The good folks at Kunsan AB, South Korea, actually got to spend some of the money they saved by being frugal with their precious dollars. According to the Wolf Pack Warrior, 8th Fighter Wing got more than $8 million in “fallout” money for Fiscal 2006. Actually, this is an annual occurrence—and marathon—around the Air Force, where money left over from buying items more cheaply than estimated goes into an end-of-year pot. The trick is to race to spend the fallout money before the midnight curfew rings on the current fiscal year. The 8th FW, like other USAF units, didn’t spend its fallout money on frills; instead it went for such items as aircraft parts and land mobile radios and some quality of life things, such as heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems for dorms.
RTX’s Raytheon unit was able to “significantly” extend the range of the AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile using mostly software changes in experimental tests last year, expanding the reach and lethality of the standard U.S. dogfighting weapon, company officials said Sept. 15.
