Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) pilot Francis Gary Powers, flying a Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, is shot down over the Soviet Union near Sverdlovsk. He is captured and later put on trial for espionage. The incident creates an international furor, and a superpower summit scheduled for later in the month is canceled. On Feb. 10, 1962, Powers will be exchanged for Soviet KGB agent Rudolf Abel.
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 21 event. But doing so…