Defense One
Should a war with China break out, the Air Force wants its intelligence community to be able to operate with full connectivity, no connectivity, and everything in between. For a service aggressively moving toward cloud services, this is no mean feat. “The public cloud offers great services as long as you have connectivity. If you're disconnected, how do you still function and do what you need to do during that timeframe?” said Norman Leach, a director in the Air Force Research Laboratory’s information directorate.
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The Wall Street Journal
Boeing Co.’s troubled project to replace Air Force One is getting costlier, both for the plane maker’s shareholders and U.S. taxpayers who will have to pay to keep the President’s aging jets flying longer. The Arlington, Va., aerospace company said it expects to lose $766 million more on the high-profile, years-late project to transform two 747-8 jumbo jets into flying White Houses, bringing the company's total losses related to the effort to nearly $2 billion, according to securities filings. The additional costs were part of a larger charge that led Boeing to report a $3.3 billion third-quarter loss.
Air Force Times
Air Force officials are investigating a mishap that heavily damaged a KC-46 Pegasus tanker plane while it refueled a fighter jet in October. The tanker was on its way from Glasgow Prestwick Airport in Scotland to Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, N.J., when it was tasked to gas up an F-15, an Air Force official confirmed. Investigators believe that during the rendezvous, the two aircraft were traveling at such different speeds that the refueling boom forcibly broke away from the fighter jet and slammed back into the KC-46, the official said. The Pegasus safely continued on to New Jersey after the mishap.
SpaceNews
China’s secretive reusable spaceplane has released an object into orbit, according to tracking data from the U.S. Space Force. China carried out the second launch of its “reusable experimental spacecraft” from Jiuquan in the Gobi Desert atop a Long March 2F rocket. The spacecraft has now been in orbit for 90 days. Two weeks ago the spacecraft raised its perigee—or the point during its orbit at which a spacecraft is closest to Earth—to shift to a near-circular 597 by 608-kilometer orbit.
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The Wall Street Journal
“The Pentagon is pulling F-15 fighter jets from Okinawa after decades on the Japanese island, and the news has received too little attention. American air power is spread thin across the world, and the U.S. is in a precarious position even as it needs to put more hardware in the Pacific to deter China,” writes The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board.
The War Zone
A new weapon, an air-launched ballistic missile, or ALBM, for China’s Xi’an H-6K bombers, has emerged. While its origins are unconfirmed, the missile looks very similar to the CM-401, previously known as a truck- or ship-launched anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) that is also capable of hitting static land targets. The latest development seems to point again to the considerable efforts Beijing is making to increase its advanced air-launched anti-shipping capability, which is becoming a fundamental part of its wider and fast-evolving anti-access/area-denial strategy.
Breaking Defense
The cost of developing hypersonic weapons combined with the relatively small industrial base means it isn’t viable for the Navy to go it alone on developing the much-sought-after capabilities, a senior officer argued Nov. 2. Vice Adm. Johnny Wolfe, director of the service’s strategic systems program office, told attendees at the Naval Submarine League one of the lessons learned from the Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike program, a hypersonic weapon being developed jointly with the Army, is that such high-end weapons are too costly for one service to take the full brunt of the price.
Task & Purpose
You never know who you might end up sitting next to in class one day. For example, biology students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill between 2017 and 2019 may not have known that the quiet older guy in their classroom was a decorated Air Force commando who saved his entire team of U.S. and Afghan special operators from being overrun on a 2008 mission in Afghanistan, a mission where he repeatedly exposed himself to enemy fire and directed danger-close air strikes against the local militant group despite being shot through the leg. As incredible as it sounds, that kind of story is fairly common in the world of Air Force combat control.
DOD release
The current conflict in Ukraine is not the worst that the U.S. should be prepared for. Around the corner, said the commander of U.S. Strategic Command, the U.S. must be prepared for much more. “This Ukraine crisis that we're in right now, this is just the warmup,” said Navy Adm. Charles "Chas" A. Richard, commander of STRATCOM. ‘The big one is coming. And it isn't going to be very long before we're going to get tested in ways that we haven't been tested a long time.”
Politico
Senate Democrats want to finish up confirmations of senior Pentagon nominees who have been stuck in limbo for months—but there may not be enough time to get the job done. More than a dozen of President Joe Biden’s civilian nominees await action when the Senate returns after the Nov. 8 midterm elections that could swing control of the chamber. The list includes those who would oversee weapons purchases and industrial policy as the Pentagon and defense contractors are scrambling to build missiles, drones, and ammunition to send to Ukraine and replace depleted inventories for the U.S. and NATO allies.
One More Thing
Military.com
Businesses are appreciative of all that the military does. That's why they offer discounts to military members and their families throughout the month of November, which is designated as Military Family Appreciation Month. The following is a list of discounts on goods, services, and dining during Military Family Appreciation Month 2022.
