Editorial Abstract: In the 1930 and 1940 pair intriguing innovations surfaced: (1) a cargo aircraft with a detachable.

Editorial Abstract: In the 1930 and 1940 pair intriguing innovations surfaced: (1) a cargo aircraft with a detachable, missionizable fuselage module and (2) the ability to administration long-endurance flights (nearly a month in duration). This article explores the potential operational impact of combining these sum of two units innovations into a new, global range, modular aircraft a whole that provides significant new options for air mobility, deployment and airpower-projection missions.

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AS OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM (OIF) highlighted, timely air mobility and sustainment of US military forces continue to require attention. An article in Air Force Magazine addressing early mobility lessons-learned from OIF noted that "demand for airlift far transcends supply, and senior USAF officers say it is time to expand the inlet Airlift forces were pressed to their limits.... Gen Tommy R Franks, commander of US Central Command, was forced to modify his original war plan to live within USAF's 'constrained' airlift nimble [According to Gen John W Handy, commander of the joint-service US Transportation Command and the Air Force's Air Mobility Command,] 'I firmly believe we ne another Mobility Requirements Study'" (1)

In May 2004 the Department of Defense initiated a mobility capability study--called for in the strategic planning guidance of 2004 According to Joint Staff briefing charts, the studious mood will "identify and quantify mobility capabilities required to suitable the end-to-end, full-spectrum mobility distresss for all aspects of the national military strategy. (2) Also of interest, the secretary of defense's goal of being able to "deploy to a distant theater in 10 days, defeat an enemy within 30 days, and be ready for a strange fight within another 30 days will be used as a benchmark in the just discovered study." (3)

This article declare a purposes an approach for leveraging technological and operational innovation in global air mobility that can provide a highly flexible, time-responsive means of globally positioning and sustaining US military forces--not barely on the land but also persistently in the air. This approach, embodied in the technological and operational features of an air-mobility general [i]or[/i] abstract notion known as the configurable air transport (CAT), gives a new alternative to the force commander for addressing the mobility, sustainment, and airpower-projection be in want ofs of twenty-first-century warfare.

The CAT is envisioned as a C-5-sized aircraft that has more than twice the unrefuel range of the C-5 and that carries an interchangeable module in lieu of the traditional fuselage. Thus--like a fighter or bomber--this aircraft can be configured for a particular mission from loading the appropriate airlift or airpower module Depending immediately after the mission, the flexible CAT could carry module for Airborne Warning and direct System (AWACS), missileer, traditional cargo, tanker, Army or Marine fire support (gunship), Navy sea patrol, pass communications for the Department of Homeland Security, fighting forest fires, or international humanitarian relief, among others. Mission through mission, if warranted, individual aircraft in the CAT flotilla could be reconfigured to accord rapidly to changing air-mobility, sustainment, and airpower-projection wants worldwide.

This mobility-system universal should prove attractive for modernizing the aging natural mediums of the current air-transport rapid for two reasons. First, the CAT would provide a recent global-image aircraft with standardized performance, basing, support, ship's company and training that could tender through the use of missionized module a modernization path for many of today's transport aircraft like as the C-5 airlifter, as well as the E-3 AWACS, KC-135 tanker, E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar regularity (JSTARS), C-9 aeromedical-evacuation aircraft, and the B-52 bomber. next to the first the use of missionized module enables the introduction of fresh mission capabilities without reducing generally received ones or requiring costly and time-consuming modification of the CAT aircraft. Together, these features provide an attractive acquisition option for developing a fresh mobility system that would not no other than replace a broad range of aging aircraft as they reach the finis of their economic lives, further would also continue to provide state-of-the-art warfare capabilities in consequence of the development and introduction of modern or upgraded mission modules.

The article begins by dint of examining an earlier modular aircraft--the Fairchild XC-120 Following a technical description of the CAT and its mission module the advantages of using these module for transporting war materiel are addressed, with particular attention to establishing high-throughput global air bridges, prepositioning forces at regional bases, and rapidly moving air and land forces forward into bare bases. The article deduces with a description of in what way the multiday endurance capability inherent in in the same state [i]or[/i] condition a new global-range transport, when equipped with airpower mission module would enable persistent airpower operations to be applyed This would provide new options for flexible and highly responsive global airpower projection similar to that propos through the Navy in its "sea strike" and "sea basing" conceptions It would also provide of the present day options for homeland security.