The 332nd Expeditionary Maintenance Squadron is wrapping up a historic deployment in support of Operation Inherent Resolve, the US campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Over the past six months, the unit has kept their F-15E Strike Eagles consistently in the air as they dropped 5,018 munitions with “no tasked sorties missed,” according to a US Air Forces Central Command press release. The team, which deployed from Mountain Home AFB, Idaho, has “surpassed every monthly bomb record for a deployed unit except for one,” according to AFCENT. The 332nd EMXS has nearly 500 maintainers and operators deployed. “It’s been a privilege to watch the Mountain Home team’s success throughout the past several months,” said Capt. Jason Henderson, 332nd EMXS operations officer, according to the release. “While over 5,000 munitions expenditures are certainly impressive, it’s a bi-product of something bigger… non-stop combat sortie generation. This deployment should be a case study in how to effectively generate and sustain combat airpower at the end of a challenging logistics pipeline.”
A new report from the Government Accountability Office calls for the Pentagon’s Chief Technology Officer to have budget certification authority over the military services’ research and development accounts—a move the services say would add a burdensome and unnecessary layer of bureaucracy.
