The Biden administration said it intends to move forward with the long-promised $20 billion sale of F-16 jet fighters to Turkey, hours after that country’s president withdrew his objections to extending membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to Sweden.
White House officials say they plan to move forward with the transfer of F-16 fighter jets to Turkey after Ankara gave the green light for Sweden to join NATO. But congressional gatekeepers are saying it’s not yet a done deal. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s desire to buy new F-16s and upgrade his existing fleet was seen as a leverage point as President Joe Biden pressed the foreign leader to drop his objection to letting Sweden into NATO—which Erdoğan has agreed to do.
Pilot error was the principal cause of a drone crash in Eastern Europe last summer, Air Force investigators concluded. A U.S. Air Force MQ-9A Reaper drone cannoned into a remote patch of land on the outskirts of the 71st Air Base in Campia Turzii, Romania, July 14, 2022, according to local media reports. A five-month investigation released by Air Combat Command blamed the accident on the “channelized attention” and poor adherence to “basic airmanship” of the Launch Recovery Element controlling the unmanned aircraft system.
Driven by advancements in technology and research, the Air Force and Space Force are adapting how they train their warfighters to complete the missions at hand. Keep up with all the latest news on changes and improvements to the services’ training enterprises.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said July 11 that Ukraine would be “defenseless” if the U.S. had not made the decision to supply Ukraine with controversial cluster munitions to fill a critical gap created by a backlog of conventional weapons. “The stockpiles around the world and in Ukraine of the unitary munitions, not the cluster munitions, were running out, about to be depleted,” Blinken said in an interview for MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Reports" at the NATO Summit in Lithuania.
The NATO nations have formally declined to put a timetable on Ukraine’s ability to join the military alliance, in an official Communiqué spelling out consensus among the 31 members. While the agreement comes with a number of gifts to Ukraine, including the promise to waive standard requirements for NATO membership in the future, it falls well short of the goal set by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that NATO members lay out a clear path forward for his country to join the alliance.
As the military services struggle to meet recruiting goals, lawmakers in the divided House seem united on a proposed fix: relaxing the Pentagon’s policies on marijuana use. “I do not believe we should be testing for cannabis [in] people who want to join the military,” Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., told the House Rules Committee during a hearing on July 11. “We should be thinking about cannabis more in terms of alcohol.”
Michael Horowitz, a senior Pentagon expert for military technology and policy, is poised to lead a newly formed organization in the Office of the Secretary of Defense that will focus on strengthening the department’s readiness to confront uncertain security challenges associated with artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.
The latest U.S. military budget goes all-in on the notion that resilience will be a core feature of space programs. As evidence, the term surpasses 300 mentions in the Space Force’s 2024 budget documents. “It’s amazing how many times you see the word resiliency in the budget justification materials,” said analyst Sam Wilson of the Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Space Policy and Strategy.
While the Advanced Battle Management System has been the Air Force’s main program to realize the Defense Department’s joint all-domain command and control vision, the service is aiming higher, seeking to build a battle network to unify JADC2 efforts within the service. The Air Force launched the ABMS program to build a resilient command-and-control infrastructure to connect and integrate sensors, move and manage data and enable commanders to make operational decisions quickly, according to descriptions of the program in Government Accountability Office reports.
Retired Fr. George Kane will board a flight to Washington, D.C., on July 12 to visit various monuments honoring the military. Kane was a United States Air Force chaplain from 1959 to 1963 while serving in Korea. He would minister to fighter pilots preparing to go to war in Vietnam in the early ’60s. After that, he served at various parishes around Chicago, including Holy Cross parish and St. George parish, before retiring from the Church of the Holy Spirit parish.
