After spending more than $1 billion on it since 2005, the Air Force notified Congress that it is canceling the Expeditionary Combat Support System, reported the Dayton Business Journal. ECSS was the supply chain management tool that service officials thought would transform the Air Force’s logistics enterprise. But the Air Force’s efforts haven’t panned out, as the ECSS program has yet to yield any significant military capability and is no longer a viable option for meeting the Pentagon’s Fiscal 2017 financial-improvement and audit-readiness statutory requirements, announced service officials on Nov. 8, according to the newspaper. After three restructures of the ECSS program in the past three years, “it became apparent the Air Force will be better served by developing an entirely new strategy,” they said, noting that the Air Force intends to do exactly that by moving forward with other options. Another $1.1 billion would have been necessary to field ECSS capability by 2020, but that amount would have resulted in much less capability than originally envisioned with ECSS, said the officials.
The U.S. thwarted a drone attack on U.S. forces at Al Asad air base in western Iraq on April 22, marking the first time that American troops have been targeted since February, U.S. officials said. “We can confirm it was an attack on Al Asad,” a defense official told Air & Space…