WORLD: Training

July 25, 2025
Major Exercises Kick Off By Greg Hadley  The Air Force and Space Force kicked off a busy summer of major exercises across the Pacific on July 8, with thousands of Airmen and Guardians set to participate in a series of...
Air Force Pushes Ahead with 2 Hypersonic Missile Programs  By John A. Tirpak The Air Force’s Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM) is delayed and may significantly overrun its expected cost, which could partially explain why the service is reviving the...
The proliferation of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has shaken up the military world, fueling concern that UAVs could revolutionize airpower concepts and even negate the need for air superiority as a fundamental objective of airpower strategy. These perspectives suffer from a collective airpower amnesia ...
“Top Gun: Maverick” captured movie audiences with a plot built around the mission to destroy a fictional country’s uranium enrichment facility hidden deep in a remote mountain range. ... In June, we saw the remake: The Air Force executed the real thing as seven B-2 ...
The 36-hour operation to fly deep into Iranian airspace in June and destroy three heavily fortified nuclear complexes began more than 15 years ago with the discovery of a major construction complex among the remote mountains of northwest Iran.
The U.S. Air Force operational concepts for penetrating into contested areas assume that U.S. forces can maintain highly networked connectivity and reach-back to data and command centers. But China’s People’s Liberation Army’s “informationized” warfighting strategy is specifically designed to counter the networked U.S. approach. Disaggregated ...
Air Force Reveals Range and Inventory Goals for F-47, CCAs By John A. Tirpak The F-47 Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter will have a combat radius greater than 1,000 miles—nearly double that of the F-22—and the Air Force plans to acquire...

Verbatim

June 20, 2025
Still Smaller, Still Older   “The fleet is aging; 30-plus years on average. Some of the … critical platforms, are significantly older than that. When I was a navigator, I never flew a KC-135 that was younger than me. They’re...