NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.–The U.S. Air Force will not pursue a future tanker, stealthy or otherwise, but instead self-protection systems to ensure access for refueling tankers in future conflicts, the service’s top acquisition official said this week during a reporters roundtable at the Air & Space Forces Association’s annual conference here.
The Air Force has done “lots of work around what do we do in the future for our tankers,” said William “Elvis” Bailey, the Air Force’s acquisition chief, when asked about the future of the Next Generation Air Refueling System (NGAS) program. “We spent a pretty dedicated effort to go through and look at what do we think those design solutions could look like. We looked internally. We went out to industry and had those guys come back with their thoughts on how to provide a more survivable aircraft. The stuff that was coming in for me might have been an incremental improvement, but not clear that that represented the next step, the next phase.”
“If the real question is tanker access, then let’s not constrain ourselves to the aircraft itself in trying to make a stealthy tanker,” Bailey said. “We need a tanker to have access so we’ll talk about all those systems that it would take to protect that tanker. There’s ancillary benefit in that, the fact that when I’m worried about tanker access, I’m also worried about transport access. There are leverage opportunities across the fleet for how do we get these aircraft where they need to be. That’s where you’re seeing our focus shift to now.”
“We will be going after how to make the tanker survivable,” he said.
The Air Force had been gauging industry wherewithal to build NGAS as a successor to the Boeing [BA] KC-46s and KC-135s, also by Boeing.
Rather than hold a competition between Boeing and Airbus on a tanker that would have served as a step toward NGAS, the Air Force determined last year that development of such a mid-stage tanker was unaffordable and that the service would instead focus on accelerating NGAS by four years–from 2040 to 2036–and buying another 75 Boeing KC-46A Pegasus tankers under a KC-46 Production Extension contract (Defense Daily, Oct. 6, 2025). The new Air Force direction means the NGAS effort for a new airframe has ended.
The Air Force plans to field 188 KC-46s by 2030 in a total buy of 263.
