The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Corps Gen.James Cartwright, says that ongoing defense reviews, chiefly the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, must lead to affordable decisions, ones that weigh buying “exquisite” weapons over ones that are “good enough,” reports The Huntsville Times. Cartwright, who was speaking last week at the Space and Missile Defense Conference in Huntsville, Ala., noted that “affordability is a huge issue” and that the weapons the Pentagon procures must be relevant to current operations and adaptable to serve in “anybody’s best estimate of the wars that we’re likely to go to,” reports American Forces Press Service. Adaptability for weapons and strategy are paramount, he said, “because if we’ve learned anything over the last eight years of this conflict, it’s that the enemy has a vote in where we’re going to go and where this fight’s going to go.”
The Air Force is on track to reach its annual goal of graduating 1,500 new pilots that had proved elusive to this point, one year after the service launched a sweeping overhaul of its undergraduate pilot training program, Air Education and Training Command said Sept. 14.
