Government and industry employees converged in Dayton, Ohio, this week to discuss the ins and outs of the pending KC-X tanker competition. It was also an opportunity, says Teresa Rendon of the small business office at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, for small businesses to find out how they might engage in the tanker replacement program. Officials with the 653rd Aeronautical Systems Squadron at Wright-Patt expect the Air Force to purchase 179 replacement aircraft over a 15-year period—beginning in 2010—at a cost of around $20 billion.
The future U.S. bomber force could provide a way for the Pentagon to simultaneously deter conflict with peer adversaries in two geographically disparate theaters, said Mark Gunzinger, the director of future concepts and capability assessments at AFA's Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, during a March 21 event. But doing so…