Air Force Times
Two decades after the Pentagon issued its first memo on the future of predictive maintenance, the top federal watchdog says the military still hasn’t fully reaped its benefits. A Dec. 8 Government Accountability Office report argues that lackluster oversight, a dearth of concrete objectives and little buy-in among rank-and-file maintainers are keeping the Defense Department from saving money and time — and even lives—each year.
Military.com
The program that grants visas to Afghans who helped the U.S. military during the United States' longest war is at risk of ending next year after an extension was left out of the annual defense policy bill. The Special Immigrant Visa, or SIV, program has been included in the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, in recent years. But the compromise version of this year's defense policy bill that is expected to become law this month left out a one-year extension that had been included in prior iterations.
The Associated Press
NASA’s Orion capsule made a blisteringly fast return from the moon Dec. 11, parachuting into the Pacific off Mexico to conclude a test flight that should clear the way for astronauts on the next lunar flyby. The incoming capsule hit the atmosphere at Mach 32, or 32 times the speed of sound, and endured reentry temperatures of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius) before splashing down west of Baja California near Guadalupe Island. A Navy ship quickly moved in to recover the spacecraft and its silent occupants—three test dummies rigged with vibration sensors and radiation monitors.
ProPublica
In early February 2016, the security gate at a U.S. military base near Washington, D.C., swung open to admit a Navy doctor accompanying a pair of surprising visitors: two artificial intelligence scientists from Google. In a cavernous, temperature-controlled warehouse at the Joint Pathology Center, they stood amid stacks holding the crown jewels of the center’s collection: tens of millions of pathology slides containing slivers of skin, tumor biopsies, and slices of organs from armed service members and veterans.
Defense One
With Pentagon budgets headed for a new record, defense officials and industry executives wonder: Can contractors fulfill all the outstanding weapons orders? Defense spending could rise 10 percent in 2023, though relatively few U.S. troops are deployed in conflict zones around the world. A good chunk of the increase is meant to rush weapons to Ukrainian forces fighting off the Russian invasion and replenish the U.S. missiles, artillery, and other weapons donated to Kyiv.
SpaceNews
As Artemis 1 concludes, U.S. Space Command is using the mission to highlight its role in supporting NASA, even as the space agency considers alternatives to some of those services. The Orion crew capsule splashed down after 12 p.m. Eastern Dec. 11 in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja Calif. It was recovered by a joint NASA/U.S. Navy team using the ship USS Portland, along with several helicopters and small boats. The military forces involved in the recovery are coordinated by U.S. Space Command. “It’s one of the most visible mission sets within U.S. Space Command that we do, and it’s a pretty neat one,” said U.S. Army Gen. James Dickinson, commander of U.S. Space Command, in an interview at Patrick Space Force Base in Florida before the first Artemis 1 launch attempt in August.
Defense One
Several obstacles remain before the Pentagon achieves its connect-everything vision—but just linking together computers and networks won’t solve them. Raytheon on Dec. 12 announced it has been selected by the Air Force to help build out a key portion of the Advanced Battle Management System, or ABMS, USAF’s contribution to the Pentagon’s dream of connecting all its air, space, sea, and land assets across the services and domains.
Defense News
Argentina’s president has ruled out the possibility of procuring supersonic fighter jets for the country’s Air Force in the short term. In an interview with the Financial Times’s “Global Boardroom” program last week, Alberto Fernandez was asked about the aircraft program, saying “there are other priorities before buying weapons, definitely.”
One More Thing
The War Zone
December 2022 has been a big month for stealth bombers. The rollout of the B-21 Raider, the most advanced officially disclosed aircraft mankind has ever built, has captured imaginations and has spurred new interest in the future of air combat and the role stealth bomber-like platforms play in it. At the same time, the B-2 Spirit, still alien-looking many decades after first being shown to the public, is entering into the golden years of its service. Northrop's original stealth flying wing represented an absolute quantum leap in military aviation technology and remains an icon of aerospace innovation. But there was another aircraft design that competed directly with it at the time—four decades ago—as part of the highly classified Advanced Technology Bomber (ATB) program.
