The US military needs to change its culture in order to reap the full benefits of an energy-efficient force, said Gen. Duncan McNabb, head of US Transportation Command, Wednesday. That may mean re-evaluating each service’s command and control elements to enable mobility officials to identify better operational concepts for the joint team, he said at the Army & Air Force Energy Forum in Arlington, Va. Such concepts would allow for the quicker transfer of supplies from the commercial to the military sector or from surface to air, he stated. “When you do that more efficiently, the most savings you will see will be in fuel. And, those savings are huge,” said McNabb. The Air Force’s new tanker, the KC-46A, will go a long way in cutting energy costs, he said. Unlike the legacy KC-135, the KC-46A will have a longer range, meaning other aircraft won’t have to travel as far to refuel, said McNabb. “Now we will be able to fuel much closer to the fight, so all sorties will be much more efficient,” he noted.
The Air Force is finished evaluating the proposed “interim” fix for the KC-46’s troubled remote vision system, and is moving toward finalizing the design of the “2.0” overhaul of the system. The Air Force is more focused on the 2.0 overhaul, and “we’ve completed nearly every aspect of the design”…