Air Mobility Command

The DOD ties its assets and systems together with the United States Transport Command headquartered at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois.

Under its banner and co-located on the same base is Air Mobility Command, a major command of the US Air Force.

Now, Air Mobility Command does hold a massive fleet of hundreds of C-5, C-17, and C-130s.

And while these aircraft and their crew regularly train, provide humanitarian assistance, and move some cargo through the US's global network of bases during peacetime, they primarily exist for the eventuality of battlefield use.

They're not there to move regular pallets from Dover to Ramstein.

Well, and also, in fact, the Army has talked about standing up an organization called Army Autonomous Systems Command just within the Army.

So there's the Transportation Command at the joint level, and then there's Air Mobility Command at the Air Force level, and the Navy has Sealift Command.

So you'll see that within the services as well.

um and there there is overlap and you know some people could say well you know it seems a little bit wasteful and i i get that um but at the same time you know this this area of warfare is is becoming very significant i think and is changing very quickly and so to have um a headquarters established that can really focus on this and understand it.

This would have been done by the Tinker crew, and we'll dive into that here in just a little bit.

So just last week at the Air and Space Cyber Conference, Lieutenant General Daniel Tully, who runs Air Mobility Command, actually told this story.

He described the crew being strapped into the jet, getting ready to launch, and then the base goes into an alarm red.

Everybody had to scramble to the bunkers, and when they came out, the KC-135 that they were sitting in and crewing, which was loaded with two hundred thousand pounds of jet fuel, was riddled with holes.

And then we have retired Lieutenant General John Ty Thomas.

General Thomas is also an executive partner at Aleranova and previously served as the deputy commander of Air Mobility Command and Pacific Air Forces.

Sir, thanks for taking the time to join us today.

Happy to be here, Scott.

And the C-17 MC rate seems to be drifting down by about 1% a year.

As the fleet ages, more parts get obsolete, becomes more difficult to keep the supply chain intact as just technology leaves the C-17 behind.

So the The plan from Air Mobility Command that you see in the request for information is for a single airplane to replace both of those.

The C-5 replacements will start in about 2050, and the C-17 replacements should finish by about 2075.