Four members from a C-17A Globemaster III aircrew were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for their performance during the chaotic and violent evacuation of Kabul last August. During a ceremony at Travis Air Force Base in California on Friday, the medals were presented to Lt. Col. Dominic Calderon, 1st Lt. Kyle Anderson and Master Sgt. Silva Foster, from the 301st Airlift Squadron, and Senior Airman Michael Geller of the 517th Airlift Squadron. The ceremony also recognized Staff Sgt. Dennis Gonzales-Furman, of the 437th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron at Joint Base Charleston, S.C, who was the aircrew’s flying crew chief during their mission in Afghanistan.
A federal judge has blocked the military from disciplining a dozen U.S. Air Force officers who are asking for religious exemptions to the mandatory COVID-19 vaccine. The officers, mostly from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, along with a handful of Airmen and Reservists, filed a lawsuit in February after their exemption requests were denied.
Details of the plan will remain classified, but an unclassified outline is expected to reveal more about how Space Command intends to engage industry.
The head of Russia's space program said April 2 that the future of the International Space Station hangs in the balance after the United States, the European Union, and Canadian space agencies missed a deadline to meet Russian demands for lifting sanctions on Russian enterprises and hardware. Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, told reporters that the state agency is preparing a report on the prospects of international cooperation at the station, to be presented to federal authorities “after Roscosmos has completed its analysis.”
The war in Ukraine is the conflict where spies came in from the cold and took center stage. Since Russia invaded its neighbor in late February, intelligence agencies in the U.S. and Britain have been remarkably willing to go public with their secret intelligence assessments of what is happening on the battlefield—and inside the Kremlin.
“We hear a clear call from the Air Force to ‘accelerate change.’ Competition is a great way to do it,” says retired Gen. Frank Gorenc, former commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe and a current consultant for GE Aviation. “We have an opportunity in the near-term to introduce competition through a new engine for the world’s most advanced fighter, the F-35.”
“Operation Desert Storm was a turning point in modern Chinese military history. As military planners with the People’s Liberation Army watched U.S. and allied forces make short work of the world’s fourth-largest military (on paper), equipped with many of the same systems as the PLA, it became obvious that China’s quantitatively superior but qualitatively lacking massed infantry would stand no chance against the combination of modern weaponry, C4ISR, and joint operations seen in Iraq. The result was new military concepts and over two decades of often-difficult reforms, which produced the modern, far more capable, “informationized” PLA of today. Today, the PLA is no doubt closely observing its Russian contemporaries in Ukraine as they under-perform in multiple areas, from failing to take key targets or claim air supremacy to running low on fuel and supplies and possibly experiencing morale collapse, and surely taking away lessons that will shape its own future,” writes Thomas Corbett, a research analyst at BluePath Labs; Ma Xiu, a BluePath analyst researching the PLA Rocket Force; and Peter W. Singer a strategist with New America.
The Air Force is seeking $5.3 billion in fiscal 2023 to continue revamping its outdated facilities across the globe, nearly half of which comes in the form of major construction projects. “These actions undertake urgently needed actions to improve the defense ecosystem and build resilient facilities and infrastructure,” the service said in its latest budget request.
Raytheon Intelligence & Space, a Raytheon Technologies business, announced effective today that retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Sami D. Said is joining the business as vice president of Global Security. Said will serve on the RI&S senior leadership team and report directly to Roy Azevedo, president, RI&S. Most recently, Said served as the Inspector General of the Department of the Air Force, and prior, as the Deputy Inspector General of the Air Force, in the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force.
Self-service smart lockers—similar to the Amazon Hub Lockers that have been popping up around the country—are now available for airmen at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia, the first base to install the secure package delivery system at its barracks. Previously, troops at Robins had to wait two to three days for the base's post office to manually sort a package, notify the recipient that it is available for pickup and then hand it out, according to Senior Airman Ricardo "Noah" Morales, who pitched the locker concept to Air Force leadership. Now, technology is quickly replacing or reshaping service jobs typically carried out by human beings.