The USAF’s new tanker, the KC-46, by the way, came from the factory with two wing refueling pods that stream a drogue.
So, in flight, it can handle either type of receiver. It’s not just for the USN, either, because NATO fighters, and even NATO transports, like the A-400M, have a probe and need the drogue.
Edit: I see that was already mentioned. I forgot that KC-46 was called “Pegasus”.
But even the KC-10, from the 1980s, had a built in drogue. We loved that tanker - huge, tons of gas to give, and a nice big basket well below the slipstream of the airplane.
To use a KC-135 for USN/NATO tanking required putting a drogue on the back of the boom. A genuinely awful set-up.
The boom operator would try and “fly” the basket to where they thought it should go, which makes it a lot like threading a needle, when your wife is holding the needle and trying to help you line up the thread.
The basket itself was called “The Iron Maiden” - because it as a hard 9 foot hose that connected the basket to the boom, and the basket was solid, it was not a drogue. No give. You had to put a “kink” in the hose to get fuel to flow.
It was hard on airplanes and pilots. Very hard.
While flying formation on a tanker in the weather, and in turbulence, you have about a foot fore/aft and about a foot up/down and left/right where fuel would flow and that hard hose would not hit your radome and bust up the airplane.
