AMC’s Force Multipliers: 
Air Mobility Command’s Gen. Duncan McNabb has been hard at work figuring out how he can make America’s “air bridge” more effective in an era of high ops tempo and slim budgets, he explained during his talk at AFA’s Air and Space Conference Monday. The answer, he explained, is velocity and precision for air mobility. “Velocity has the effect of more airframes—it makes the system much faster,” he said. An example of increasing velocity can be found on the ground, from performing routine maintenance faster to using high-speed fuel pumps to cut down on time spent sitting on the tarmac. Precision air mobility also multiplies the effectiveness of the fleet by getting cargo drops to troops that need them in a hurry (by use of the new Joint Precision Airdrop Delivery System, which McNabb enthusiastically touted during a videotaped demonstration as “pretty cool”) to taking convoys off the road by using intratheater airlift.
RTX’s Raytheon unit was able to “significantly” extend the range of the AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile using mostly software changes in experimental tests last year, expanding the reach and lethality of the standard U.S. dogfighting weapon, company officials said Sept. 15.
