Boeing E-7 Wedgetail

Um-

Well, and, and, and their good idea coincided at a time when the US basically took the E-7 off the field, right?

Well, there's that too.

But even she, it was starting to look pretty good.

But cruise missiles and drones and things that hug the Earth give you relatively less warning, and so what you want is more radar up in the air looking down to spot them coming.

We've only got three of the Wedgetail.

Uh, there's-

Mm

For example, there's a large airborne early warning aircraft for, uh, managing the air fight and deconfliction.

It's known as the Wedgetail in most countries, and it is not in the US Air Force inventory.

And it was supposed to come in the US Air Force inventory, and then it got canceled as a program.

Okay.

Right.

Um, they're about to, to do the Wedgetail.

I was just gonna-

The E-7

... bring up the Wedgetail.

And I mean, it's like...

I, I don't know.

The most expensive single crewed loss, according to the war zone, was the E-3 Sentry, which is currently out of production.

They say they can only be replaced by the E-7 Wedgetail, a program that the Pentagon recently revived at a unit cost the CBO estimates to be half a billion dollars.

So this is kind of the, the big one, five hundred million dollars for this one.

Unfortunately, this is, uh, one of only 16 we have available in our inventory.

The UAE is the most rabid of the anti-Iranian Gulf monarchies.

We've got a Wedgetail early warning and control aircraft there.

We've donated missiles.

I won't re-litigate all of that.