Daily Report

May 24, 2011

Bye, Bye Black Sheep

Airmen at Holloman AFB, N.M., held an inactivation ceremony for the 8th Fighter Squadron. The “Black Sheep” are standing down after less than two years of operating F-22s due to the Air Force’s Raptor fleet consolidation plan, which calls for...

New Fuel Research Center Opens

Officials at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, on Monday christened the Air Force Research Lab’s new Assured Aerospace Fuels Research Facility during a ribbon-cutting ceremony. AFRL researchers, along with scientists from the University of Dayton and the Battelle Memorial Institute, will utilize...

ORS-1 Heads to Wallops Island

US defense officials approved the first Operationally Responsive Space satellite, ORS-1, for shipment to NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia for integration with its Minotaur 1 launch vehicle. The satellite is currently scheduled for launch in mid June. “This team...

What’s Next in Iraq?

Although the current agreement with Iraq calls for US military personnel to exit that nation by year’s end, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he sees some benefits to keeping between 8,000 and 15,000 troops there for longer to continue training...

Supremely Unsatisfying

The Supreme Court unanimously sent the 20-year-old Navy A-12 stealth bomber case back to a lower court Monday, and vacated the lower court’s ruling against contractors General Dynamics and Boeing (formerly McDonnell Douglas). It’s good news for the companies, which...

Boeing Responds to Supreme Court A-12 Ruling

In response to Monday’s Supreme Court ruling on the A-12 case, Boeing general counsel Michael Luttig said Boeing is “pleased with today’s win” and “the court’s unanimous decision to overturn the government’s default termination of the A-12 program.” He added,...

No Frivolous Lawsuits

In its ruling on the A-12 case Monday, the Supreme Court rejected a concern that defense contractors could “goad” the government into invoking a state-secrets privilege in order to litigate their way out of an over-budget program. “Government contractors—especially cutting-edge...

Largest Ever Interagency Exercise Concludes

About 40,000 members of the National Guard participated with members of the active duty military and federal and state emergency personnel in the nation’s largest interagency exercise to date. National Level Exercise 11 included Guardsmen from Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana,...

Strong Recruiting Numbers Through April

Through the first seven months of Fiscal 2011, the Air Force has met its recruiting goal, logging 16,153 new accessions or 100 percent of its target. The Air National Guard had been tracking nine recruits under its fiscal-year-to-date targets for...

Directing the Air Campaign Away from Home

US Air Forces in Europe airmen are showcasing the new Command and Control Forward system at Ramstein AB, Germany, through Tuesday. C2-Forward is an adaptable, scalable system capable of deploying within 72 hours of notification to enable a joint force...

Civil and Cooperative Engineering

The 554th RED HORSE Squadron hosted Marine Corps civil engineers for a week-long course in emergency runway repair at Kadena AB, Japan. “In a fiscally constrained environment, this type of training enables us to support and develop the integration of...

High Road to Recovery

Five airmen with the 438th Air Expeditionary Wing in Kabul helped recover parts of an Afghan air force Mi-17 helicopter that crashed in Afghanistan’s mountainous east-central border region of Nuristan. With the assistance of Army Pathfinders, the airmen documented the...