The Air Force has to “think outside the box” about its role in warfare of the future, long-time defense analyst Jeremiah Gertler said at a Heritage Foundation seminar May 21. Gertler thinks USAF doesn’t have a “Day Two” plan for after it has established air dominance in any given theater. Gertler says the Air Force is in need of another Billy Mitchell type—a strong leader with a future-oriented mindset. We have heard this somewhere before (read “The Billy Mitchell Syndrome.”) Yesterday, we reported that Gertler also advocated that USAF must punch up its focus on mobility assets if it is to gain in the budget wars.
The Defense Innovation Unit is gearing up for the first flight of its commercially developed hypersonic testbed as soon as the end of February—part of a larger project to quickly increase the cadence of the Pentagon’s hypersonic flight testing and field advanced, high-speed systems and components at scale.
