Just months after Iran shot down an expensive US surveillance drone over the Strait of Hormuz, the Defense Department is weighing scrapping about two-thirds of the Air Force’s roughly three dozen Global Hawk unmanned aircraft as part of a shift toward building the new capabilities needed to counter China and Russia.
US airmen assigned to the 354th Fighter Wing tested a new arctic survival kit for the F-35A Lightning II in downtown Fairbanks, Alaska, Nov. 5.
The results of the Pentagon’s second-ever full financial audit are a decidedly mixed bag: Although officials were able to point to some areas of significant progress in managing the Defense Department’s finances over the past year, overall, auditors are uncovering new problems faster than the department is fixing them.
As it grapples with the advent of multi-domain operations, NATO is asking industry how companies can help ensure interoperability among allied fighters, tankers, and airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms.
Department of Defense officials routinely talk about the need to more fully embrace machine learning and artificial intelligence, but one leader in the Marine Corps said those efforts are falling short. “We’re not serious about AI. If we were serious about AI we would put all of our stuff into one location,” Lt. Gen. Eric Smith, commander of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command and the Deputy Commandant for Combat Development and Integration, said at an AFCEA Northern Virginia chapter lunch Nov. 15.
Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein met on Nov. 15 with Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Aviv Kohavi and Israeli Air Force Commander Amikam Norkin, who presented Goldfein with the Chief of Staff Medal of Appreciation. Goldfein was participating in the Blue Flag joint military exercise, a 10-day exercise in which 70 combat planes from five air forces fly against each other in 19 sorties across six different locations around the country.
An Air Force engineer and his team are offering one idea in an era of school and workplace shootings—a sturdy, portable, yet affordable door barricade. Dayton-based S9 Engineering Technology Corp. last month completed a patent license for the commercial rights to the device—dubbed the "Fortress"—invented at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), which is headquartered at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio.
As the prospects of an ongoing dialogue with the US over its ever-growing nuclear and missile programs continue to decline, Kim Jong Un visited North Korea’s Wonsan-Kalma International Airport to oversee what appears to be an unprecedented, at least in recent years, gathering of North Korean air power. Satellite images from Nov. 11 showed a very large number of aircraft at the airfield, which pointed to some sort of high-profile event being imminent.