Despite telling Senators that he believes the current plan to upgrade C-5As will win out, Deputy SECDEF England acknowledged that the “higher-than-anticipated usage of the C-17” means the Pentagon “will need likely a few more airplanes.” However, England said that is an issue for the 2008 budget not the 2007 budget.
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…