According to news reports, an internal Air Force memo declared that the death Oct. 14 of the service’s No. 2 civilian acquisition official, Charles Riechers, “appears to be suicide.” Riechers has been the subject of news articles questioning his Air Force-arranged job with Commonwealth Research Institute, a Pennsylvania-based non-profit group, while he awaited Senate confirmation for his USAF job. The Senate Armed Services Committee had asked for details on the matter because Riechers, according to the Washington Post, which first broke the story, reportedly did no work for CRI; instead, he worked for the Air Force. In a subsequent statement to the Post, an Air Force spokesman said that Riechers had worked “in a scientific and engineering technical assistance capacity to the Air Force and made recommendations that were instrumental in engineering our acquisition transformation and continuing the Air Force’s modernization of our aging fleet.”
The Air Force wants to pump more than $12 billion over the next five years into its new affordable long-range missiles program and recently asked industry to push the flights of some of those munitions beyond 1,200 miles.