
crosshairs wrote:sferrin wrote:marauder2048 wrote:OTOH, big tankers can accommodate deeper magazines of kinetic (DEWS, kicm) and non-kinetic
countermeasures (expendable/towed decoys) without much degradation to fuel offload.
When's the last time the US flew a tanker where there was a real anti-air threat?
Lugging tankers into or even off the coast of China cannot possibly be a real consideration. Yeah, let's refuel our fighters 25,000ft over Guangzhou. Sure. No problems there!
No one is saying "no problems". If you want tanking in close to the fight you can't send in a KC-30A. And that doesn't mean having the boom-tanking drone over the mainland interior, it just means being a lot closer to the fight than a KC-30A can get to and survive. So the VLO drone can fill up the Raptor at the margin (i.e. within airspace F-35 dominates) as they go in, and then on the way out again. So on egress the refuel drone and F-22A are covered by F-35s and the F-22A only needs enough gas from the drone to cruise back to the large manned tankers, and the drone can go back and refill at the KC-30A along with the Raptors. Raptors RTB and the refilled drone goes back to near the edge of the fight (in airspace covered by F-35).
All the F-22A has to do here is take the B-21 in to release the weapons, and then immediately take it out again. It's the ISR-targeting drone that does the loitering. So the total exposure is a lot less than you'd think for the tactical tankers. They have VLO, now add decoys, EA/EW support, and DIRCM, etc.
Plus this can be a protected pipeline that provides the comms relay redundancy to get data out to weapons within other services and allies.
Future of Air Tanking: The Perspective of the 86th Wing Commander - 04/11/2018
“The future of a large tanker will be to support more distributed and dispersed operations and we will be looking at small tactical refuelers providing fuel to tactical air combat assets – these tactical assets will likely be cheaper, unmanned and more expendable.
https://sldinfo.com/2018/04/the-kc-30a- ... commander/
I am wondering what you see the problem is with having F-22A and a whole lot of F-35s (and such tactical drone tankers to extend them) as opposed to having a manned PCA aircraft and others in the mix. If the tanker can much more cheaply provide the range-boosting, and most of these tactical tankers survive the fight, who cares if there's a specific PCA platform at all?
All that matters are results from affordable dollars.