Defense Secretary Robert Gates, testifying Tuesday on the Pentagon’s Fiscal 2011 spending plan and new Quadrennial Defense Review, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that a new Air Force bomber “would probably not appear into the force until the late ’20s.” This is a seemingly significant departure from the Pentagon’s previous public estimates that had the bomber entering the inventory much earlier in that decade, or as soon as 2018, if one goes back to the 2006 QDR. Gates said the Defense Department is “still wrestling” with the type of bomber platform to pursue (e.g., standoff, penetrating, manned, unmanned, some combination of those attributes). The additional time for study that the department now intends to take will determine what the bomber should be, whereas the analysis up until now has focused on whether a new bomber was really needed, he said.
The Air Force has dispatched an element of its Natural Disaster Recovery Team to Guam in the wake of Super Typhoon Mawar, which has caused widespread damage on the island and at Andersen Air Force Base. The team will assess the damage and put together a recovery cost estimate for…