Fudging medical histories has been a key step on many troops’ path from applicant to recruit, according to a group of active-duty military recruiters who spoke with Military Times for this story. “What it takes to get in the Army is, quite frankly, a lot of fraud and perjury,” one recruiter said. But this tacit tradition—technically a crime—largely stopped in 2022, the same year the military’s recruiting numbers fell precipitously and today’s recruiting crisis came to the fore.
Driven by advancements in technology and research, the Air Force and Space Force are adapting how they train their warfighters to complete the missions at hand. Keep up with all the latest news on changes and improvements to the services’ training enterprises.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan officially cut the ribbon for Turkish navy’s flagship TCG Anadolu on April 10, delivering the nation’s largest ship that can carry helicopters and armed drones. … It is no coincidence that Erdogan is launching this ship, which was under construction for five years, less than 34 days before the May 14 general election. Recent polls indicate that it will be a tight race and every vote counts. And analysts say shiny new toys presented by Erdogan to the public may play a role garnering more votes for the incumbent, who is facing an uphill battle due to an economic crisis and public fatigue after 20 years in power.
Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, U.S. Space Force chief of operations, discussed space operations and national security strategy during the Mitchell Institute’s Spacepower Security Forum. Several topics were discussed, including training, private and public partnerships, threats posed by China and Russia, and force resiliency and readiness.
The ground terminals used to operate U.S. military and intelligence satellites are running out of capacity and in dire need of upgrades, warns a new report from the Government Accountability Office. GAO auditors spent more than a year investigating the state of the Satellite Control Network, operated by the U.S. Space Force. The network of 19 parabolic antennas, first established in 1959, is distributed across seven locations around the world.
IT is the mostly invisible glue of modern offices that only leaps into view when it fails: an undelivered text, the dreaded “searching for signal” icon, apps that take minutes to load. But all of that takes on a different meaning inside the Pentagon. “We have to make sure that the infrastructure behind the scenes is able to handle the new way or the updated way of working,” Sajeel Ahmed, the director of the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Joint Service Provider, told Defense One. Because if it isn’t, key players will be at risk of cyberattacks that could compromise missions and service members' safety.
The Defense Department has selected Brynt Parmeter—a former Army officer who recently left his latest post as a Walmart personnel executive — to serve as its inaugural Chief Talent Management Officer. “His first day [as CTMO] is today,” a Pentagon spokesperson told DefenseScoop on April 10, shortly after the hiring decision was announced. In this brand new capacity for DOD, Parmeter is set to help steer the making and facilitation of the department’s anticipated “total force’” talent acquisition and management strategy.
China’s military declared April 10 it is “ready to fight” after completing three days of large-scale combat exercises around Taiwan that simulated sealing off the island in response to the Taiwanese president’s trip to the U.S. last week. The “combat readiness patrols” named Joint Sword were meant as a warning to self-governing Taiwan, which China claims as its own, China’s military said earlier.
An equal-opportunity complaint alleging that the Air Force discriminated against its deaf and hard-of-hearing civilian employees will move forward as a class-action case, a federal appellate office ruled April 5. The decision is a win for Air Force employees who say the service failed to provide the tools they need at work, like American Sign Language interpreters, real-time captioning equipment, and videophones.
Pentagon officials are reeling from the leak of highly classified military plans on the war in Ukraine that surfaced last week—alarmed by both the sensitivity and sheer amount of information exposed. The U.S. government is scrambling to determine the source of the most significant breach of U.S. intelligence in a decade after the tranche of more than 100 documents surfaced on social media. The documents contain information so sensitive that only people with the highest levels of security clearance in the U.S. government can access them.
Taiwanese are rushing to buy patches being worn by their air force pilots that depict a Formosan black bear punching Winnie the Pooh—representing China's President Xi Jinping—as a defiant symbol of the island's resistance to Chinese war games.