The Air Force and Marine Corps collaborated on a surveillance system, called Angel Fire, that puts real-time, wide-angle imagery from aircraft directly in the hands of ground forces, but the Army prefers its own system, Constant Hawk, that Tom Vanden Brook of USA Today reports is “more difficult to use and produces video that must be studied by analysts.” The battle, of course, is over money. Although officials of all three services claim to have worked through problems, Vanden Brook reports that e-mails the newspaper obtained “paint a far different picture.”
Members of the House Armed Services Committee say the AIM-260 Joint Advanced Tactical Missile program has been set back three months due to the ongoing government shutdown. The comment is noteworthy because the JATM's status has been kept tightly under wraps.
