Here's how the link to the article read in the AW&ST email I received;
"The story of the Navy’s stealth unmanned air vehicle has taken some new turns. Is a secret project behind the changes?"
Plus from the article:
"U.S. Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.), a member of the cabal that has been pushing for a high-end Uclass, was discreet in an early-February discussion. “I’m pretty comfortable with the direction that the program is taking,” he said. “I’m not trying to be vague. I just don’t want to go to jail.”
"P-AEA appears in no known plan, but you need not dig very deep into the Air Force’s fiscal 2016 budget to find $7 billion in classified acquisition money that is neither part of the cash that the Pentagon launders for the intelligence community, nor the LRSB."
"What follows is a speculative scenario, an exercise in the risky art of connect-the-dots:
A classified P-AEA program started in 2011-12. It may have involved flight demonstrations. Quite recently, Boeing won it, hence McNerney’s confidence about St Louis’s future. It’s been designated RAQ-25, indicating it has a strike capability, and as well as pathfinding for the LRSB, it takes on the MQ-X role. RAQ-25 is somewhere in that $7 billion slush fund.
Work’s comments about “capabilities that we already have” indicate he and other leaders are pushing for a joint Air Force/Navy program based on the RAQ-25. The delay in Uclass allows time for a carrier variant to be demonstrated, and competitors have deemed the battle half over."
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I apologize if I inferred incorrectly that UCLASS will have a new black mission as P-AEA or are you saying we will have UCLASS and there is a whole other program for a secret P-AEA? Or is UCLASS a new classified RAQ-25?
