While it’s “the right thing to do” for top Air Force leaders to explore a possible cheap-to-buy-and-operate cost close air support aircraft for “permissive environments,” Air Combat Command chief Gen. Hawk Carlisle isn’t so sure such a program would be a good investment. “I wonder,” Carlisle told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday, whether “in five-seven-ten years … will there be any such thing?” as a “permissive environment.” He said that Russia’s loss of multiple helicopters? in Syria to unsophisticated weapons is an indication of “where we’re going.” State-sponsored terrorists, he said, “have access to state-sponsored weapons,” and a low-tech CAS airplane might arrive just in time to be irrelevant. He also said he “doesn’t have the money to spare from other priorities” at the moment to invest in a new fleet of CAS aircraft, relatively inexpensive though they might be.
NASA Boss: Race to Moon Has National Security Stakes
Sept. 15, 2026
NASA is pushing hard to get astronauts back to the moon by 2028—and the urgency is driven in no small part by the national security implications of doing so before China does, Administrator Jared Isaacman said Sept. 15.
