General Atomics has given its Collaborative Combat Aircraft drone, the YFQ-42A, a new nickname in keeping with the Air Force tradition of aircraft named for birds of prey: Dark Merlin.
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Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force David R. Wolfe will deliver his first keynote speech to the force this week at AFA’s 2026 Warfare Symposium—a talk aimed at helping Airmen understand what they can expect from the service’s top enlisted Airman and how their performance will be judged.
About 15 seconds separated F-16 “Wild Weasel” pilots Lt. Col. William “Skate” Parks and Maj. Michael “Danger” Blea from life or death in the night skies over Yemen.
The Air Force will send off its final A-10 Thunderbolt II from depot maintenance this month and deactivate the unit that performs overhauls, upgrades, and rebuilds on the venerable close air support jet.
The Defense Innovation Unit is gearing up for the first flight of its commercially developed hypersonic testbed as soon as the end of February—part of a larger project to quickly increase the cadence of the Pentagon’s hypersonic flight testing and field advanced, high-speed systems and components at scale.
The Air Force has a new X-plane: The X-68A LongShot from General Atomics is an air-launched drone intended to carry additional air-to-air munitions. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been developing LongShot since 2021, and announced on Feb. 17 that flight testing could begin “as early as the end of 2026.”
Boeing announced Feb. 20 it has opened a new production line dedicated to building electro-optical infrared sensors for the Space Force and other customers.
Space enables integrated defense to function as a unified, resilient architecture rather than a collection of standalone systems. Jeff Schrader, Vice President of Strategy & Business Development for Lockheed Martin Space, sits down with Air & Space Forces Magazine to...
The Space Force team responsible for developing advanced battle management capabilities wants to create a better pipeline for mature space domain awareness tools to move from the lab into the hands of operators.


