US Navy Reserve eager to get Super Hercules
The admiral in charge of the Navy’s reserve, Vice Adm. John B. Mustin, told Congress that the top budget equipment priority is to acquire the Lockheed-Martin C-130J Super Hercules transport aircraft to replace the legacy C-130T/KC-130T fleet.
The Navy Reserve currently operates thirty C-130T/KC-130T Hercules transporters with five different fleet logistics squadrons.
According to Mustin these squadrons flew 26,000 hours and moved 24 million pounds of cargo in 2021 at a cost avoidance of USD 1 billion. However, the current C-130 fleet is challenged to meet sustained fleet logistics requirements. The modern C-130Js will realise an additional USD 200 million in annual transportation cost savings. Because of the age of the C-130T aircraft the mission-capable rates are lower, and the squadrons struggle to continue to fly them.
Vice Adm. Mustin continues with: “There is no active-duty counterpart to what we do in the reserve force. That’s our intra-theater lift. Certainly, working with the Air National Guard and the Air Force, we’re able get from CONUS into theater whether that’s in the EUCOM area or INDO-PACOM. Once there, however, transition to strike groups and distributed US Navy is impossible without C-130s. We’ve got Boeing C-40s — smaller capability — but if we want to transfer an F-35 engine, we’ve got to have the C-130s.”
The following units operate the C-130T/KC-130T transporters:
Photo by Jeroen Jonkers (Scramble Archive)