Somebody has flown every tanker the U.S. Air Force has ever operated. The new head of Air Mobility Command would like to know whether that needs to stay true.
“I do not believe that it has to be a manned future air refueling solution,” Lt. Gen. Daniel Tulley said on 16 September, which is not a sentence an Air Force three-star says casually about an aircraft type that has carried people since 1957.
Informations clés
OMS: Lt. Gen. Daniel Tulley, commander of Air Mobility Command since early August 2026
Où: Air & Space Forces Association Air, Space & Cyber Conference, 16 September 2026
Programme: Next-generation aerial refuelling system, targeted to field in the mid-2030s
Options on the table: Blended wing-body design, more KC-46s, or a stealthy and possibly uncrewed platform
Near term: A pending contract for 75 additional KC-46 Pegasus tankers
What it replaces: The KC-135 Stratotanker, in service since the Eisenhower administration and still the bulk of the fleet
The precedent: The U.S. Navy’s uncrewed MQ-25, which passes 14,000 lb of fuel at 500 miles from the carrier
The scale problem: A KC-46 carries 212,000 lb of fuel, more than fifteen times the MQ-25
The Question He Actually Asked
Tulley was not announcing a programme. He was doing something rarer, which is thinking out loud about a requirement before it hardens.
Two of those requirements are already settled and both are new. A future tanker has to be networked, and it has to be able to defend itself. Neither has ever been true of a tanker before. Tankers historically orbited somewhere safe and waited.
Once you accept that the aircraft must survive contested airspace, the crew starts to look less like an asset and more like a constraint.
The Navy Already Did the Easy Version
Tulley pointed straight at the MQ-25. Boeing’s uncrewed tanker refuels aircraft like the F/A-18 Super Hornet et le F-35 around 500 miles out from a carrier, in airspace nobody wants to send a crew into.
It works. It has been passing fuel to manned fighters since 2021. But the numbers do not scale the way the Air Force needs.
An MQ-25 transfers 14,000 lb of fuel. A KC-46 carries 212,000 lb. The Air Force does not need a small uncrewed tanker that works near a carrier. It needs a very large uncrewed aircraft that works across the Pacific, and nobody has built one.
The Technology Is Not the Hard Part, Which Is the Awkward Part
Tulley was careful to say the Air Force is not yet operating fully autonomous large aircraft, but he was equally clear that the technology is arriving fast, and he made a point that is quietly damning.
A modern airliner can already take off with very little help, fly a programmed route and land itself. The capability exists. It simply is not used that way, because there is no commercial reason to remove the pilots and every commercial reason to keep them.
Which means, as Tulley put it, the market for autonomy in large aircraft is a military market. If anyone is going to pay to make a 200-tonne aeroplane fly itself, it will be an air force.
He was less impressed by the shortcuts on offer. Companies have proposed carry-on autonomy kits that could be fitted to existing KC-135s. His verdict was short: they have not seen them tested successfully.
A day in the life of a U.S. boom operator, the job an uncrewed tanker would have to replace.
Meanwhile, the Aircraft They Actually Have
All of this sits on top of a tanker fleet with real problems. The 75-aircraft KC-46 follow-on contract has been held up by unresolved deficiencies, with the Air Force and Boeing reaching an agreement in mid-May to work through them. The service is also adding connectivity and active defensive systems to both the KC-46 and the elderly KC-135.
Tulley’s deputy summed up the timescale better than any slide could.
That is the sentence to take away. An aircraft designed in the 1950s will still be flown by people who are not yet alive, while the service argues about whether its replacement should have a cockpit at all.
Sources: Air & Space Forces Magazine; Air Mobility Command; U.S. Navy; Boeing
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