Just over a year after becoming the 27th Secretary of the Air Force, Troy Meink believes he’s making progress on his top priorities—increasing Air Force readiness, modernizing its aircraft fleet, and growing the nascent Space Force. In a June 26 interview with Air & Space Forces Magazine, Meink acknowledged headwinds but said the proof of his progress is in the fiscal ...
IT Modernization
One of the Pentagon’s largest cloud services providers is partnering with a rising defense juggernaut to provide high-capacity computing and AI for targeting and sensor fusion in a mobile data center built for austere conditions at the tactical edge.
New KC-46 Vision System Slips to ’28 By Matthew Cox The Air Force says it has formed a plan with Boeing to get key upgrades deployed across the KC-46 tanker fleet faster—but the service acknowledged it won’t start fielding the...
Concerned about how artificial intelligence might be used to generate target lists or operational plans, lawmakers want to expand limits on autonomous weapons to address mission planning and target selection. The House Armed Services Committee's version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization bill would direct ...
The Department of the Air Force is embracing the new commercial-first approach to IT ordered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, outsourcing networks and other infrastructure and reducing the amount of customization required from vendors, say the chief information officers for several DAF organizations.
When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth canceled the Air Force’s Cloud One Next contract earlier this year, he declared it would save taxpayers $1.4 billion—the maximum billings under the contract. But current and former Air Force personnel who are familiar with Cloud One say it’s not as ...
When Airmen and Guardians need data or connectivity, they don’t much care whether it comes from a fiber optic cable or a satellite—and the Department of the Air Force wants a future network to match.
The Pentagon’s cutting-edge technology research agency awarded cash prizes worth $8.5 million at hacker conference DEFCON last week as part of a contest to build open-source generative AI tools that can help find and patch software vulnerabilities.
The competing House and Senate versions of the 2026 defense policy bill advancing through each chamber both contains provisions aimed at expanding or speeding up efforts to get new software and technology into the hands of warfighters.