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.”
As with previous stealth aircraft unveilings, the Air Force’s imagery of the F-47 Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter has been doctored to keep adversaries guessing about its true shaping and design philosophy.