The Air Force is planning experiments and briefing senior leaders on progress toward its “arsenal plane” idea, looking at multiple aircraft options to fly with a large weapons cache to back up strike assets.
An arsenal plane would be a multi-engine platform that accompanies remotely piloted aircraft and fighter jets in combat and totes “network-enabled, semi-autonomous weapons,” according to a 2016 Air Force video. The concept has been around for years under the Defense Department’s Strategic Capabilities Office.
The idea “takes one of our oldest aircraft platform[s] and turns it into a flying launchpad for all sorts of different conventional payloads,” then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter said in 2016. “In practice, the arsenal plane will function as a very large airborne magazine, [and] network to fifth-generation aircraft that act as forward sensor and targeting nodes.”
I've noted the idea of an arsenal plane for bombs. And long ago I added the idea of an air-to-air arsenal plane:
Taiwan is struggling to afford modern warplanes to prevent China from invading Taiwan. They are modernizing their older F-16s, but so far haven't been able to develop their own adequate aircraft or buy newer planes from us.
It occurred to me that we have gunships that turn large transport planes into ground support aircraft. They work very well. Couldn't Taiwan use the same concept for air defense?
Taiwan has AWACS-type planes to watch the Taiwan Strait and Chinese air bases near their coast.
Would it be possible for Taiwan to pair up air-to-air missile-planes consisting of a large transport plane carrying lots of long-range radar-guided missiles?
If Taiwan's E-2s spot a Chinese air armada heading across the strait, the "air gunship" could fire off volleys of air-to-air missiles even as Taiwanese fighters were scrambling. Given that the Chinese aircraft would be closing with Taiwan at high speeds, the air gunships could fire while well out of range of Chinese missiles, counting on the Chinese aircraft to close within the missile range even if the missiles are fired while the Chinese planes are out of range.
Which was earlier than RAND's proposal that I mentioned.
More recently I've worried about the survivability of a slow lumbering arsenal plane and wondered if we could turn the B-1 air frame into an air-to-air arsenal plane--an AABONE:
Given the ability of the F-35 to fire anti-aircraft weapons on other platforms, could we equip the B-1 bomber with long-range air-to-air missiles (an Air-to-Air B-1, or AABONE)?
The B-1 could hang well back and let the closer stealthy F-35 fire a barrage from the B-1, without even disclosing the location of the F-35.
I suggest a B-1 for this mission rather than a bomb truck using a converted commercial plane for this threat environment because the B-1 could skedaddle at high speed away from the threat after firing the missiles.
Of course, the air-to-air missiles should ideally have a longer range than our standard AMRAAMs in order to keep threats out of visual range of our F-35s that are spotting and aiming the arsenal plane missiles fired from well to the rear of the F-35 (or whatever sensor is aiming the missiles).
And really, this is a great solution to the problem of the F-35s limited internal (to remain within the air frame's stealth protection) missile storage capacity. Ideally, the internal missiles never need to be fired, thus giving away the location of the F-35.
Note that the initial article raises the idea of the B-1 as the platform.
