CORRECTED: TACO GILBERT’S AFFILIATION HOLLOMAN AFB: It may be hard to believe but the future of the Air Force may depend on three turboprop planes and a $20 million spec-built attack jet. They are the entries in what the service calls the Light Attack Experiment, a back-to-the-future attempt to rekindle the sort of innovation and […]
CAPITOL HILL: Heather Wilson began her first public speech as Air Force Secretary with a paean to technology, highlighting the service’s history of innovation from the B-29 to the F-117 to the F-35. It would have been an unambiguous signal of administration priorities, except the budget doesn’t really back her up. Research and development funding […]
Michigan’s defense ecosystem and expertise makes it a special asset for production.
ORLANDO: A half-dozen people in the Air Force are helping to define the service’s as part of a major new approach to deciding what weapons to buy, known as Strategic Development Planning Experimentation. The effort is led by Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, the commander of Air Force Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson AFB. The first iteration of SDPE (as […]
WASHINGTON: A key part of Sen. John McCain’s alternative defense budget proposal is the rapid purchase of 300 “low-cost, light-attack fighters that would require minimal work to develop.” I asked Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein today what he thought of McCain’s proposal, contained in Restoring American Power. “Great idea,” he said, pointing […]
WASHINGTON: Oops. Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James sounded a tad peeved and seemed to pretty much put the kibosh on plans to buy two replacements for the A-10 Close Air Support (CAS) plane. Why? “You just put your finger on it. Where do we get the money,” she told me at a DefenseOne event this […]
UPDATED: Adds Ayotte Comment WASHINGTON: The Air Force is considering not one, but two replacements for the aging A-10 Warthog close air support plane. But analysts wonder why, given that the service is already building a new bomber (the B-21), a new tanker (the KC-46), a new fighter (the F-35A), they would want to build two Close […]
Cybersecurity skills must evolve in near-real time as Zero Day threats continue and AI provides new challenges.