The future of UAVs remains to be seen. Use of UAVs could become limited via rules of war, Geneva Convention, etc. But even so, UAVs have demostrated air-to-air refueling. And since they're probably not going to be flying formation off the wing of a tanker, I can only imagine how much that's going to slow the air-refueling game.

With that being said, have you ever participated in a real shoot'em war or exercise? I haven't been in a real shoot'em war, but have flown tankers and planned many exercises. I actively plan for tankers and have planned for fighters (damn you 51FW/7AF).

In a large force exercise or big shoot'em war, the fighters want to refuel in 15 minutes. ALL of them. And to do that, you need a lot of booms in the air. Since OIF/OEF wasn't an air-to-air war, we've gotten away with yo-yo ops. But let's be clear. Yo-yo ops is in complete violation of doctrine and would not be something the fighter guys would do in a real shoot'em war. Just compare tanker ATOs from Gulf War I and today, and you'll see the difference. GWI had hundreds of tanker lines a day. So why exercise and build a future tanker plan on operations that will not likely be used in a real war? I don't know what our tanker utilization rate is. But if we were to start reducing the size of our tanker fleet, even by small percentage, I'm sure the pain would be significant.

Our bigger problem is the KC-135 is old, but the newer KC-10 has hours. While the KC-135 spent decades on the ramp sitting alert, the KC-10 has always been flying. As much as we need a replacement for the KC-135, we need to start looking to replace Big Sexy (KC-10). Her maintenance reliable since I've left the fleet has gone down a lot and she's showing her age. The KC-10 also has a legacy cockpit, the KC-135 does not. The USAF failed to upgrade the KC-10 and everyone is ignoring the big snafu that is coming with the new navigational requirements. To think that ICAO is going to give our tankers a waiver is very naive.