“Last year 78 percent of the IAF’s operational flight hours were performed by UAS. This year the number jumped and is 80 percent,” Lt. Col. S. told me at the Tel-Nof Air Force base, where the largest Israeli drone, the Heron-TP flies from. Breaking Defense was granted exclusive access to the White Eagle squadron there.

A new system will retrain 20,000 DoD employees to work within the National Defense Strategy, while shifting focus to new areas of the world.

CFSCC’s mission includes executing “tactical control over globally dispersed Air Force, Army, and Navy space units that command satellites in every orbital regime.”

“We’ve seen this coming,” but governments “haven’t been preparing to go after not only UAS but cruise missiles.”

AFRL’s new Air Force Explore challenge intends to make four to seven awards, each in the $1 million to $2 million range.

Raytheon’s StormBreaker Small Diameter Bomb II guided glide bomb “means that enemies can’t hide behind adverse weather, smoke or dust, anymore. Its tri-mode seeker is one-of-kind technology and gives pilots the ability to destroy moving targets from standoff ranges,” says Kim Ernzen, vice president for Air Warfare Systems.

An IDF team has been taking test flights aboard Lockheed Martin’s new CH-53K in Maryland, but Boeing’s CH-47 Chinook is in the running too — and both programs could use a boost against their American critics.

One space expert, with no skin in the NSSL game, opined that for the most part Blue Origin’s protest is “simply whining,” and characterized SpaceX’s lawsuit as “sour grapes.”

“Of all people, it’s the ‘space warmongers’ doing the most to try to sustain the (space) environment,” one DoD official said.

If an aircraft like the B-1 was taxed so hard due to high demand, the appropriate lesson is that the nation needs more bombers, not less.