9 Secrets of the Tanker War
By Rebecca Grant
September 2010
http://www.irisresearch.com/library/resources/documents/9SecretsoftheTankerWar.pdf

In addition here are some comments from Mark Hasara on this article.

Folks,
As the Chief of the Air Refueling Control Team for both air campaigns in Afghanistan (2002) and Iraq (2002-2003), there are a few things which I would add to Ms. Grant's historical background....

TRUE:  We were 42 tanker sorties SHORT on our first run at the "Shock and Awe" ATO Wednesday night.  We flew it 17 SHORT on Friday night as we knew there would be fallouts.  Unfortunately there were fallouts and SEMPER GUMBY went into effect; ALWAYS FLEXIBLE (My most sincere apologies to all of you Marines out there... combat is the mother of invention many times).

TRUE:  National Alert Level went up the week before OIF air campaign started.  Soaked up tanker tails at home.  Delivering the "Iron" to the Gulf was accomplished with a very unique "timeshare" between assets in theater and the TACC at Scott AFB.  My thanks to Colonel Jon for that very innovative solution to a nasty problem.

TRUE:  Flexible Deterrent Option implementation in the Pacific region at the same time as iron delivery to the Gulf took 25 tankers out of the mix and moved them to PACOM AOR.  My thanks to X-Man for helping us come West from CONUS while trying to solve his own problems in his AOR.

TRUE:  TACC Tanker Barrel Maj "Mac" called me and told me he was sending the last two KC-135's AMC owned in late January 2003.  We had to back the OIF ATO into the gas.  RESULT: Cancellation of strike sorties into Iraq/Baghdad.  You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want.

TRUE:  Solution to the above was sending all air-to-air F-15Cs home just before the push into Baghdad.  We needed the gas to do the KI/CAS and SMACKDOWN in Kill Boxes 88 and 89... Baghdad!  Strike assets were loaded for air-to-ground and air-to-air... nothing new there, and IZAF not a real threat when Saddam buried his MiGs in the sand.

TRUE:  Northern Arabian Gulf (NAG) carrier airwings had to PRE-STRIKE REFUEL to get to their PRE-STRIKE refueling anchors when we moved A/R anchors into Iraqi airspace on Night 3 of OIF.  We had a drogue problem (NOT enough!) in the south.  But we dealt with it in other ways.  On the KC-135 you were either boom or drogue in the south war.  We sent all the MPRS KC-135s to the North War since it was a mostly Navy show up there.

TRUE:  Fighter strike sorties from Qatar QUICK-TURNED in Kuwait to make up for the lack of booms in the air.  We had NO airborne or ground alert spares during the initial phases of the OIF air campaign.  We did not have the tails... we need them all in the air.  When we did a CSAR in theater, we sent strike sorties home or withheld them on the ground to use their gas for CSAR mission success.  We always fight for effectiveness and efficiency.  You rarely get both in the tanker community.  You are either effective or efficient.  We were real close to being 50-50 in OIF thanks to a very good tanker planning and execution group at the Prince Sultan CAOC.  Thanks to people like Gramps and Struks for keeping us all focused.

TRUE:  Ground crew maintainers were the big key to success.  They were turning KC-135s and KC-10s in 1.5-2.0 hours vice the 4.0 it normally takes.  We learned from the Israeli Air Force's experience in the June 1967 War we could increase sortie generation if we decreased turn times.  It helps to know history.  I salute all of you who turned a wrench on a military aircraft.  You will always be the key to our success in the air.

TRUE:  Fuel resupply and storage has not been talked about much.  Every one talks about how big an airframe is and so forth.  It is important but if I cannot get gas into the base then it cannot support long endurance tanker ops tempos.  WE RAN A MIDDLE EAST COUNTRY OUT OF GAS!  We had a 4 kilometer long line of 8500 gallon fuel trucks waiting to get on one base to fill one tank farm at one base back up.  We used it all in 3 days and had to do it again.  We had Super Tankers (ST’s) in the Persian Gulf to keep one place full and they pumped it straight from the ST's to the base.  20 KC-10s were flying 38 sorties with 320,000 pound fuel loads.  That is 1.87 million gallons just to fly the KC-10 lines of an ATO at one base.  We knew this would be a problem as we all read the Gulf Air War Air Power Survey.  It helps to know history... again.  That is why I tell people high ops tempo tanker ops can only be done from prepared military airfields (and not all of them can do this) or international airports.  

TRUE:  Contact points in the air are still challenge number one.  This directly translates to mission timing.  How many of you got stuck on the boom and because you were running late to your TOT used up mission gas?  A flight of four Strike Eagles took 15K a piece so it took 45 minutes to fill up a four ship on average with two pumps at 2-2.5k a minute.  Worse with the Navy as they are only getting 1000 pounds a minute through the basket and the Tomcats were taking 12-15K in the north war... times four!  Only allowed one pump for the Navy/Drogue receivers.

RESULTS:  In 21 days of the initial OIF air campaign, we offloaded out of approximately 100 tankers 417+ million pounds of gas.  In Desert Storm, we did approximately 440 million with 300+ tankers in 48 days.  The KC-135 R models paid for themselves in SPADS!

I could go on for hours…  I hope you can see how important the KC-X program is to those who understand tanking.

NKAWTG... Nobody!

Sounds more like an argument for more aegis ships than for new tankers.

I'm not sure I follow.....
-K



 

Seems like it'd be a hell of a lot easier to put a couple supertankers out of business than to down 30+ aerial tankers.

There is the issue of doing business more efficiently as well.  I don't doubt that during the early hours of OIF we were using all of the tanker assets in theater at nearly 100% effectiveness, but we sure don't now.  In one deployment my tankers offloaded 105M pounds of fuel, but we also dumped 90M pounds of it in the gulf because our planners are lazy and shortsighted.  I remember reading that it's something like $6-8 a gallon by the time we get it airborne on a tanker, and to dump all that $$ in the ocean because: 1.  We were too shortsighted to put thrust reversers on the KC-135 and 2. Our planners are lazy and prefer to have "all the gas all the time" than to actually have to predict needs more closely.  

I believe that he proposes that Aegis ships can conduct CAS, or fly ashore carrying a few hundred thousand pounds of gas to offload.  



 

All the time we're doing stuff like this, China is taking notes on how to fuck up our warfighting capability.

I hope we aren't losing our edge against a determined adversary.

You're talking like the guy who thinks his drive home from the grocery store is the longest trip his food takes.

Unless the Boeing sleaze-machine wins the day, that is.

If you honestly believe that ships, not more airplanes, are the answer, you are way out of touch.

We are one catastrophic failure away from grounding the entire KC-135 fleet. When that happens, China won't need to do any research or studies to find our weakness. We're going to be wearing it right out there in the open.

The average age of the KC-135 is pushing 50 years. We absolutely need a new tanker, yesterday.

The words "more" and "replacement" seem to be getting confused.

the tanker deal is going to drag on forever, because our elected reresentatives in D.C. will continue to fuck around as usual.

Yep.





The only reason this is going on is because Boeing lost, cried to their bought and paid for congressmen, who then tried to fix it, which annoyed EADS' congressmen. If you didn't know, this is also why so many defense products are now made all over the fucking place. It has 0 to do with good business or manufacturing processes and everything to do with getting a lot of jobs in various districts so you can get more support in Congress.





The whole thing is fucked up beyond repair. I would like to see Boeing lose it just for the early shenanigans. Which, if they hadn't done, would probably mean a new Boeing product would already be operational.





 

0bama and Gates have been working diligently towards this end since last January.
-K



 

Boeing had a legitimate gripe.  The Air Force screwed up that process too, which is why Boeing won their challenge.  As for the Shenanigans, IIRC, the reason for that was they could lease from the O&M budget, but they had to use a different budget to buy, and Congress hadn't approved that yet.  It wasn't necessarily malicious, just the Air Force trying to get tankers faster.  



Regarding spreading out production for political purposes, you are absolutely right.
-K





 

"You can always buy an Airbus and you can always sell a Boeing."

TC

The argument over the Boeing vs the EADS consortium tankers is stupid.

They should be buying both.  By the time they finally sort out this mess the KC-10s will need to be augmented or replaced too.  The tanker situation is obviously bad and in desperate need of attention... order 50 of each and get the production going, then deal with the specifics of how they want the total mix to end up.  Maybe look at... () the actual performance of the as-delivered units in considering their decisions.

If they truly don't need the smaller size tankers, why did they write the request for one?  I'm sure Boeing would be happy to build them a large tanker if that's what they want... 747-800 anyone?  Maybe Lockheed could build a tanker version of the C17.

During the Kosovo air campaign we dumped about as much fuel as offloaded. Taking off with mandated from above 190's to refuel two to three F-16/F-15's in a <6 hr sortie under 200 nm .

We will still have the same problems with a new tanker be it Airbus or Boeing.

Obviously landing with a significant percentage of fuel load should be a requirement then.  Upgraded landing gear, tires, and brakes would be far less expensive (and more responsible) than all that wasted fuel and the overhead it took to get the fuel there.

In reading the OP discussion another option becomes glaringly obvious - in that a large tanker that can tank more than one aircraft at a time would seem to significantly improve overall efficiency and availability, especially if in combination with higher speed pumps or whatever to speed up the refueling process.  And that all the tankers should be equipped to refuel with either boom or drogue.  Have they ever tried multiple booms on a large aircraft?

Another option would be to equip some large tankers with appropriate crew accommodations to support very long duration sorties... say 24 hours or whatever.  "KC-747" might not seem so outrageous after all if you consider what it might be able to do in changing the typical operating environment for tankers.

Of course one of my pet peeves is just that we have a lot of aircraft in the air which really have insufficient fuel load/range - they are designed to be dependent on tankers.  Air refueling is a significant addition to the force structure but I question the designed-in near inability to conduct operations without it.

Don't worry, getting so indebted to China was the smartest thing we did regarding them. Their economy is so linked to our success to attack us would mean economic collapse for them because we would then have a valid reason to negate our debts. Now, we might get into pissing matches every now and then to keep the hawks happy, but that's all it will be for quite some time.


Daniel

Alternately, they dump our treasury notes on the world market and nobody loans money to us.

We'll see what happens with this competition.....

Huh.

Back when I was a 141 FE (86-88) we fuel planned pretty tightly, because if you are carrying tons of unneeded fuel, you are wasting gas hauling that extra weight around.

Boeing probably wouldn't let them.  

I'm talking about the guys at the CAOC who want every tanker in theater in the air all the time, boring holes in the sky in case some thirsty pointy nose wants a sip.  Our crews were extremely unhappy with all the 8-10 hour "zero offload" sorties they had them flying.  Take off, fly circles for 8 hours, dump a bunch of gas in the gulf, land.  Not exactly what they get paid to do.  Since the CAOC is so piss poor at predicting the next days needs, they just launch every flyable tail every day so we never run short.  I didn't mind the 1:1 pairing of tankers to heavies like AWACS and JSTARS, that's simple stuff, but all the guys that spend half the day flying around only to pump 5K ea on a flight of A-10s or F-16s is hardly justifying the massive expense of having all those tankers in theater.



 

Airborne fuel was calculated at $17/gal by the DSB in 2001.

Well if you figure at just one location we are dumping about 270 million pounds of it a year, that adds up to real money*.  
* We took the parachutes off of the KC-135s to conserve fuel though.  



It's only $675M/yr unless my numbers are off, chump change for this administration.
 

I have just enough government contracting experience to be dangerous; in a perfect world both teams would be told to FOAD and the KO would find third and fourth competitors for the next round.  But, there are no other companies in the game.  Eventually Boeing will win because the AF screwed up and did not follow the source selection plan (defeating the whole point of releasing the SSP to industry). IIRC the new source selection plan has 180 true/false factors, what an f'ing mess...

Kharn

Shock and awe.
Because we had to or because we could?

Especially when the F-16s and A-10s aren't exactly doing much other than buzzing around catching "combat" hours.