The 80 Airmen hovered in bunkers on Jan. 7, 2020, weren't sure they would live through the night. The sky glowed and the ground “shook with a force impossible to put into words," as Iranian ballistic missiles rained down on al-Asad Air Base, Iraq. Air Forces Central Command on April 7 published detailed recollections from more than 20 Airmen who survived the attack, launched to revenge the death of Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani. “I was being forced to gamble with my members’ lives by something I couldn’t control,” Lt. Col. Staci Coleman, commander of the 443th Air Expeditionary Squadron at the base. “I was deciding who would live and who would die. I honestly thought anyone remaining behind would perish. I didn’t believe anyone would survive a ballistic missile attack, and it made me feel sick and helpless."
The first F-35 Joint Strike Fighters landed at Eielson Air Force, Alaska, on April 21, marking a historic shift for the 354th Fighter Wing, which will now take on a combat mission in addition to its role training U.S. and partner forces through major exercises like Red Flag-Alaska. “They are on their way and we are ecstatic,” 354th FW Commander Col. Ben Bishop told Air Force Magazine shortly after the jets embarked on the six-hour flight from Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth, Texas, facility to their new home base. The wing is slated to receive three F-35s in April, and it will ramp up to two squadrons of strike fighters by the end of 2021, increasing Eielson’s total fleet from 30 aircraft to 84. “Once the beddown is complete, with 54 aircraft, the state of Alaska will have the highest concentration of combat-coded fifth generation aircraft than anywhere else in the Department of Defense,” said Bishop, referencing the F-22 Raptors based at nearby Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska.
The Space Force has ambitious plans to support American companies and astronauts as they try to return to—and set up shop on—the moon. But to succeed, the military first needs to understand more about what's near Earth’s only natural satellite. Rhea Space Activity, a Washington-based space technology and policy startup, will lead a project to create the field of “lunaspatial intelligence” (LUNINT), the collection of intelligence data on activity in cislunar orbit and on the moon’s surface, for the Department of the Air Force. The $50,000 contract is small in the scheme of DOD funding, but could have an outsize impact in utility for the new space age.
U.S. Northern Command is protecting its critical, “no fail” crews by having them live in isolation so it can focus on protecting them and the nation amid the new coronavirus outbreak, the head of the command said April 21. NORTHCOM is working to “drive our risk down to zero” for service members, including fighter pilots on alert for the homeland defense mission and personnel who operate ballistic missile defense radars, USAF Gen. Terrence O’Shaughnessy told reporters during a teleconference. “Some areas where we have very little redundancy in, we don’t have multiple different options to perform a mission, then we are literally driving that so there is no chance of a COVID-19 impact to them,” O’Shaughnessy said.
The Air Force’s 36th Wing recently teamed up with Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, and Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, to set up an expeditionary medical facility at U.S. Naval Hospital Guam to treat U.S. Navy sailors evacuated from their COVID-19-ravaged aircraft carrier, according to a USAF release. The system being set up on the naval hospital’s grounds contains medical and warehouse units. It will provide 25 more beds for COVID-19 patients and storage space for medical equipment used to treat them. USAF is also providing 77 personnel to staff the expeditionary medical facility.
Once the Raytheon AGM-181 Long-Range Standoff missile is operational, Lockheed Martin may play a role in upgrading its sensors or contributing other expertise even though the company was passed over to build the weapon, the Air Force said. The decision to focus on Raytheon for further design work followed program design reviews of both candidate systems, USAF reported. Money that was not used on Lockheed's design may help accelerate the program.
