As Congress looks to delay passage of a new federal funding package until after the November elections, the Air Force is warning that even a three-month gap would harm national defense. “[Continuing resolutions] immediately disrupt major exercises and training events, affect readiness and maintenance, curtail hiring and recruitment actions, and adversely impact contracting negotiations,” Air Force spokesman Capt. Jacob N. Bailey said in a Sept. 24 email. A stopgap spending bill would also slow the service’s adoption of technology it wants to compete with other advanced militaries like those of Russia and China.

The Air Force this month finished the biggest upgrade to the B-1B Lancer fleet ever. The Integrated Battle Station program, which includes three separate avionics and cockpit upgrades, began in 2012. Since then, 62 aircraft have received the upgrade, almost all on a dedicated line at Tinker Air Force Base, Okla. The program cost about $1.25 billion, and included 1,050,000 total hours of work. “I think everybody’s heard of how complex this upgrade is, and how complicated it’s been,” said Lt. Col. James Couch, commander of the 10th Flight Test Squadron, which handled test flights in the program. “But through teamwork, through maintenance and the (System Program Office), and through engineering, ops, we all came together as a team and we did something that’s never been done before in the B-1 enterprise.”

The military’s travel and other restrictions related to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic are likely to stick around for a while, until a vaccine is broadly available, which Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley said he expects to be a matter of months. Milley, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, and Senior Enlisted Adviser to the Chairman Ramón Colón-López on Sept. 24 hosted a virtual town hall with service members, during which multiple questions were focused on COVID-19 restrictions. In response to a question on how soon restrictions would be lifted, Milley said changes are “conditions based” and depend on where a service member is stationed. “We have to be mindful of our No. 1 priority, which is the health of the force writ large,” Milley said.

MQ-9 Reapers, the workhorse drone of America’s two-decade counterterrorism fight in the Middle East and Africa, want to show they’re getting a second wind. The MQ-9 schoolhouse at Holloman Air Force Base, N.M., recently rewrote its syllabus to prepare Reaper pilots and sensor operators for a more complex fight, 29th Attack Squadron Commander Lt. Col. Brian Davis told Air Force Magazine in a Sept. 21 interview. The Air Force approved the new coursework shortly before the start of Exercise Agile Reaper, the first training event focused on those tactics in the Pacific.

For Aviano Air Base’s 555th Fighter Squadron, Thracian Viper 20 is about more than just training. The multilateral exercise, to which the squadron sent Airmen and six F-16s, boosts “operational capacity and capability," as well as interoperability with Bulgaria, Maj. Rohan Naldrett-Jays, the squadron’s chief of standardizations and evaluation, told Air Force Magazine. But, it also helps the Italy-based squadron fine-tune its ability to deploy aircraft and manpower anywhere in the European theater with agility—a critical part of Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.’s “accelerate change, or lose” directive for the Total Force.