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From War on the Rocks: https://warontherocks.com/2019/04/air-force-manned-reconnaissance-at-a-crossroads/ From the article: The world today isn’t the Cold War world of yesterday, and Cold War requirements should not justify acquisition of new assets for tomorrow’s military needs. The RC-135’s innocence has long been compromised as it has evolved from its original peacetime role into a valuable combat asset, but both missions must be performed in the future. No single replacement solution can meet both of these disparate operational requirements. The U.S. Air Force must look beyond its obsession with warfighting to identify and procure a second manned big-wing peacetime replacement for the RC-135. Overall the article was pretty good but the last point (last sentence of the article) I thought made a particularly interesting point, I think obsession might not have been the right verb for the AF approach, prioritization on warfighting (major conflict preparation has to be number one but not necessarily one that takes up a disproportionate amount of resources from other missions, contingencies, etc..) but it made the point that not everything is peer v. peer with double digit SAMs and 4/5 gen fighters weapons free lobbing missiles at anything that flies, there's a range of military operations. Big Wing ISR/C2 may not fit into peer v. peer on Night 1 anymore but has a role to play in AF/Joint ops across the range. Recap would not be cheap but a new Iron Triangle based on a common platform (ideally) seems reasonable. Thoughts?