The New York Times reports that Defense Secretary Bob Gates wants his staff to return to wearing service dress uniforms rather than battle dress uniforms as has been the custom for many military members assigned to the Pentagon since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. According to Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell, Gates “understands and appreciates” the impetus to switch to combat dress after 9/11, but he said, “more than eight years later, it’s more important to him that people—both civilian and military—are dressed in a way consistent with the fact that this building is the headquarters of the United States military in our nation’s capital city.”
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.
