Orlando, February 18, 2010—Prevailing in today’s fight—the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—remains the Air Force’s “number one priority,” Air Force Secretary Michael Donley said at AFA’s Air Warfare Symposium. He said several trends have emerged from those two contingencies, as well as the US military’s activities in the Horn of Africa, that have driven the service’s pursuit of robust air mobility, intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance, command and control, and partnership-building capacity. First, he said. air mobility’s ability to project US power at great distances “has been critical” to the success of those endeavors since day one and is “on display again” during the troop surge in Afghanistan. Continue
RTX’s Raytheon unit was able to “significantly” extend the range of the AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile using mostly software changes in experimental tests last year, expanding the reach and lethality of the standard U.S. dogfighting weapon, company officials said Sept. 15.