Senate Nixes Senior Leader Airborne Communications Project

The Air Force kicked off a project in 2008 to develop a standardized suite of communications gear for a fleet of four Boeing 737s and 17 Gulfstream jets used to zip the vice-president, Secretaries of State and Defense and the combatant commanders around the world.

The service pitched this $12.5 million program as a way to ensure all these aircraft had the most advanced communications suite in the world, which probably included all-important decoder rings.

But the Senate Appropriations Committee, in its report, concluded that going ahead with the Senior Leader C3 System-Airborne program would in fact hobble all those leaders with an inferior system as those executive aircraft "are provided with the most up-to-date communications gear as it becomes available."

The Senior Leader C3 project, the committee said, "will develop a common communications suite that will have the practical effect of providing standardized, but out-of-date equipment soon after completion of the effort."

Taking this into consideration -- as well as the fact that that the planned Senior Leader gear had experienced a weight gain -- the committee terminated the program by eliminating its funding. In an odd way, that means all those senior leaders will have the best equipment possible.