Poland’s president said March 16 that his country plans to give Ukraine around a dozen MiG-29 fighter jets, which would make it the first NATO member to fulfill the Ukrainian government’s increasingly urgent requests for warplanes. President Andrzej Duda said Poland would hand over four of the Soviet-made warplanes “within the next few days” and that the rest needed servicing and would be supplied later. The Polish word he used to describe their number can mean between 11 and 19.
Defense sector behemoth Lockheed Martin Space has established a new unit, called Ignite, designed to not just foster innovation but rapidly mature new technologies in order to meet its customer’s—the Pentagon, the Intelligence Community, and NASA—need for speed in acquiring new on-orbit capabilities, executive vice president Robert Lightfoot said March 16. “What we’ve heard from the traditional customers is: ‘we need better technical maturity, we need to get it faster,'” he said.
Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman headlines an A-list of Space Force leaders speaking at the 2nd Annual Spacepower Security Forum on April 5 in Arlington, Va. Presented by AFA's Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, the Space Power Security Forum is a one-day deep dive into spacIn addition to the CSO, the packed agenda highlights Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt, Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Operations, Cyber, and Nuclear; Derek Tournear, Director of the Space Development Agency; and Lisa Costa, USSF's Chief Technology and Innovation Officer (CTIO).
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has defined seven Operational Imperatives for the Department of the Air Force to work on, warning that “if we don't get them right, we will have unacceptable operational risk.” From a resilient space order of battle to the development of next-generation tactical air dominance and global strike platforms, these imperatives will define the Air Force for decades to come—Dive deeper into each one with our new “Operational Imperatives” pages highlighting all the latest news and developments on these critical efforts.