A brutal loss in a wargaming exercise last October convinced the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. John Hyten to scrap the joint warfighting concept that had guided U.S. military operations for decades. “Without overstating the issue, it failed miserably. An aggressive red team that had been studying the United States for the last 20 years just ran rings around us. They knew exactly what [we were] going to do before we did it,” Hyten told an audience July 26 at the launch of the Emerging Technologies Institute, an effort by the National Defense Industrial Association industry group to speed military modernization.
Currently, the Aurora, Colo., base bedecked with its famous golf ball-shaped radomes pumps about $1.3 billion into the local economy each year and provides the launchpad for some 5,500 jobs, according to annual economic impact reports. For most of the 2000s, Buckley regularly fed more than $1 billion into the city economy, largely due to frequent construction projects that were required to update the base after its transition from an Air National Guard Base in 2000. But economic injections began sagging at the beginning of last decade and hovered around $900 million for several years. Two years ago marked the first time in about a decade Buckley had surpassed a $1 billion annual economic impact.
“The decision was made because there is no current Department of Defense direction regarding body-worn cameras or an existing program of record that would provide servicewide funding or guidance on the appropriate use of the body-worn cameras or the storage of the footage acquired,” Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek told Air Force Times.
A portion of M-32 will be closed for five hours on August 5 as the Air Force practices landing an aircraft on roadways designed for cars and trucks. According to the Air Force, the plan is to land four A-10 aircraft and two C-146 aircraft on a closed-off portion of the road near the Alpena Combat Readiness Training Center. The Michigan Air National Guard’s 127th Wing from Selfridge Air National Guard Base, the Air Force’s 355th Wing from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz., and the Air Force Special Operations Command from Duke Field, Fla., will be participating.
Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo., will reinstate its mask mandate, regardless of a person’s vaccination status, starting July 26 to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. In a Facebook post July 25, the Air Force base in Johnson County said the policy applies to all Department of Defense facilities, and outside at the base, whenever social distancing is not possible.
The Senate draft version of the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act could be the start of the Department of Defense and Congress rethinking the defense budgeting process, a system that advocates for tech modernization have long said inhibits the DOD’s ability to be agile. A summary published by the Senate Armed Services Committee includes a provision that would establish a commission to study the planning, programming, budget, and execution process that forces acquisition programs to wait years before getting full funding from Congress.
The Department of Veterans Affairs announced July 26 that all medical facility employees will be required to be vaccinated against COVID-19, becoming the first federal agency to issue a mandate. The Biden administration has been under increasing pressure to begin mandating the vaccine where it can as the national rate of inoculations stalled and new cases have risen in recent weeks.
To deter China and Russia from possible future aggression, the Defense Department has come up with a concept known as "expanded maneuver," the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said July 26. Air Force Gen. John E. Hyten said expanded maneuver involves understanding how adversaries can operate in all domains and how to stop them while protecting DOD and coalition forces, he said, noting there are four functional battle areas within expanded maneuver.
At the outset of the Cold War, American strategic planners obsessed over the threat posed by the Soviet Union’s long-range, strategic bombers. Characterized by very long range and capable of delivering a nuclear payload, the Soviet bomber threat was used by the United States Air Force as justification for quite a few interceptor aircraft designs that would combine high speed, long range, and a strong defensive armament to fly out and meet incoming Soviet bombers at a moment’s notice.