The Year the Air Force Was Born

The Air Force is set to announce finalists for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft Increment 1 competition, intended to lead to production of 1,000 to 2,000 autonomous combat drones.

Lockheed Martin projects more than a billion dollars of losses on a classified program, but company officials said April 23 they are confident it will turn profitable by 2028 and become a "franchise" system in the U.S. military.

South Korea conducted the final live-fire drills with its F-4 Phantoms and AGM-142 Popeye missiles amid the largest U.S.-South Korea air exercise of the year.

The full-up Tech Refresh 3 for the F-35 won't be delivered until 2025, Lockheed Martin officials said April 23. A "truncated" version will be delivered this fall so users can start taking delivery of their jets, and then be able to exploit the full capabilities once the complete upgrade is…

Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman said reforms underway to the Space Force’s deployment and training model are the “most drastic change accompanying the establishment of the Space Force” in a note distributed to Guardians on April 19. “It fundamentally alters how we prepare for operations,” Saltzman wrote…

An Air Force C-130J crew braved a long flight around half the planet last week as part of an experiment testing how quickly they could respond to a crisis in the Indo-Pacific. Dubbed Hazard Leap, the test kicked off on April 20 when two full crews in a C-130J assigned…

The U.S. thwarted a drone attack on U.S. forces at Al Asad air base in western Iraq on April 22, marking the first time that American troops have been targeted since February, U.S. officials said. “We can confirm it was an attack on Al Asad,” a defense official told Air & Space…

Polish president Adrzej Duda said in a interview published April 22 his country is "ready" to become one of the "nuclear sharing" NATO partners that can deploy American tactical nuclear weapons from their fighter aircraft, but prime minister Donald Tusk said no such decision has been made.

The Air Force found no significant evidence of harmful chemicals at Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif., as part of its ongoing Missile Community Cancer Study, the service said on April 22. Samples collected in February found “no instances of contamination above regulatory action level.” The sampling of Vandenberg focused on polychlorinated…