Senators want the Pentagon to continue to review the question of airlift sufficiency. In floor remarks, Talent quoted Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley, who said recently that the C-17 was “worth its weight in gold.” Retired Gen. John Handy, who stepped down this fall as head of Air Mobility Command and US Transportation Command, had long contended that 222 C-17s was the minimum required to meet the existing mobility requirement. And that requirement has gone up.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall doesn’t see great value in trying to break the Sentinel ICBM program off as a separate budget item the way the Navy has with its ballistic-missile submarine program, saying such a move wouldn’t create any new money for the Air Force to spend on other…