Naval Air Refueling Needs Deferred in Air Force Tanker Plan

sameolesid wrote:

Guy Alcala wrote in message ...

The only way to settle this is to wait and see how the USAF reacts if, after
selecting whatever new tanker they pick, the USN says "hey, we want some of
those for ourselves, and here's the money." Myabe the USAF will say "you're
welcome, and thanks so much for helping out with the R&D." Or maybe they'll get
all territorial; it's not as if turf wars are dead just because we've been
fighting real ones.

Guy

If the USN were to pony up the cash to buy land based tankers then it
would be admitting that CV's are inextricably tied to land based
assets to complete their power of projection missions. Of course
thats always been true to some extent anyway-and is more true today
than ever.
Today's scheme of "borrowing" AF assets can be explained as playing
nice nice in the "Jointness" game. Buying USN land based tankers would
be a different story altogether.

You raise an interesting point. While the vast majority of the world's population (and thus, the targets) live within the
littorals (defined as within 200nm of a coastline) and well within range of unrefueled navy strikes, three of our last four
major air conflicts (OAF being the exception) have had most/all of their targets at considerably greater distances inland.
Is this just an aberration (after all, DS and Iraq: The Sequel bias a small dataset), or are our targets increasingly likely
to be well inland on continental land masses?

If it is an aberation, which is what I expect, then there is little justification for the navy needing their own land-based
tanker support, especially as the advent of the F-18E/F and later the F-35 should increase their average un-refueled strike
radius compared to, say, DS or OEF. If this is only an occasional thing, it makes far more sense to let the USAF provide
the capability when needed.

OTOH, if this becomes the norm, then some serious re-apportionment of funding/tasking between the services may be in order.

Guy