The United States and Britain struck 36 Houthi targets in Yemen on Feb. 3 in a second wave of assaults meant to further disable Iran-backed groups that have relentlessly attacked American and international interests in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war. But Washington once more did not directly target Iran as it tries to find a balance between a forceful response and intensifying the conflict.
The AFA Nominating & Governance Committee will meet this spring to select candidates for open AFA National Officers and Board of Directors positions for election at the AFA 2024 National Convention in September.
Nineteen days after taking power as China’s leader, Xi Jinping convened the generals overseeing the country’s nuclear missiles and issued a blunt demand. China had to be ready for possible confrontation with a formidable adversary, he said, signaling that he wanted a more potent nuclear capability to counter the threat.
The U.S. Air Force will add an automatic ground collision avoidance system (AGCAS) to its Boeing T-7A Red Hawk trainer fleet as the service works through issues on the aircraft’s escape and oxygen systems, according to a new Pentagon report.
The Air Force is putting the final touches on a major structural shakeup that would remake the force as part of the Pentagon’s push to keep up with China’s military buildup. Within the next few weeks, the service will announce it is consolidating some of its major three- and four-star commands, integrating fighter jets and bomber aircraft into single units, and beefing up its budget and planning shop, according to six people familiar with the plans.
“I first learned of a secretive Pentagon-funded study about rogue nuclear entrepreneurs more than five years ago from Stephen Lukasik, a former head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. We were talking about the Office of Net Assessment, the long-term analysis division of the Pentagon, famous in Washington policy circles for its predictions about the Soviet Union’s military capabilities and then later China’s rise. Lukasik mentioned that he had led several studies for the office, including one that looked at whether a private company or wealthy entrepreneur could produce nuclear weapons,” writes national security editor Sharon Weinberger.
For several years, a problem has been brewing for Lockheed Martin’s F-35: future upgrades will make the jet run even hotter than it does now, more than its current cooling system is believed to be able to handle. In the near term, Pentagon officials expect that a high-profile upgrade to the plane’s F135 engine will avoid most of these cooling issues. But in the longer term, the military fears future aircraft upgrades needed to keep pace with threats decades down the line will push the heat factor even higher, and officials have recently suggested they’re casting about for new cooling options.
Switchblade 600 kamikaze drones are among the first set of systems Pentagon leadership and Congress are evaluating to be mass produced and rapidly scaled through the ambitious new Replicator initiative, multiple sources told DefenseScoop.
Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., has launched its first Active-Duty flight training unit since the end of World War II as it prepares for the arrival of the new MH-139A Grey Wolf helicopter later this year. The unit, Detachment 3 of the New Mexico-based 58th Operations Group, activated Jan. 31 to help Maxwell’s 908th Airlift Wing train the Grey Wolf pilots who will eventually staff operational helicopter units.
One of the two major software development programs that would allow the Space Force to ditch its outdated information technology system for keeping tabs on satellites, spacecraft, and dangerous space junk has fallen behind on testing, due to a host of problems that include both technology issues and training gaps, according to the Pentagon’s testing director.
The Space Force expects to begin identifying members for its Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve—an effort to scale up its use of commercial capabilities during a conflict—and get them under contract by 2025, if not sooner. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, who provides civilian oversight for the service, approved the Commercial Space Office’s plan for the construct, known as CASR, last fall.
A Bellevue, Wash., man had a conundrum. He had acquired a military-grade rocket made during the Cold War from his deceased neighbor and was looking to donate it. He had called the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio about giving it to them. The museum then called the police. That’s according to the Bellevue Police Department, which this week shared that they had sent the bomb squad to the man’s home to discover he was in possession of an air-to-air munition.
