The nation’s top spy offices are expected to pare certain "non-essential" intelligence-gathering activities if the government shuts down at midnight. Under guidance provided by the Defense Department, intelligence work that directly supports active military operations, threat monitoring, or other national-security emergencies is designated “excepted” and would continue if funding lapses.
“This month, the Government Accountability Office released findings on the Air Force’s troubled transition from the aging, silo-based Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile to its far more advanced Sentinel replacement. We believe that the GAO report makes it evident that relying entirely on the current plan for silo-based ICBMs could pose grave risks that leave a future president with a far too-small ICBM force when the adversaries’ combined ICBMs have swelled,” write Kyle Balzer, Rebeccah L. Heinrichs, and Robert Peters, nuclear experts from three different think tanks.
Following a closed-door briefing Sept. 30, some Democratic members of the Senate Armed Services Committee are raising concerns about the cost and technical feasibility of the Golden Dome missile shield—although one Republican lawmaker said the $175 billion cost estimate previously given by President Donald Trump has stayed steady.
The Air Force will start 2026’s annual recruiting cycle with a record-high number of potential recruits in the service’s delayed entry program. If all of the recruits currently in the pre-service program eventually report for boot camp, the service would be more than halfway toward next year’s goal, service officials told Task & Purpose.
South Korea's state arms procurement agency said Sept. 30 it has selected U.S. defense contractor L3Harris Technologies Inc. to supply four new airborne control aircraft as part of the second phase of a project to bolster the country's surveillance capabilities.
Weeks after summer sun melted ice here near the Arctic circle, the air is a balmy 50 degrees. It is the worst time to fight a war in the high north. The Arctic is feared for its bone-chilling winters, when dangers include frostbite and snow blindness. Even worse, say soldiers who operate in these latitudes, is the warmer season, when mosquitoes and midges infest marshes that flood overnight, hampering troop movements and threatening to swallow up vehicles.
A report of an active shooter prompted Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst to go on lockdown Sept. 30; however the threat has since been cleared and the base has returned to normal operation. According to Col. Michael Stefanovic, Joint Base commander, base emergency response personnel and law enforcement responded to reports of an active shooter on the installation at 10:58 a.m. However, no active shooter threat was confirmed and the base resumed normal operations at 11:57 a.m.
A design of a patch for the F-47 System Management Office (SMO) that has been circulating on social media was indeed created by members of that organization, but is still being refined and hasn’t been formalized, the Air Force has confirmed. The patch’s central feature, which appears to be a phoenix or a firebird, raises the question of whether the sixth-generation fighter may already have a nickname.
