Breaking Defense
The Space Force continues to be intrigued by the concept of acquiring weather data “as a service” from commercial vendors, but has determined that available services don’t fill their needs just yet, according to a senior Space Systems Command official. Lt. Col. Joseph Maguadog, SSC program manager for Electro-Optic/Infrared Weather Systems (EWS), explained that SSC’s January market survey of potential vendors, kicked off with a Request for Information in January 2022, failed to turn up any candidates capable of meeting current requirements.
Military.com
Roughly 35 percent of U.S. military personnel, retirees and family members lived in areas that had few to no military or civilian psychiatrists from 2016 to 2020, with retirees and those residing in rural or low-income areas notably having the least access, a new study has found. Worse yet, 6 percent of Tricare beneficiaries resided in areas with no psychiatrists, according to the research, published Jan. 3 online at JAMA Network Open.
Defense News
In 1959, the U.S. Air Force and Navy partnered with NASA to fly a piloted hypersonic test aircraft, the X-15, for the first time. During that flight, the high-speed vehicle designed to travel at speeds of at least Mach 5 was dropped from under the wing of a B-52 bomber flying over the Mojave Desert in Southern California. Pilot Scott Crossfield carried the aircraft to an altitude of 52,341 feet and reached a peak speed of Mach 2.11.
Defense One
Unlike what is portrayed in television and movies, government officials say, they have not found evidence of UFOs—or unidentified flying objects—that are extraterrestrial in nature. However, the government is expanding efforts to collect data on objects it still can’t explain.
Air Force Times
Three years after Iran fired more than a dozen ballistic missiles at U.S. troops in Iraq in January 2020, seven American airmen have been recognized for their actions overhead. The HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter crews who served at Al Asad Air Base, Iraq, on Jan. 7-8, 2020, helped ensure thousands of Americans were safe following the first overseas ballistic missile attack on U.S. citizens in over 30 years, the Air Force said.
Sandboxx
On December 5, the Army announced its selection of Bell’s tilt-rotor V-280 Valor as its replacement for the legendary (but aging) UH-60 Black Hawk, and almost immediately, we received a number of questions about the V-22 Osprey’s reputation for being an unsafe platform and how that could affect the V-280’s performance. These questions make some sense. After all, the V-22 program has certainly seen a number of high-profile incidents leading to the deaths of service members, dating all the way back to the early 1990s. But the truth is, the Osprey has proven itself to be a rather safe and reliable platform despite its setbacks.
Popular Science
On December 28, the Department of Defense announced the award of an $118 million contract to build a special kind of radar installation in the Republic of Palau. Palau is a nation in the Pacific, about 800 miles southwest of Guam and about 1,000 miles southeast of Manila. It will, by 2026, be host to the Tactical Mobile Over-the-Horizon Radar, a new sensor about which the military is being fairly tight-lipped.
One More Thing
The War Zone
During the dawn of aerial combat in World War I, flyers came up with inventive ways of practicing using their aircraft-mounted machine guns. This image is a case in point. Taken on July 17, 1918, it depicts a Royal Air Force (RAF) Pilot Officer conducting target practice from a moving ‘cockpit’ as it hurtles around a curved track at the RAF’s Rang-du-Fliers gunnery school at Berck in northern France.
