Air Force airlifters are one step closer to becoming bomb trucks after the service awarded Lockheed Martin a $25 million contract to continue developing palletized munitions. The contract, awarded in August and announced this week by the company, includes a demonstration in 2021 to assess ...
Air Force Research Laboratory
Nearly 18 months out of office, former Air Force Secretary Heather A. Wilson indicated the service has more work to do on the reforms she championed over the course of two years. Wilson, now president of the University of Texas at El Paso, pursued multiple ...
Low-cost, attritable aircraft will likely reshape the fleet design outlined in “The Air Force We Need” white paper of 2018, panelists said during an Oct. 1 event hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. The technology's rapid advance is causing service force designers to ...
AFRL’s top research programs get a lift with accelerated funding.
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The Air Force Research Laboratory wants to make its budding swarm of semi-autonomous weapons smarter. “Golden Horde” aims to connect munitions like Boeing’s Small Diameter Bomb I in a swarm that can work through a list of targets on its own, and that could redirect ...
Air Force researchers in October will test whether a software version of the service’s developmental weapons swarm can make its way through a combat mission and reroute itself as conditions change. The demonstration is part of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Golden Horde initiative, a ...
Military researchers are eyeing multiple projects that could become the next Space Force “vanguard” programs, the high-profile ventures that receive extra money and attention from across the Department of the Air Force. The “Precise” initiative and the Cislunar Highway Patrol System, which were recently selected ...
Air Mobility Command is testing how its workhorse strategic airlifter can not only carry in combat weapons systems, but also directly contribute to a fight by dropping bombs and providing targeting data for artillery. As part of the high-tech Advanced Battle Management System “onramp” evaluations ...
Officials overseeing a promising new satellite venture warned this week that Ligado Networks could jeopardize the future of next-generation positioning, navigation, and timing alongside the current GPS enterprise. “As we interface with our [Air Force headquarters] staff counterparts, the message we communicate is basically, ‘Well, ...
The Air Force in the coming weeks will evaluate an interim fix to the KC-46’s troubled remote vision system to see if there would be any value gained, while still holding Boeing to its requirement to provide a broad, permanent fix to the system by ...
Two spaceflight experiments on object tracking and atmospheric ionization won the Air Force Research Laboratory’s latest competition for promising technologies, the lab said Sept. 2. The “Precise” project and the Cislunar Highway Patrol System beat out 25 other internal proposals in a six-month bid to ...
