Congressional Caucus Out To Save Electric BUFF: Someone was paying attention. A coalition of Capitol Hill defenders—the Electronic Warfare Working Group—put out an issue brief late last month bemoaning the fact that USAF now seems ready to kill the B-52...

AFSOC’s CSAR-X Plan Meets a Cautious Congress: Lawmakers, apparently weary of weapons program cost and schedule overruns, took aim at Air Force Special Operations Command’s program to replace its elderly HH-60 Pave Hawk combat search and rescue helicopters. The 2006...

In a strange turn of events, given the continual Pentagon push for jointness, Congress has signaled a desire to see whether the Air Force and the Navy should each have “service unique” Joint Unmanned Combat System programs. Included in the...

Doing Battle in the Volunteer State: The last we heard the Tennessee Air National Guard’s 118th Airlift Wing would lose its C-130s but keep its people, per BRAC 2005. It seems, though, the state is slugging away, trying to keep...

Lawmakers want some assurance that USAF has not “prematurely ruled out” adding Transformational Satellite-like capabilities to the more mature Advanced Extremely High Frequency or Wideband Gapfiller satellites to satisfy the military’s global communications needs. (AEHF is slated to replace Milstar...

Congress has expressed “concern” about the ability of the Air Force and industry to “manage expensive and complicated satellite programs such as Space Radar.” Lawmakers wrote in the 2006 defense spending bill that there is “broad agreement” that USAF should,...

Air National Guard Maj. Gen. Terry Scherling has become the first woman to head the National Guard Bureau’s Joint Staff, according to an NGB statement. She took over as director on Jan. 3 and received her second star on Jan....

Amid wide-ranging attacks on the Administration’s handling of the global war on terror—abroad and at home—President Bush gathered former Secretaries of State and Defense at the White House last week—a tad overdue per some. Former head of State under the...

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper Jr., director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, is being shown the door courtesy of Donald Rumsfeld for a past transgression, reports the Baltimore Sun. Clapper is set to step down in June,...

Four different young Air Force officers get tapped three or four times each year for a four-month mission to see if they can find a vulnerability, or not, for a given space system. They employ open source information available over...

US and Kyrgyz officials are about to wade into a second round of negotiations over the American military presence at Manas Air Base, reports Russian news agency ITAR-TASS. The new Kyrgyzstan leadership has been pressing for an increase in rental...

Ever since the US adopted the atomic clock as the time standard, the problem of the “leap second” has come up once every few years due to the discrepancy between an “atomic second” and an “astronomical second.” To make up...

DOD has awarded a $56 million contract to Northrop Grumman to develop military-grade solid-state laser technology that will eventually incorporate high-energy laser systems for all the services, under the Joint High Powered Solid-State Laser program. The lasers would be employed...

DOD’s general schedule civilian workforce will get an average, across-the-board pay raise of 2.1 percent for 2006. However, the boost includes locality pays, so the Office of Personnel Management says the pay hikes range between 2.83 percent and 5.62 percent.

Air Force officials at Kirtland AFB, N.M., have leased eight acres of base land to New Mexico Tech’s Institute of Mining and Technology under a provision of federal law that permits assignment of an Enhanced Use Lease of underused military property to public and private groups, primarily as a draw for technology efforts. As part of the agreement, USAF officials will utilize 300 acres on the west side of the base to develop Kirtland Technology Park, which will house four million square feet of office space and laboratory and light industrial space.

January 5, 2006 Sortie Type OIF OEF OIF/OEF Total ISR 12 7 – 19 CAS/Armed Recon 44 23 – 67 Airlift – – 175 175 Air refueling – – 32 32 Total 56 30 207 293 OIF=Operation Iraqi Freedom OEF=Operation...