The Air Force Desperately Needs A Stealth Tanker
Fielding a stealthy tanker would go a long way to remedy the USAF’s near-sighted practice of betting heavily on relatively short-ranged stealth fighters, but it won’t be cheap.
By Tyler RogowayJanuary 18, 2017
Sitting on the table at Lockheed Martin’s booth at this year’s American Institute of Aeronautics And Astronautics Sci Tech Forum in Texas was a large model of a plane that looked as if it was ripped right from Hollywood’s latest science fiction war epic. And although its design surely includes loads of science, the need for such a machine is anything but fictional—a hard truth that the USAF seems to be finally coming to terms with, albeit slowly.
The USAF’s great capabilities mismatch
The term “stealth tanker†just sounds frivolous doesn’t it? Like something out of a Transformer’s movie—nice mil-tech eye candy, but not much logic behind it. Yet the reality is the concept is anything but frivolous, especially now, and the logic behind it is undeniable. The problem lies in the fact that the Air Force has dumped massive amounts of resources into developing and procuring relatively short-ranged but very high-tech and grossly expensive stealth fighter aircraft—aka the F-35 and the F-22.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/7012/the-air-force-desperately-needs-a-stealth-tanker
