Lethal, agile, ready: 35 years of Air Force Special Operations Command
Lt. Gen. Mike Conley, Commander of AFSOC, reflects on the importance of the command over its 35 years, and looks ahead to its future.
Lt. Gen. Mike Conley, Commander of AFSOC, reflects on the importance of the command over its 35 years, and looks ahead to its future.
“My whole fleet is not operationally running yet, but I have enough capacity and the right crews training to provide the capabilities on the battlefield," AFSOC Commander Lt. Gen. Michael Conley said.
“It's our vocation to go fly this thing,” said 21st Special Operations Squadron commander Lt. Col. Matt Davis in his first interview since a V-22 crash killed eight servicemembers in November.
During a military exercise in Wyoming, an MQ-9 Reaper made history by conducting its first highway landing alongside what the Air Force says is the greatest number of aircraft to pull off the tactic.
Flight demos will take place in summer or fall 2023, but it remains unclear whether development will turn into a bonafide program of record.
“I was asking myself, what would I say to myself in the aftermath of fatal mishap if we discovered that the reason for this was this clutch issue,” said AFSOC commander Lt. Gen. Jim Slife. “Would I look back and say that I did everything that I could do today? And I couldn't answer that in the affirmative.”
AFSOC Commander Lt. Gen. Jim Slife ordered the safety standdown on Tuesday in the wake of two safety incidents that had occurred over the past six weeks, with a total of four such events occurring since 2017, AFSOC said.
L3 Harris could produce up to 75 AT-802U Sky Warden aircraft to replace US Special Operations Command's U-28 Draco.
The company has demonstrated the capability to do 'pattern of life' monitoring, staying over a 40 kilometer area for more than four days, said CEO Ryan Hartman.
Notably, Slife called out the need to operate in and around “an island environment that is not serviced by a major fixed operating base runway.”
A weather "data coverage gap exists in areas that we operate on a regular basis in the military," says Dan Stillman, director of marketing for Tomorrow.io's space and government division.
"The SOF that we have is not the SOF we will need" for the future, head of Air Force Special Ops Command, Lt. Gen. James Slife, warned today.
The new owners bring venture capital and software expertise to upgrade Area-I’s ALTIUS mini-drone, already a favorite in Army experiments with ‘Air-Launched Effects.’
"The whole reason we’re doing this is because the National Defense Strategy talks about the need to do cost effective [counter-terrorism] operations, cost effective irregular warfare,” AFSOC commander Gen. Slife said.