https://www.defensenews.com/digital-...oomsday-plane/
Northrop, Lockheed, Raytheon team up on Navy’s E-XX ‘doomsday’ plane
NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland — Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works and Raytheon Intelligence and Space are teaming up to bid on the
Navy’s next command-and-control aircraft, to be used if a nuclear war breaks out.
The “E-XX” would replace the Navy’s fleet of 16
E-6B Mercury aircraft, which carry out a mission the Navy refers to as TACAMO, for “Take Charge and Move Out,” that allows the president, the secretary of Defense and other national leaders to communicate with and control forces such as nuclear missile-armed submarines.…
The Navy decided to use the Lockheed Martin C-130J-30 Super Hercules, a version of the C-130 with 15 feet added to the fuselage, as the platform for its TACAMO aircraft, said Henry Cyr, Northrop Grumman’s director for multi-domain command and control capture programs.
The stretched C-130 will be the right size for for the mission and will fly better than the E-6, he said….
The Navy wants a quick transition, so the E-XX likely won’t bring significantly new technologies to the table, aside from more advanced radios and computing systems. The goal, Cyr said, is to take already-existing technologies and field them in a new air frame as soon as possible.
“This is not intended to be a new technology demonstration,” he said. “It is intended to take existing capability that can be fielded in the near term.”
TACAMO is a “can’t-fail” mission, too important to endanger by experimenting with something unproven, Cyr said.
“The nuclear command and control communication business, it is more important to do 100% of the time correctly than to maybe take a little bit of risk on developing new technology,” he said.