AMC’s Force Multipliers: Air Mobility Command’s Gen. Duncan McNabb has been hard at work figuring out how he can make America’s “air bridge” more effective in an era of high ops tempo and slim budgets, he explained during his talk at AFA’s Air and Space Conference Monday. The answer, he explained, is velocity and precision for air mobility. “Velocity has the effect of more airframes—it makes the system much faster,” he said. An example of increasing velocity can be found on the ground, from performing routine maintenance faster to using high-speed fuel pumps to cut down on time spent sitting on the tarmac. Precision air mobility also multiplies the effectiveness of the fleet by getting cargo drops to troops that need them in a hurry (by use of the new Joint Precision Airdrop Delivery System, which McNabb enthusiastically touted during a videotaped demonstration as “pretty cool”) to taking convoys off the road by using intratheater airlift.
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…