In October 2022, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration Frank Calvelli released his nine “tenets” of space acquisition, meant to guide the future of the Space Force’s capabilities. His very first step: Build smaller satellites. Nearly two years later, the service ...
The Air Force should quickly and comprehensively adopt digital methods to regain the speed of fielding new gear necessary to match the "blistering" pace of China's modernization, a new Mitchell Institute paper recommends.
The Space Force rightly wants to consolidate the Department’s entire space portfolio. Resistance has been strong. But a measure now in Congress would formalize the Space Force vision to unify the space missions now fulfilled by the Air Guard into the Space Force. Congress should ...
Space is a warfighting domain, and to ensure superiority in that domain, the Space Force and U.S. Space Command need to field and demonstrate a full range of capabilities—including counterspace weapons—a new paper from the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and a panel of experts ...
The U.S. must focus on detecting and tracking potential air and missile threats to the homeland before they even launch, a top Air Force general said June 22—and doing so will require homeland defense to “look vastly differently than it does today.” U.S. Northern Command and ...
After a long period in which munitions were almost an afterthought and sacrificed to pay for other priorities, the Air Force needs to focus on them in order to have the right “package” of capabilities for future conflicts, Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown ...
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Brown cautioned that America must align its strategic goals with the deployment of military assets. “You can make a decision in a moment not realizing what the impact is going to be further down that line,” ...
As the Air Force plans to retire many of its aging intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft in the next few years, it is working with the Space Force and agencies in the Intelligence Community to cover potential gaps and build persistent coverage around the globe, ...
China has structured its military to defeat the U.S. “kill chain”—the sequence of steps needed to spot and destroy particular targets—and the Air Force must now ensure its process is agile and resilient, largely by investing in new platforms and networks, an expert from the ...
Top U.S. defense officials dismissed the notion that the U.S. would provide aircraft—manned or unmanned—anytime soon to Ukraine in Congressional hearings March 28 and 29. While Kyiv has repeatedly asked for F-16 fighters and MQ-9 drones, the Biden administration has refrained from providing them and ...
Though touted as “loyal wingmen,” Collaborative Combat Aircraft may not always be paired with crewed aircraft and may function only in concert with one another or weapons in “swarms,” the better to complicate an enemy’s ability to track and counter them, senior Air Force CCA ...
The future U.S. bomber force could provide a way for the Pentagon to simultaneously deter conflict with peer adversaries in two geographically disparate theaters, said Mark Gunzinger, the director of future concepts and capability assessments at AFA's Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, during a March ...