Americans looked back Sept. 11 on 9/11 with moments of silence, tearful words, and appeals to teach younger generations about the terror attacks 22 years ago. … President Joe Biden, speaking at a military base in Anchorage, Alaska, urged Americans to rally around protecting democracy. His visit, en route to Washington from a trip to India and Vietnam, is a reminder that the impact of 9/11 was felt in every corner of the nation, however remote.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said his department is comfortable working with SpaceX despite recent reports about Elon Musk restricting the use of the company’s Starlink satellite services in Ukraine. During a news conference Sept. 11 at the Air Space & Cyber conference, Kendall said he could not comment on reports—from news media and from Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson—that SpaceX’s boss thwarted Ukrainian forces by shutting off Starlink’s satellite network over Crimea—a territory occupied by Russia that Ukraine was fighting to reclaim.
The four-star head of Air Mobility Command said Sept. 11he plans to nominate Air Force units and service members who participated in the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan for the nation’s highest military awards, after Airmen were left out of a group selected to receive the Presidential Unit Citation for their collective courage.
The U.S. Air Force's Air Mobility Command is still exploring a concept that could see KC-135 aerial refueling tankers gain the ability to launch up to 100 commercial-of-the-shelf drones. The command's top officer says that drones launched by KC-135 motherships could act as decoys and remote sensors, help forces navigate to their destinations, scout out new places to land, aid in the rescue of downed pilots, and more.
Jay Meil, Chief Data Scientist of SAIC’s AI Innovation Factory, met with Air & Space Forces Magazine at the 2023 Air, Space & Cyber Conference on getting data to the warfighter to achieve information dominance.
The Biden administration is in active conversations about whether to send long-range missiles to Ukraine amid an intense campaign for the U.S. to transfer the weapon, according to two U.S. officials and a person close to the Ukrainian government. It’s unclear if a decision memo has reached President Joe Biden’s desk. The officials said a final call would be made with Ukraine’s input, but Washington and Kyiv aren’t engaged in discussions about an announcement or a rollout of Army Tactical Missile Systems.
The White House is taking issue with a House Republican proposal to give junior enlisted troops a more than 30 percent pay bump next year. The opposition to rewriting the pay scale for E-6s and below was included in a broader statement the White House issued Sept. 11 threatening to veto the House's proposed fiscal 2024 Pentagon spending bill, largely over the administration’s objection to “divisive policy provisions” that target abortion rights and LGBTQ+ service members.
The Boeing Co. has been tapped by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for the next phase of the Glide Breaker program aimed at developing technologies that could help the U.S. military shoot down adversaries’ hypersonic missiles, according to the contractor and the Pentagon.
From Rolls-Royce's factories in Indianapolis, originally the Allison Engine plants, thousands of engines have been designed, developed, and delivered to keep the Air Force flying. Today, the company is moving rapidly toward Critical Design Review for the Air Force’s B-52 Commercial Engine Replacement Program (CERP), which will help extend the life of the venerable BUFF by another 30 years. Rolls-Royce has many other programs in operation or development that will benefit the nation’s Airmen.
Blended wing body aircraft could benefit the U.S. military by allowing warplanes to fly further, from shorter runways. But making sure the planes are compatible with existing airports is key to giving commercial airlines buy in, too, a top general said Sept. 11. Commercial airlines buying these new, radically different-looking planes would likely lower the cost for the military.
As the U.S. Air Force develops its next generation of command and control, it is using two measures of success: how quickly forces can be tasked and coordinated in a fight; and how tolerant digital systems are of new technologies and applications.
For the past several years, Defense Department and Intelligence Community (IC) leaders have been vocally touting their determination to take better advantage of cutting-edge commercial space technology—with a handful of studies, strategies and experiments in various stages of completion, including a new commercial acquisition strategy that Pentagon sources say is now on the desk of Space Force chief Gen. Chance Saltzman. But a chorus of industry insiders have told Breaking Defense over the last few weeks that they have a simpler answer to the conundrum: Show me the money.
Defense chiefs have left the United Kingdom “dangerously exposed” through a series of misguided equipment decisions—in one case branded “irrational” and “perverse”—which have created “unacceptable” capability gaps for the Royal Air Force (RAF), a cross-party group of MPs has warned.
Gen. Mark Kelly, commander of Air Combat Command, announced the establishment of the William Tell Competition “Lt. Col. James Harvey III F-15 Wing Award” during the competition’s ceremony dinner Sept. 10. The new award is named in honor of Harvey, a member of the storied 332nd Fighter Group of the Tuskegee Airmen and winners of the “Best Overall Team Award” during the first-ever gunnery meet held in 1949 at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. The gunnery meet was the predecessor to William Tell.