The Latest Stories from the AFA 2018 Conference
CAPITOL HILL: The Air Force is finalizing a high-tech “flight plan” for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance investments, the deputy chief of staff for ISR said here. The service can’t keep buying more and more drones to collect more and more data and then hiring more and more human analysts to plow through it, Lt. Gen.…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
AFA HQ: We finally learned why the Air Force has been backing away from a new JSTARS: it probably wouldn’t be much use in a real shooting war. That’s the verdict, stated in less unforgiving terms by the head of Air Combat Command, Gen. Mike Holmes, here in a speech. “The question is, how will…
By Colin Clark
CAPITOL HILL: If Sikorsky reaches the next Combat Rescue Helicopter milestone early, the Air Force will reward the Lockheed Martin subsidiary and “immediately go ahead to” production. “We’ll see how this goes,” Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch, the military deputy for Air Force acquisition, said this morning, saying the effort is an experiment the service was…
By Colin Clark
PENTAGON: It’s always difficult to tell when the military is covering its tuckus and when it’s just being careful. So when the outgoing head of the Air Force press desk, Col. Patrick Ryder, told reporters this afternoon that the service had not made any decision about whether to go ahead with a combat test of…
By Colin Clark
AFA: Two decades after the Marines predicted most warfare would be in urban areas, the Air Force is coming to the same conclusions. Simply put, the great majority of humans live in cities these days, and Air Force Chief of Staff David Goldfein has added urban warfare to his list of top focus areas. Part…
By Colin Clark
AFA: The Air Force needs more tankers and transports because a sophisticated enemy like Russia or China can shoot them down, the chief of Air Mobility Command said here. The current fleet size is based on war plans that only considered how much fuel, supplies, equipment, and troops the air fleet needed to move from…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. AFA: Lockheed Martin’s Sikorsky is on track to deliver nine new HH-60W Combat Rescue Helicopters to the Air Force for the price the company promised and six months early — a “man bites dog” story, the very definition of news. Delivering early and for the promised price is far from the norm in defense acquisition,…
By Richard Whittle
AFA: The senior leadership of the Air Force will decide at the late October Corona meeting at the Air Force Academy whether to take the cyber force from Air Force Space Command and merge it with Air Combat Command‘s ISR force. Why, you ask, would they combine the 24th Air Force with the 25th Air…
By Colin Clark
AFA: The Defense Innovation Unit experimental (DIUx) is working with airmen and DOD civilian software coders to rapidly change the planning and conduct of air operations, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, commander of Air Forces Central Command, told reporters here Tuesday. Over the past few months, Harrigian said, DIUx has helped develop new software used by the Combined…
By Richard Whittle
No American military service has fought longer than the Air Force. They pretty much have been at war since Kosovo. They are beginning to grind down. Breaking D readers are familiar with many of their problems — too few pilots, really old planes and too little time in the air. The head of the Air…
By Larry Spencer