Col. Eric Mathewson, head of USAF’s unmanned aircraft system task force, who recently helped brief reporters about the service’s new long-range UAS flight plan, is on the road drumming up help on designing the next-generation of unmanned aerial vehicles. According to an Associated Press report (via Forbes.com), Mathewson visited the University of North Dakota Aug. 4 during a three-day conference on unmanned systems to encourage students and researchers to work on new UAS capabilities. He said, “We don’t have the time or the brainpower in the Air Force to answer all these questions [concerning new concepts].” The service’s flight plan envisions a UAV-dominant Air Force.
Just over a year ago, in July 2025, the Air Force established a dedicated office on the Air Staff for communications/cyber functions, separate from the intelligence directorate it had long been attached to. Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Phillips, Deputy Chief of Staff for Warfighter Communications and Cyber Systems, recently sat…