service now plans to purchase 179 KC-46s, and expects to receive the ultimate KC-46 tankers in 2029.
Hunter said the best difference between how the Air Force saw the KC-Y procurement proceeding and the way industry saw it was on the necessity for an engineering and manufacturing development, or EMD, program. Industry felt it could meet the KC-Y requirement using existing, off-the-shelf technologies, he added.
But, Hunter noted, it wouldn’t have been that easy; the person technologies may need been off-the-shelf, but they’d never been integrated into the sort of system that KC-Y would have needed. That will have required conducting risk reduction through an EMD program to display the proposed design would work, after which take it into production, he explained.
“What was different about how we were seeing the schedule, versus how industry was seeing the schedule is, they were just seeing it as: You begin a program, after which after 2, 3, 4 years we start constructing and delivering aircraft,” Hunter said. “They were leaving out, I believe, the timeframe for an EMD program.”
Hunter said the Air Force also won’t have had the cash in its budget to start and rapidly progress an EMD program for KC-Y.
“That was a number of the disconnect,” Hunter said. “They’d very favorable — for themselves — assumptions about: ‘Hey, we will go very rapidly towards aircraft production without doing much of an EMD effort. And to the extent that any EMD can be required, you might start it immediately, and you might proceed in a short time.’ And you only should bump that up against [the] reality of, what does the Air Force budget actually seem like?”
“We now have generally higher expectations than industry sometimes does about how much we wish to know in an EMD program before we initiate production,” he added.
The Air Force hopes its recent strategy of a more limited purchase of tankers not far off from the previous KC-X requirements can be simpler and proceed more quickly, Hunter said.
“Our hope is that there can be very modest, if any, recent technology integration required [for the] KC-135 substitute,” he noted. “Because we’ve effectively done that with the [KC-46] aircraft which can be out on the planet flying today. In order that does lend itself to the chance that you might proceed to production significantly faster under this approach.”
When asked if he saw Lockheed and Airbus’s proposed LMXT tanker as still having a shot, Hunter responded: “Absolutely.
“I’m assuming Lockheed will include that of their RFI,” he said. “So that will that mean that it will still be into account.”
Hunter explained that the foremost change to the necessities for the subsequent tanker are coming in its communications architecture. The necessities for the KC-46 were set nearly 14 years ago, he said, and communications requirements have evolved considerably since then.
The following aerial refueling fleet may also need rather more ability to connect with and communicate with other aircraft or systems in a future war, he added, but those changes mustn’t present a fantastic challenge for industry.
“We’re not seeing that as things that industry fundamentally doesn’t know easy methods to do, or that they’ve never needed to integrate before.”
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.