A recent Air Force document provides the clearest insight yet into the service’s evolving tanker strategy, as well as what might be needed to continue the production run of Boeing’s KC-46 Pegasus air refueler.
The Air Force plans to use the Boeing KC-46 Pegasus’s Capability Production Document “as the most affordable requirements basis” for the new program, potentially giving the embattled aerospace manufacturer a leg up in a competition.
Onshoring and investment in military-specific semiconductors anchor a cornerstone of the defense industrial base.
Should the Air Force say "'we're going to move now with NGAS....[or] If they say 'we have reassessed, and our plans will be different, we [at Embraer] need to adjust that investment timeline" accordingly, said Frederico Lemos, Embraer Defense and Security chief commercial officer.
As questions hang over the future of the service’s Next Generation Air Dominance stealth jet, Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel, the Air Force’s director of force design and wargaming, said that “the fight looks much better when NGAD is in it.”
Speaking to Breaking Defense, Andrew Hunter said that the CCA loyal wingman program is proof the Air Force can move forward in new directions.
“It's fair to say we pay a lot of attention to what the Chinese are doing. And so, not everything that becomes public is a shock,” Andrew Hunter said when asked about new images of purported Chinese fighters. “But having said that, their pace is incredibly fast.”
Why edge and endpoint security can’t be an afterthought.
“This strategy to become a supplier of the US government is not a project that I have created inside of my business unit only. It is a 'One Embraer' approach,” Embraer Defense and Security CEO Bosco da Costa Jr told Breaking Defense.
“I think it’s fair to say that the L3 partnership is not there anymore for the agile tanker,” Embraer Defense and Security CEO Bosco da Costa Jr. told Breaking Defense. “They decided not to move on [it] because of other priorities.”
A recent request for information for NGAS to industry represents a new approach that seeks to gather feedback from more vendors earlier in the procurement process, according to Air Force acquisition chief Andrew Hunter.
Initial flight tests showed that a mitigation technique "look[s] very promising" as an interim solution, an Air Force official said, suggesting the issue could be downgraded relatively soon.
Reducing cognitive overload on warfighters while improving “time to trust” for autonomous systems is a matter of design.
Responses will help shape analysis for the tanker program, known as the Next Generation Air refueling System.
"We just kind of need to get their no-kidding ground truth of, ‘this is what we think we can deliver and when we think we can deliver it,'" Andrew Hunter, the service's acquisition chief, said in a Sept. 5 interview at the Pentagon.
Service officials hope that Congress will back Secretary Frank Kendall’s proposal to allow some new programs to begin early work, even if a continuing resolution is in place.
Aviation expert Tim Walton said that while such a design could mean strides in fuel efficiency, past iterations have had their limitations.