Well Jim H. the devil in the details here is that different aircraft are built differently. Military aircraft are purpose built to carry the equipment, defenses and armaments specific to their role. The same is true for commercial transport aircraft, but their role is very different. Head of state transport is an interesting overlap between these two categories. Setting aside comparisons of very different airframes equipped across very different time periods, I’ll confine myself to a comparison of the current VC-25s and the new replacements, as on the surface these appear to be very similar. The key difference though is how the two development programs for these aircraft differ. The original VC-25s were designed and purpose built for their hybrid role, at a time when, perhaps, there was less budgetary sensitivity around total program cost. The replacement VC-25s are stock 747s ordered and built for commercial transport operations that, due to a program change to control costs, are being retrofitted for the head of state transport role instead of the use of purpose designed and built aircraft. So if you start with the cooling capacity of an aircraft designed to transport X numbers of pax or cargo, remove a bunch of that and replace it with high power draw equipment, you might end up with more heat than the cooling capacity can deal with. Now you’d expect Boeing would carefully study this to make sure that whatever the final configuration is that cooling budgets for each subsystem program are appropriately managed to make sure there’s enough capacity, which some buffer. However, with any large project, requirements drift (often in the direction that decreases difficulty in my experience), and perhaps some of those early estimates turned out not to be correct, such that today Boeing finds itself looking for ways to reduce cooling demand. Maybe not a ton (see what I did there?), but maybe enough that changing the paint scheme would mean the difference between needing to re-engineer the cooling systems to increase capacity or shift around capacity (at great cost), or keep those systems unchanged. Speculation on my part? Absolutely, but at least it is grounded in basic facts. But I would posit it shows the heat load argument is not in fact a canard, per the prior appeals to facts and logical inferences. Much more so “an unfounded rumor or story” - which is a definition of the term “Canard” - is this repeated but unjustified by facts / logic rumor that heat is not in fact the motivation for the change.