The US military believes that an unarmed American drone reported lost near Libya’s capital last month was in fact shot down by Russian air defenses and it is demanding the return of the aircraft’s wreckage, US Africa Command says. Such a shootdown would underscore Moscow’s increasingly muscular role in the energy-rich nation, where Russian mercenaries are reportedly intervening on behalf of east Libya-based commander Khalifa Haftar in Libya’s civil war.
It appears that the AGM-114R9X, a secret low collateral damage derivative of the AGM-114 Hellfire missile, has been employed against occupants of another vehicle in northwestern Syria for the second time in a week.
The upper stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 mission to the International Space Station Dec. 5 successfully performed a six-hour coast and a deorbit burn, a test that had been requested by the US Air Force to demonstrate the vehicle can deliver national security payloads directly to geosynchronous Earth orbit. “I got a thumbs up this morning,” SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell told reporters Dec. 6 during a media roundtable at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif.
The Defense Digital Service’s first satellite office opened on Nov. 20 in Augusta, Ga., and was named “Tatooine,” after Luke Skywalker’s home planet in the Star Wars series. It’s located within the Georgia Cyber Center, a building owned by the state of Georgia that fosters collaboration among government, academia, and industry.
His comments come as his company fights to wrest the Defense Department’s giant cloud contract from Microsoft.
Special Operations Command wants to work more closely with the conventional force on simulation technologies, according to service officials. “As we fight in the synthetic environment—as well as the real live battle space—we have to be able to connect and we have to be able to discern where our issues are,” Randy Jackson, SOCOM chief of mission preparation, said Dec. 5.
The Defense Department has announced expanded commissary, Military Service Exchange, and MWR access beginning Jan. 1, 2020, and established a standard for physical access to military installations.
Lauren Bruner was struck by gunfire while trying to flee the inferno that consumed the ship, the second-to-last man to escape the explosion that killed 1,177, including his best friend; 335 survived. Now, nearly eight decades after that fateful day, Bruner’s ashes have been delivered to the sea that cradled his fallen comrades, stored in an urn inside the battleship’s wreckage.