“What is the Space Force’s culture? This is a tough question to answer, mainly because the culture does not fully exist yet. Obviously, a very large proportion of the Space Force’s initial personnel and culture came from the Air Force. However, after listening to the Chief of Space Operations, Gen. John W. Raymond, conduct a town hall meeting with all the inter-service transfers, it became very clear that the Space Force needs a very different culture, purposely distinct from the Air Force,” writes Maj. Mark D. Natale, an Army officer recently selected for an inter-service transfer to the Space Force as a 13S, space operations officer.
When Ukrainian forces began to take apart several pieces of captured or partially destroyed Russian military equipment, they found a strong reliance on foreign microchips—especially those made in the United States—according to component lists Ukraine intelligence shared with The War Zone.
Multiple branches of the U.S. military are eager to add more loitering munitions to their arsenals. The weapons will give them new tools, but the technology also poses a threat to American forces that must be countered, experts say. These types of systems, sometimes referred to as kamikaze drones or suicide drones, are different than traditional munitions because of their ability to loiter and search for targets to strike.
In episode 78 of the Aerospace Advantage, host John “Slick” Baum speaks with a seasoned remotely piloted aircraft operator—Brig. Gen. Houston Cantwell, who commands the NATO Alliance Ground Surveillance Force—and an engineer who specializes in artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions, Dr. Anastacia "Stacie" MacAllister of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, to explore how AI can revolutionize airpower. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall has made it clear that AI and developing manned and unmanned teams is a top priority for the USAF if we are to fight and win in a conflict with our peer competitors. To realize this vision, it will take engineers and warfighters working side-by-side to deliver operationally relevant AI into UAVs.
Finland’s top diplomat said the country hasn’t seen an uptick in Russian aggression since it decided to join NATO, but suggested the U.S. should assist in Finland’s ability to “react rapidly” in the event its much larger neighbor does take malevolent action. Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto told the Center for Strategic and International Studies that since the NATO announcement days ago, Russian activity against Finland has been “normal,” except for “some” violations of Finnish airspace and Russia shutting off a natural gas pipeline that runs between the two countries. He added that those reprisal actions were “nothing surprising.”
Seventeen people were hospitalized overnight and hundreds sought medical treatment for symptoms after a Navy fuel spill in Hawaii contaminated Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam’s water system, according to a new report. A voluntary online survey found that 87 percent of 2,289 respondents reported symptoms from exposure that lasted more than 30 days, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry said.
The Pentagon’s premiere research agency is moving forward with an effort to build an unusual kind of plane that, if successful, will rival the lift of the Air Force’s storied Globemaster, cost half the price, and not be constrained by a traditional runway. That’s if the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency can get right what the Soviet Union got wrong.
A project years in the making, Ellsworth Air Force Base has broken ground for the first of three dozen major projects that will support the incoming long-range B-21 bomber. The 95,000-square-foot Low Observable Restoration Facility, or LO, will have “specialized equipment to ensure that the free world’s next generation stealth bomber is sustained and maintained,” said Gen. Anthony Cotton, Air Force Global Strike Commander.
There’s no way to verify that 29,600 Russian troops have died in the invasion, as Ukraine’s defense ministry claimed May 26, but what is known is that Russia is calling for more volunteers and raising the upper age limit of enlistees. The Russian military has also lost thousands of weapons, and in the last few weeks has scaled back from a three-pronged attack on Ukraine to a narrower effort to take the whole of the Donbas—and retain the parts it captured in 2014. The losses could make it difficult to wage war anywhere else in the short term, defense experts and officials said.
"Billy Mitchell," claiming to be writing from the "Wild Blue Beyonder," says he cooked up the idea for Top Gun as a secret information operation to retard the further development of naval aviation and convince future leaders that, ultimately, the Navy did all it could to sink naval aviation and the Air Force is leading the way into the future.