Air Force North has reported in an Oct. 29 release that the six Modular Airborne Firefighting System-equipped C-130s detailed to support California wildfire operations have flown a total of 64 missions, dropping more than 180,600 gallons of fire retardant. (An earlier report cited considerably fewer sorties.) And, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has weighed in on the issue of whether the fire-fighting tankers were late to arrive and go to work, saying in an Oct. 27 press conference, “If the federal government didn’t respond fast enough with their airplanes, … we will go into that and fix that right away.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. still “believes” in his mantra of “Accelerate Change or Lose”—and indicated the doctrinal changes it produced when he was Air Force Chief of Staff played a role in the service’s recent response to Iran’s aerial assault on Israel, he…