Replacing Canada’s Failing CC-130s: 17 C-130Js

CC-130 over BC

The US military has been coming to the realization that its aging aircraft fleet will begin posing serious challenges in the coming years. Canada is experiencing similar problems. In 2005, Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Rick Hillier said that:

“Our [CC-130 E/H] Hercules fleet right now is rapidly going downhill. We know that three years and a little bit more than that, the fleet starts to become almost completely inoperational and we will have to stop supporting operations – or else, not be able to start them.”

This Spotlight article offers additional details regarding the Canadian CC-130 recapitalization program, and the thinking behind it; some background that points up the parallels between the issues faced by the Canadians, and the experiences of other air services; and some insight into why the buy took so long, after the C-130J was declared Canada’s preferred choice in an “expedited” process. Canada has begun using the new planes on operations, and is preparing to accept the last “CC-130J.” This will shift its focus to issues of long-term support costs.

Reality-Undeterred USAF Secretary Releases Buzzword Compendium

• US Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James is worried about the service’s current readiness because of budgetary squabbling, but that didn’t stop her from releasing a lofty long-term strategy document [PDF] where the word “global” appears no less than 65 times (one time more than “future” and 65 more than “interesting”). Read it if you need a dose of game-changing high-end full-spectrum multi-domain verbiage (quoted verbatim). In the future such vapid documents will be both written and read by robots, letting humans focus on actual thinking.

• Actually 30 years from now the US Air Force will be flying F-35s running software version 7E, with luck [Bloomberg].