Air Force leaders are urging members of Congress to sit down with them in a classified setting so they can better understand the service’s thinking behind its fiscal 2021 budget request, which once again attempts to retire a host of legacy platforms to free up funding for new technology. “Not surprisingly, of the services, the air and space forces have the largest classified portfolio of investment. This makes the story harder to tell,” Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein told House legislators on March 3. “... Most of what we’re retiring is unclassified and visible, while many of our game-changing investments are classified and therefore invisible. ... When you see what we’re trading for, our budget submission will make perfect sense.”

Lawmakers are beginning to weigh how the fiscal 2021 defense policy bill could help solve the KC-46 tanker program’s woes and speed its introduction into regular operations. Congress could dictate the terms of how Boeing should fix the tanker’s faulty remote vision system and how long that should take, as well as lay out possible repercussions like cutting the annual buy, withholding funding, or calling for a new tanker competition, according to Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), the top Republican on the House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee. He said the company should dispatch its full cadre of scientists to come up with a hardware solution to the RVS issue, which shows a refueling boom operator a picture that can be too blurry to connect the boom to a receiving aircraft. Boeing should then test that fix using a “digital twin,” or software that lets testers vet parts on computers without installing them in real life, he said.

Space Force Vice Commander Lt. Gen. David Thompson told lawmakers March 4 the service has started testing new tools built to defend American assets on orbit, possibly hinting at classified counterspace capabilities. “We began prototyping, and demonstrating, and preparing for what I’ll call abilities to protect and defend our assets, and we did that extensively in the budget in [fiscal 2020],” Thompson said at a House Appropriations defense subcommittee hearing. “In [2021], we are now taking steps to extend that across the fleet, as well as look at other capabilities to be able to continue to defend those assets that we have and defend adversary use of space.” That could mean anything from updates that shield satellites from signal jamming to something more offensive to target the source of a potential threat.

The novel coronavirus epidemic is starting to affect the Department of Defense on everything from recruitment to fighter production. Here’s a look at its impact so far and how the Air Force is proactively working to counter the spread of the virus within its ranks.

Full-rate production may slip a little further as initial operational test and evaluation and the integration of the F-35 into a virtual wargaming environment play out, program executive officer Lt. Gen. Eric Fick said March 4. Granting Lockheed Martin's pitch to get a Performance-Based Logistics contract depends on its sharing of data, he added.

US aircraft targeted Taliban fighters who had attacked an Afghan military checkpoint on March 4, just days after a peace deal to end the war in Afghanistan was signed. The strike in Nahr-e Saraj, Helmand province—the first against the Taliban in 11 days—came one day after the group conducted 43 attacks on Afghan National Defense and Security Forces checkpoints in Helmand alone, U.S. Forces-Afghanistan said in a statement.