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Odustaju od JSTARS, umesto toga familija sistema medjusobno uvezanih...
Citat:The Air Force intends to cancel the JSTARS recap program in its fiscal year 2019 budget submission, tanking one of the service’s few remaining aircraft production opportunities still in contention.
The Air Force had planned to buy 17 new JSTARS recap planes to replace its legacy inventory of E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System battlefield management and control aircraft, with Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman — the three major U.S. military aircraft manufacturers — all vying for the prime contractor slot.
Instead, it will push forward with a system-of-systems approach that will link together existing platforms to track ground targets and do command and control, sources with knowledge of the budget told Defense News.
The Air Force’s decision to terminate the recap program will come as little surprise to those closely watching the competition. News of the potential cancelation broke in September, when a handful of lawmakers released a letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis that condemned the Air Force’s plans to explore alternate options for the airborne command and control mission.
In recent months, the service seemingly doubled down on the system-of-systems approach, with top officials from the Air Force’s top civilian to the head of Air Combat Command all questioning — in public — whether a JSTARS recap made sense given future threats.
Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson repeatedly argued that a more distributed solution could be used to meet demands. The legacy JSTARS fleet currently meets only 5 percent of the requirements of combatant commanders, she said, and by the time the recap system would be fielded, it would meet “less than one percent” of those needs, she said in November.
Gen. Mike Holmes, the four-star in charge of Air Combat Command, noted similar concerns during the Air Force Association’s annual conference this September.
“The question really is, how long do we continue to fund the GMTI [ground moving target indicator] capability in the classic way we’ve done it: with an integrated platform that has a sensor and air battle managers onboard,” that then communicate in the line of sight with people to take on tasks, he said.
“How much of our threat environment in the future will allow us to do that?”
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