Stealth Tanker

Way back when I first strted this blog, I used to chip the odd comment over on some miltary sites and I used to blog about things military.

Things have gone a bit stale on the military front: the F-35 is slowly coming on stream and I'm sure will eventually support most of it's requirements. The Typhoon will eventually start to be fitted out with upgrades to lower it's radar observability.

The big news is the Chinese and Russian low-observable aircraft that will over the next decade come on stream.

However, there is a weak link in the chain: endurance. Most fighter and reconnaissance aircraft need refuelling as part of their operation envelope. Refuelling is even more critical on stealthy aircraft because bulky extenal fuel tanks ruin the stealth aspect, so they have to carry fuel internally.

The F-22 Raptor has the ability to super-cruise at supersonic speeds without afterburner, but it still needs to tank once on a regular basis.

The stealth fighters are harder to combact, so the weak link moves down the chain to the tanker.

They may be flying their lazy 8's outside of the main threat area, but they are  vulnerable nontheless to attacks from stealthy enemy fighters. They are a big highly radar-observable and even IR-observable target vulnerable to attacks from Beyond Visual Range. Just the sort of attack low-observable fighters are designed for.

Stealth fighters are such an expensive commodity and maintenance so intensive that it would be very difficult to supply them in enough numbers to fly top cover for a tanker in enemy airspace. In any case a stealthy enemy fighter would be hard to spot before it got close enough for a guided missile kill on the highly observable tanker. Of course a bunch of unstealthy fighters and a big fat unstealthy tanker flying circuits are very very obvious targets not just from aircraft but from ground fire too.

Because of the risk from BVR attacks and the increased capability of foreign aircraft, the case for the stealth tanker becomes a higher priority.

A few aviation sites have already posted abouit the tanker capability gap and the need for a stealthy tanker, but nothing as yet has popped up on the radar.

It's possible the B-21 project could spawn a tanker variant and it's also possible that the USA already have a stealth tanker avaiable and are allowing their future enemies to base tactics on a very un-stealthy tanker fleet. After all, Northrop grumman pulled out of the KC-X tanker competition that Boeing eventually won... I just wonder if they had an alternative offer to build an alternative tanker, after all they built the B-2 bomber so have expertise in building large stealth aircraft under black projects.

After all in the recent decade, more large stealthy aircarft have been observed around the usual secret testing grounds in the USA.

It wouldn't surprise me if the US did have a stealthy tanker ready to go if push came to shove.

If not deep pentration missions into highly-contested enemy airspace will simply not be possible. Not through lack of stealth, but through lack of range.