The U.S. Air Force's Master Plan to Outgun China

David Axe

Security,

The U.S. military is considering developing a so-called “arsenal plane.”

The U.S. military is considering developing a so-called “arsenal plane” to accompany stealth fighters into combat, hauling large numbers of munitions in order to significantly boost the stealthy planes’ firepower.

The arsenal-plane concept, announced by Defense Secretary Ashton Carter in a February 2 speech previewing the Pentagon’s 2017 budget proposal, could help solve one of the U.S. military’s most intractable military problems—its lack of “magazine depth” compared to more numerous Chinese forces in various Pacific war scenarios.

But Carter didn’t specify what kinds of weapons the arsenal plane might carry and whether they might include air-to-air munitions, which is where America’s arguably greatest firepower shortfall exists.

The arsenal plane, under development by the Defense Department’s new Strategic Capabilities Office, “takes one of our oldest aircraft platform and turns it into a flying launchpad for all sorts of different conventional payloads,” Carter said.

“In practice, the arsenal plane will function as a very large airborne magazine, networked to fifth-generation aircraft that act as forward sensor and targeting nodes, essentially combining different systems already in our inventory to create whole new capabilities,” Carter continued.

A Pentagon official told Aviation Week that the Strategic Capabilities Office, a kind of incubator for new weapons ideas that Carter established in 2012 during his tenure as deputy defense secretary, is considering adapting the B-1 or the B-52—or both—for the arsenal role. In the jet age, there have been many proposals to arm bombers with air-to-air weapons.