Gen. Arnold Bunch

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Air Warfare

KC-46 Faces 3 Category One Deficiencies; Two Affect Boom

AFA: The four-star chief of Air Mobility Command wants his new KC-46 Pegasus tankers “yesterday,” but the tanker’s boom has a nasty tendency to scrape up planes it’s trying to refuel, as well as two other category one deficiencies, and contractor Boeing has to fix those. The paint scraping problem — formally known as “undetected […]

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Air Warfare

New SecAf Extols High Tech, But Where’s The $$$?

CAPITOL HILL: Heather Wilson began her first public speech as Air Force Secretary with a paean to technology, highlighting the service’s history of innovation from the B-29 to the F-117 to the F-35. It would have been an unambiguous signal of administration priorities, except the budget doesn’t really back her up. Research and development funding […]

Air Warfare

B-21 Bomber Boost? KC-46 Still Late

  CORRECTED: What Gen. Harris Meant To Say Was A Total Bomber Fleet of 165; Still “At Least” 100 B-21s WASHINGTON: How many B-21 bombers will the US need? 80? 100? 165? Bound by the president’s budget on one side and congressional appropriations on the other, the head of Air Force acquisition was very careful in […]

Air Warfare

Air Force Strategy on UH-1N: Wait and Hurry Up

What could justify the Air Force awarding a sole source contract for helicopters worth close to a billion – that’s a thousand millions – dollars? Pick an answer: Whatever the answer, Air Force Secretary Deborah James and other officials confirmed in House Armed Services subcommittee hearings Thursday that the service’s acquisition arm is studying whether […]