January 2018
Vol. 101, No. 1
EDITORIAL | Devin Kelley’s brutal rampage is a reminder that USAF must perform routine bureaucratic ta
U-2s and Global Hawks out of Al Dhafra Air Base bring vision to the war on terror.
How the OA-X Might Change Air Force Acquisition
Can the Light Attack Experiment serve as a model for speeding up USAF acquisition?
F-35: Exiting the Pattern
At long last, the F-35 strike fighter is set to complete development.
Verbatim
Hairy Trigger “North Korean officers are trained to press their [retaliatory strike] button without any further instructions from the general command if anything happens on their side. We have to remember that tens of millions of South Korean population are...
Wingman: Habu’s Last Hurrah
It was a record-setter. Congress voted in late 1989 to retire the SR-71 Blackbird. Soon thereafter, the Smithsonian Institution requested one of the triple-sonic reconnaissance aircraft for display. Reconnaissance System Officer Joseph “J. T.” Vida and I had been flying...
Infographic: USAF Suicide Numbers: Bad—and Trending UP
In 2015, airmen committed suicide at a rate of more than 20 per 100,000 population. Put another way, more than one in 5,000 airmen took their lives in a single year. This was the leading cause of death for airmen,...
Richard Hunter, Air Force Cross
SSgt. Richard Hunter called in short-range air attacks to help a special operations team escape a harr
The Arctic Heats Up
In the high north, things are cold no more.
Namesakes: Clark
Wings Over Hawaii Had history taken a logical course, there never would have been a Clark Field in the Philippines. It would have been built in Hawaii. Sometimes, though, history isn’t logical. Take the case of Harold Melville Clark,...
Cyber Warriors Fight USAF’s Most Active, and Secret, War
The challenge: USAF must build a highly skilled force it can’t say much about, to perform missions it
Letters
We love letters! Write to us at letters@afa.org. To be published, letters should be timely, relevant and concise. Include your name and location. Letters may be edited for space and the editors have final say on which are published. One...
The Shadow War in Cambodia
Nixon and Kissinger thought the sustained B-52 bombing in Cambodia could be hidden from Congress and t
In Korea, Ready to Fight Tonight
In the rapidly changing Pacific Theater, the Air Force is determined to maintain the competitive advan
Aperture
A Deterring Price of Deterrence Even among jaded defense program watchers, a trillion dollars is still a sobering number. The defense community in Washington was rendered very sober in November when the Congressional Budget Office, in a new report, added...
Forward Deployed
Weekend Warrior? Wrong Answer An Undisclosed Location, Southwest Asia— The 386th Air Expeditionary Wing is in virtually the same business now that it was at the height of Operation Iraqi Freedom, according to the unit’s vice commander. The wing’s passenger...
