The Air Force has finished renovating a 48,000 sq. ft. warehouse on the grounds of Hill AFB, Utah, in which it will store the service’s nuclear weapons-related materials and intends to move those materials into the facility starting today. “Construction on the warehouse is complete and contractors have departed,” Jillian Speake, spokeswoman for the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center at Kirtland AFB, N.M., told the Daily Report Dec. 31. She added, “The facility looks great and the team is setting up equipment now.” The center, USAF’s lead organization for nuclear weapons sustainment, will oversee the warehouse, which was formerly owned and operated by the Defense Logistics Agency. The Air Force is assuming oversight of its NWRMs from the DLA as part of the many changes that it is making to improve its nuclear stewardship. These materials, approximately 160 various national stock numbers, are mostly related to the nation’s Minuteman III ICBMs but also go with other USAF nuclear systems. They include items like a hardened bolt that goes on a Minuteman missile or a part for the missile’s guidance section. These items are being consolidated at the Hill facility and the AFNWC is gradually instituting an automated system of positive inventory control over them so that, by 2013, it can instantaneously track the location of any of these parts. Moving all of the materials into the facility will be “a multiple-month effort,” Speake said. In a November interview, Brig. Gen. Everett Thomas, AFNWC commander, said the refurbished warehouse has received better lighting and new security systems.
The United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force has unveiled a new electronic warfare drone designed to fly with fighter jets into contested airspace, including alongside its fleet of F-35s. RAF says it plans to develop models that draw on the U.S. Air Force’s approach of mating unmanned systems with crewed platforms.