A Nov. 19 solicitation memo says the C-5 Galaxy will fly until 2045 and the C-17 Globemaster until 2075, longer than previously planned, to ensure that the Air Force has enough airlift capacity while it waits for the Next-Generation Airlift aircraft. 

NGAL is to reach production no earlier than 2038 and initial operating capacity three years after that. “To mitigate risks associated with acquisition delays, funding uncertainties, or technological challenges, the existing C-5M and C-17A fleets’ operational viability must be maintained until a fully capable replacement is fielded, which may require extending the service life and associated Military Type Certificate (MTC) of each platform,” the memo states.

The plan is to retire one C-5 as each new NGAL arrives, then do the same with the C-17s.

But keeping some of the Air Force’s oldest transport airframes in the skies is already a major effort, former service officials told Defense One. Maintenance hurdles, mission-capability rates, and recent mishap stats add to the concerns.

“Why would this approach to this old problem deliver a different result than what has already happened?” said Mike Minihan, who retired last year after leading Air Mobility Command. “Have we done the analysis to ensure that the capability that we're delivering with this upgrade is actually what the warfighter needs?”

Minihan said he supports the Air Force’s efforts to field NGAL. (In May, he became an adviser to Radia, which aims to field the world’s largest cargo plane.) He also praised the memo’s acknowledgement that “uninterrupted inter-theater airlift capacity is paramount for global operations,” 

But Minihan said the service needs to prioritize its future airlift capabilities, not just modernizing aging aircraft.

“I'm extremely worried about what I call the equilibrium. The equilibrium between the force that supports and the force that needs supporting, or the strike forces,” Minihan said. “So you're going to have fifth- and sixth-generation bombers and fighters, and you're still on generation-two airlifters and tankers.”

The C-5 entered service in 1970. After the AIr Force concluded in 2004 that the Galaxy still had decades of life, the remaining 52 airframes were re-engined and upgraded between 2006 and 2018. But last year, the type managed only a 48 percent mission-capable rate, thanks to  maintenance and supply-chain problems that kept some airframes in the depot for 900 days. The Air Force Life Cycle Management even started a campaign, “Drive to 55.” to boost that rate to 55 percent. 

Minihan has publicly argued that the Air Force should sell its C-5s to private companies, then charter them from time to time, as a way to “relieve the C-17.”

The C-17, which entered service in 1995, has a more reliable mission-capable rate of 75 percent. But in the past four years, Globemasters have been involved in 21 class-A mishaps—the deadliest and costliest incidents—more than any of the military’s most-used planes.

Jessica Ruttenber, a former Air Force pilot and program manager who oversaw the C-5 and C-17 portfolios, said she was unsurprised by the service’s call to extend the life of the two transports, but said the cost of doing so would continue to be high.

“It’s a grandfather jet, so it doesn’t surprise me one bit,” Ruttenber said. “The thing that concerns me for the C-5 and the C-17…is the maintenance cost and the upkeep.”

Responses to the NGAL solicitation are due in about two months, and the analysis of alternatives is to take place in 2027, the memo said.

“Ukraine has a lot of data that they want to give to NATO” as part of a joint training center in Poland, said Tom Goffus, the alliance’s assistant secretary general for operations, during a Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance virtual event on Monday. “We're doing a cloud solution for that…to be able to handle large amounts of data from the Ukraine battlefield. And we're hoping that it's going to be operational on NATO cloud in January of 2026.”

The final hurdle involves process, not technology.

“They've got all the equipment to do it,” Goffus said. “What we don't have…is we don't yet have a policy on how to accredit it. How can you accredit this system in order to use it in a safe manner? All of our tools are designed for network-centric security, and we want to go to cloud-centric security, and so that's one of our biggest challenges.” 

The plan is to learn from big cloud service providers in the U.S. that operate classified clouds for national security. The Pentagon has also been working on improving secure communications with allies and partners. 

“I'm going to be talking to some of the hyperscalers who have done this already in the U.S. system. There are secure clouds out there, nationally, at the secret and even higher level. So this is figuring out an accreditation process to go along with the capability and essentially get the culture, the process and the policy to catch up with what's available out there.”

Goffus said the goal is to build everything from scratch to avoid inheriting the “limitations” of existing networks. Also, while the aim is to use commercially available systems with open architecture—that is, they can interface with products regardless of what company made them—the government has to be the owner, ultimately. 

“It has to be brand-new. It is not system-of-systems. It's not a federated system of systems—many of our federated system-of-systems are actually proprietary, which makes it harder for things to talk to each other,” he said. “But I do want to stress that this has to, in the end, be government defined and government owned, though it is commercial solutions. And we need to be the gatekeepers on that.”

The proliferation of data generated and used on the modern battlefield from fighter jets to drones to ships has increased the need for militaries to be able to access, analyze and transfer information quickly (even for medical responses). 

And for NATO, the vision is to integrate the data from partner nations and provide that central cloud-based solution, Goffus said. 

“I think NATO needs to have a cloud solution, [an] open architecture way of integrating things that the nations buy. The nations buy the sensors. They buy that sensor suite, sensor system that feeds the data. But NATO does the data integration and makes it all good,” he said. “The strategy overall right now would be more in that line, and that common funding would go to help make sure that we have that data backbone, that common data layer that everybody can pull from.”

First Polish, Romanian, and American troops trained together Nov. 18 in Poland on Merops, an AI-enabled, pickup-truck-transportable system that identifies enemy drones, then launches a cheap fixed-wing drone to ram them. At the same time, the Army held Operation Flytrap 4.5 in Germany, a competition of 20 cUAS contenders in a competition for one of four $350,000 prizes.

“It also demonstrated our capability, just as Flytrap did, to integrate with industry, to move very quickly to employ a capability that's lethal,” Brig. Gen. Curt King, who leads the 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command in Germany, told reporters Tuesday. “It can defeat the Shahed-type threats, but also it demonstrates our ability to place capabilities that are much cheaper than some of our other previous systems that we've been using to date, to ensure that we are  able to build the capacity against the drone threats that could be placed into the air.”

The U.S. has been using air defense systems to shoot down drones, with missiles that cost millions of dollars each. A Merops interceptor drone costs about $15,000, about half the price of the Shaheds that Ukrainians have been shooting down with it. 

“The other thing that we demonstrated with Flytrap, and that Ukraine has shown us … is the technology is rapidly evolving so that we can get to enhanced decision aids and autonomy, which Ukraine has been rapidly developing, so that I don't need 10 soldiers to do a function,” King said. 

Both events included the team from the Global Tactical Edge Acquisition Directorate, a nascent procurement system that plans to create a marketplace where units can buy the systems that are vetted and approved through events like Project Flytrap.

“We're not just stopping with the counter-UAS fight,” Col. Christopher Hill, senior director of the GTEAD, told reporters. “Next up on the list is ground autonomy and ground launched effects, as I mentioned earlier, the offensive systems that we're going to use to create a dilemma for our adversaries. Then we're going to move to air autonomy and air-launched effects—again, another offensive system to provide a dilemma.”

The team is expanding to Indo-Pacific Command early next year, Hill said.

“We're going to replicate the same processes there in the Pacific region, in order to not only support our U.S. unit there, but also our international partners in Australia, in South Korea and in Japan, and other partners there in the region,” he said.

Beyond demonstrations, GTEAD plans to have soldiers lead assessments and give feedback so that systems can be tweaked and then put on the marketplace.

“On the back end of these demonstrations, be prepared, from an acquisition standpoint, to actually put dollars towards these capabilities and give these companies something to look forward to from a contract standpoint,” he said.