Farnborough, UK The Air Force is “looking at” employing the B-21 stealth bomber as a missileer, shooting volleys of air-to-air missiles at targets designated by F-22s and F-35s, Air Combat Command chief Gen. Hawk Carlisle told Air Force Magazine Monday. Carlisle, asked about the Air Superiority 2030 program, said “we have to build another platform,” to augment the F-22 and F-35, but one that’s not necessarily a sixth-gen fighter. This “PCA,” for Penetrating Counter-Air, would have to be “big. Range and payload is a part of it,” Carlisle said, noting it would have to be “a broad-spectrum” aircraft with stealth and the ability to fuse and “integrate avionics.” The B-21 “may very well be part of it, that is one of our developmental plans,” he said. To put distance between this concept and simply another fighter, USAF has dropped calling it “F-X” and the unfortunate “NGADS,” for Next Generation Air Dominance System. USAF will also look at equipping older bombers for standoff missileer duties, “with the ability to fling stuff into the theater, with guidance from stuff that’s forward.” The PCA, “I believe, … will be a new platform, it will have range and payload, an ability to rapidly and incrementally add new technology” and efficient engines from the AETP project.
The U.S. military needs to wake up to the fact that global dominance is no longer a viable strategy for national defense, because pursuing that unrealizable goal is making the country less safe, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said April 22. Emerging defense technologies like swarms of…