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.”
The rate of building B-21 bombers would speed up if the fiscal 2026 defense budget passes. But it remains unclear how much capacity would be added, and whether the Air Force would simply build the bombers faster, or buy more.
