It may also have some thing to do with losing a drone on a long range spy mission to Iran.

Only the block 30 is being retired/cancelled: the rest of the RQ-4 fleet will stay intact.

But this is only the beginning of the cuts. Get ready for some serious defence belt-tightening over the next couple of years.

Oh, yea, forgot: they feel the A-10 is so valuable, that they reduced the number of squadrons, so that there would be far more available "fresh airframes" to greatly extend the operational life of the aircraft in service. They don't need 500 of them to stop a giant tank invasion...but they do want to add 20-40 years of service to this plane. So they wrap up a few in storage, for when the current ones are truly worn out. But give them a few days and they could put them all in the air again.

BTW: they also are rebuilding parts of the wingboxes to be stronger and last longer than the original design...I think a member of SimHQ was showing us a bit about that (Dice?)

Interesting...yet not that surprising. Seems like ALL the current "high tech" weapons at the top end of complexity seem to be giant money pits of doom. I suspect that there may be some deliberate "gonna need more TLC, give us more money" strategy of padding the program.




I don't. What I'm saying is that maybe they found they didn't need nearly AS MUCH strategic, when the Reaper is giving them such good results for most of what they do with big UAV's.