The F-35 strike fighter program will suffer a $15.1 billion reduction over the newly released future years defense program. Defense Department Comptroller Robert Hale confirmed during the rollout of the Pentagon’s Fiscal 2013 spending request on Monday that DOD will reduce the F-35 program—intended to supply replacement fighters for Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy tactical inventories—by 179 aircraft in the period from Fiscal 2013 to Fiscal 2017. The program remains one of the Defense Department’s largest, with DOD seeking to spend $8.9 billion for the project next fiscal year. However, the Pentagon leadership is slowing the program to allow testing and final development to catch up with production, said Hale. Despite previous slowdowns and restructuring, there is still “great concurrency” in the program, he said.
The Space Force must invest in high-level training based on the lessons learned from an unprecedented level of electronic warfare (EW) used by both Russia and Ukraine in the conflict there, one of the service’s top EW leaders said on April 24. “What we have seen in the Ukraine-Russia conflict…