There’s an insidious creep in the world of Air Force technology away from risky pursuits with a huge potential payoff toward simply building what’s already proven, said Northrop Grumman’s CEO Wes Bush on Monday. There is “real cause for concern” on this front, he said in his speech at AFA’s 2013 Air and Space Conference in National Harbor, Md. “We need technological superiority . . . not parity,” said Bush. Inevitably, as pressure mounts on research and development spending, “remaining resources available for R&D get shifted . . . step by step into taking the technologies we’ve already developed and making them more mature so they’re ready for procurement,” he said. “That’s good . . . but what happens, the monies drift in that direction, and it’s robbed from early-stage development,” said Bush. This, he said, is “my biggest concern.” There’s an opportunity cost to this, as well as “a very dangerous risk aversion,” he asserted. Failure is a big part of “pushing technology to the maximum,” and the Air Force has to be “willing to take risks,” said Bush.
The Pentagon fulfilled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's promise to slash the number of Religious Affiliation Codes used by the military to track the volume of members adhering to different religions and to shape the chaplain corps to support them. The change reduces the number of religions counted for such purposes…