Lawyers' Old Joke
"When the facts go against you, stress the law; when the law is against you, emphasize the facts; when your case has both the law and the facts against it, call the other lawyer an a$$hole."
The facts are against you who have called me names.
The majority of airliners are leased, and leases are expiring every day. In addition are the bankruptcies, such as the MaxJet 767s that were parked in December.
The USAF could not handle a hundred tankers all at once, anyhow. The only requirement is that there be a potential fleet of suitable size, and semi-astute USAF buyers.
Ironically, the US longhaul carriers who run their planes until they go to the boneyard are the ones hauling USAF cargo and troops, and most all of those were bought well used.
The USAF always has money to buy new and shiny, but not enough for less expensive or less glamorous upgrades. When President Reagan was shot in 1981, VP Bush was reportedly riding in another of the Presidential fleet, a C-9A (mil. DC9-30). The only way they had to communicate with him was through the pilots. It took two more years before they upgraded the Comm systems on the C-9A fleet at Andrews AFB.
The T-43A is a fleet of 30-40 737-200 that were bought for pilot training in the 1970s. The USAF went cheap, and equipped them with only a single analog tuned ADF, which has no integrity monitoring, of course. As happens, the T-43A were pressed into executive service, and one of them crashed in 1993 on an ADF approach that involved two NDB, killing the US Secretary of Commerce and the rest on board.
Again, it's folly to buy on a 30-50 year payback plan. Ten years is a stretch. Every exta dollar spent by the US govt today is borrowed - mostly from Communist China. In the last several years we have gone from the largest financial power to the largest debtor nation in history. The only way we will recover is by restricting imports, which seems impossible, given the 10,000+ lobbyists in Washington.
GB