There’s no service life extension program in the future years defense program for the C-17 transport, Air Mobility Command chief Gen. Paul Selva told defense reporters on Thursday. While “on a micro level,” there are C-17s that have dramatically flown past their planned usage rates during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, “on a macro level,” the fleet is about at the 1000-hours annual usage rate expected, and “we haven’t found a need for a SLEP yet,” he said. More worrisome to him is the “vanishing vendor” problem in that the C-17 production line is winding down and some suppliers are exiting the business. AMC will be putting effort at achieving a common configuration for the C-17s—and indeed, all its aircraft types—to eliminate separate engineering teams and logistics trains for each block variant, he said. “Ten years ago, we had five ‘blocks’ of C-17s,” said Selva during the April 11 meeting with the press. That number is now down to four and he wants it down to one.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine said the U.S. needs to prepared for future conflicts in which its adversaries will be able to closely track the location of American forces and attack with autonomous systems that use artificial intelligence.
