Four months after Air Force leaders rolled out a slew of initiatives aimed at readying troops to compete with China, they’re grappling with the most difficult part of change: turning ideas into reality. As the service hashes out the details of its future force, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin and Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force David Flosi are urging Airmen to stick together and trust the process.
Ukrainian officials are pressing the U.S. and other countries to ramp up their F-16 pilot training, saying the current pipeline isn’t producing enough aviators to fly the jets that will be soon donated to Kyiv. Ukraine says it has 30 pilots who are eligible to start training in the U.S. immediately. Yet the Biden administration has told Kyiv it lacks the school seats in its Arizona-based program to accept more than 12 pilot trainees at a time, according to three people with direct knowledge of the request.
Berlin plans to order an additional 20 Eurofighter Typhoon jets, in what German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said is part of an effort to fortify the European defense industry. “We want a strong aerospace industry in Germany and Europe,” Scholz tweeted, according to an online translation. “This includes planning security in the defense industry. That’s why we ensure reliable orders—including the purchase of 20 more Eurofighters in this legislative period.”
The Defense Department has been warning of the growing risks of weapons in space, but the massive increase in objects about to enter low-Earth orbit will make tracking potential weapons even harder. A California company called Slingshot Aerospace has created an AI system to address that challenge, by identifying strangely behaving satellites within large satellite constellations—which could indicate space weapons or other threats.
“In a world where instability and threats are on the rise, it is disturbing that some in Congress are calling to weaken America’s strategic nuclear deterrent, even to the point of offering legislative proposals to severely curtail vital modernization efforts. The reality is that the safety and security of our nation demands a robust, modern nuclear triad—one that deters adversaries, reassures allies, and promotes stability,” writes retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton, explorer chair at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.
Amid delays and cost overruns for key F-35 upgrades, officials have increasingly emphasized the need to tackle a top issue for the Joint Strike Fighter enterprise: a limited and aging testing infrastructure, whose woes could delay or endanger future upgrades to the jet. And now that a brand new F-35 test jet crashed last week, the stealth fighter’s testing problems could get even worse, fleet numbers shared exclusively with Breaking Defense show.
German contractor Diehl Defense has unveiled a new ‘remote carrier’—a missile-like store that can be launched from aircraft, as well as from land and sea platforms. The long-range system, known as FEANIX, which stands for Future Effector—Adaptable, Networked, Intelligent, eXpendable, is being pitched as an adjunct to the pan-European Future Combat Air System (FCAS) next-generation air combat program, as well as for the in-service Eurofighter Typhoon.
For years, U.S. officials have accused China of stealing American technology to design and build fighter planes. But while China learned how to build advanced fighters, its pilots could not fly them so well. That may be starting to change, according to American officials.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that Moscow could arm countries with a view to attacking Western targets. Mr. Putin made the statement while criticizing the West's delivery of long-range weapons to Ukraine.
For decades, the Pentagon has wrestled with replacing large, monolithic satellites with more agile constellations of smaller spacecraft, a concept known as satellite disaggregation. Proponents have argued that distributed systems are more resilient against attack and allow more frequent technology upgrades. This vision is gaining momentum, driven by the work of the Space Development Agency (SDA)—an organization under the U.S. Space Force that is developing a missile-tracking network in low Earth orbit using hundreds of relatively small satellites
Along with the generals and the paratroopers, the pilots and the infantrymen, spare a thought for the young Irish woman who may have played the most important role of all in making the D-Day landings a success.