The Trump administration arrived in Washington promising to restore America’s military, reinvigorate deterrence, and bring back its warrior ethos. These are not things that can change overnight, but there is evidence of progress. Topics that were gingerly avoided six months...
Combat airpower requires more planes and more pilots to fly them. The U.S. Air Force is stretched thin by unrelenting rotational and contingency response demands, and its chronic pilot shortage just won’t go away. For more than a decade, the Air...

Letters

April 4, 2025
We love letters! Write to us at letters@afa.org. To be published, letters should be timely, relevant and concise. Include your name and location. Letters may be edited for space and the editors have final say on which are published. Danger,...

WORLD: Combat Air Forces

April 4, 2025
The F-47: Next Generation Air Dominance  Boeing Wins Contest to Build the Next Manned Fighter. By Chris Gordon and John A. Tirpak  When President Donald Trump announced March 21 that Boeing would build the Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter, he unleashed a...

Verbatim

Feb. 7, 2025
Danger Zone “It’s a different world when China, Russia and the U.S. all have a thousand-plus nuclear weapons in the field. It gets more dangerous as there’s other countries that are proliferating weapons. It gets more dangerous as people think...

WORLD: Air

Feb. 7, 2025
Iranian Threats in the Middle East By Chris Gordon When Lt. Col. Dustin Johnson was ordered to deploy to the Middle East last year, he and his fellow F-22 Raptor pilots prepared for an unusual challenge.  As America’s premier air...
Discussion of future tankers comes as the Air Force continues downsizing two of its three aerial refueling fleets and bringing on the troubled KC-46 Pegasus, the U.S. military’s first 21st-century tanker program.