The Air Force is preparing to embark on a five-year or more effort mandated by Congress to explore the merits of using commercial tankers on a fee-for-service basis to augment its own aerial refueling fleet, a senior service general said last week.
“We are going to do a sources sought RFI [request for information] here sometime in the near term,” Lt. Gen. Donald Hoffman, the top uniformed officer in the Air Force’s acquisition shop, told reporters Feb. 15 during a meeting in the Pentagon. However, Hoffman did not provide a specific timeframe for the release of the document or the overall evaluation.
“The language that Congress gave us was ‘as soon as practical,'” he said. “They didn’t give us any money, so that could define when ‘practical’ occurs.”
Congress instructed the Air Force in the FY ’08 National Defense Authorization Act to execute a pilot program of at least five years to examine the feasibility and advisability of utilizing the fee-for-service tankers to support, augment or enhance its own aerial refueling fleet. That fleet includes Eisenhower-era KC-135s, 1980s vintage KC-10s and, by the middle of next decade, new KC-X aircraft, which will phase out the oldest KC-135s.
While the service invited fee-for-service options when it issued the RFI for the KC-X, in April 2006, it excluded them from the subsequent KC-X request for proposals and ensuing competition (Defense Daily, April 26, 2006, and Feb. 23, 2007). Still lawmakers, such as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a long-time skeptic of the Air Force’s tanker recapitalization plans, wanted the service to take a closer look at the fee-for-service option and therefore championed the mandate in the legislation.
The Navy already contracts for fee-for-service in-flight refueling with Omega Aerial Refueling Services. Omega operates two B-707 tankers and has a KDC-10 undergoing certification testing, according to the company’s web site. The Navy and Marine Corps utilize the Omega tankers to support major and minor exercises and squadron-level training and cross-country deployments, the company says. Soon the fee-for-service tankers may support unit-independent training, the web site states.
Hoffman, reiterating the Air Force’s stated position, said fee-for-service tankers might be desirable for supporting combat air patrols that protect the American homeland or for some domestic training and test activities.
“If all you had to do was [that]…then I think there is a lot of room for a fee for service,” he said.
But utilizing fee-for-service tankers to support combat operations would be an entirely different story since it would be risky to count on equipment and personnel outside of the military chain of command to perform as needed in danger zones, he said.
“If you have a nuclear response, are [the fee-for-service tankers] going to take the bombers into threat areas and give them that last drink of gas before they answer a nuclear response scenario?” Hoffman asked. “The people that have to do that we think are probably uniformed folks.”
Another issue, he said, is how using commercial tanker services would impact the training opportunities and readiness of active-duty Air Force and Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve tanker aircrews which get a lot of their practice by participating in those homeland defense and test- and exercise-support missions.
Still, Hoffman said he thinks there is a balance that could be struck in divvying up that work.
“There is probably some subset of that that could be performed by fee for service,” he said. “I think it will come down to the business case of how much do you pay for that fee for service, and if you are doing that, are you sitting active-duty and Guard and Reserve tankers on the ground?
“This is how it will play out,” he continued. “But first we have to kind of see what industry says about what is in the art of the doable.”
And how industry will respond is a question mark, given that parameters that will be set. Hoffman said the Air Force will be paying neither for the development of the commercial, fee-for-service tankers, nor their production, and will not be giving its old tankers away to the companies so that they could use them.
“So we are going to say, ‘Is there anybody out there interested in a five-year pilot program?” he said. “And what elements would you expect in a proposal to favorably respond to something like that?”
One advantage that fee-for-service tankers would have is that they would be less likely to get pulled from a scheduled mission, Hoffman noted.
“If you are running a test program, and you say, ‘I will pay you for that fee for service for that tanker to be airborne,’ you know it won’t get scraped off by a higher priority,” he said. “If you rely on a normal tanker to do that, a higher priority may come along.”
“So by paying a fee for service,” he continued, “you kind of remove that unknown from the scheduling equation. But how much of that you do and whether it is…fiscally the right answer we don’t know yet.”