As the Air Force Association girds for its annual conference, which starts Monday here in Washington, I was struck by several comments from several experts that the traditional dichotomy between air power and ground forces — often the focus of internecine budget battles between the Army and Air Force — isn’t that relevant any more. Aircraft… Keep reading →

As the NATO alliance’s panjandrums meet in Wales and debate the best ways to destroy ISIL and make Vladimir Putin’s Russia stop doing whatever it wants in Ukraine, we offer this schemata for defeating ISIL. It’s penned by Dave Deptula, the man who ran the air war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan during Operation… Keep reading →

Technology is not enough. What’s equally essential is ideas for how to use it. Wielding new weapons in the same old way is a recipe for defeat. As the US military today invests in innovative programs, none larger than the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, it must also invent innovative concepts of operation. The Air Force’s… Keep reading →

[Corrected 9:35 pm with a note about the EC-130 Compass Call] Is stealth still America’s silver bullet? Or are potential adversaries’ radars getting too smart for US aircraft to keep hiding from them? That’s literally the trillion-dollar question, because the US military is investing massively in new stealth aircraft. At stake in this debate are… Keep reading →

The Joint Staff looked at the last decade of operations in a report, “Enduring Lessons from the Past Decade of Operations,” that hit cyberspace this summer. I applaud the Joint Staff effort to assemble lessons from operations over the past decade. What will be key is for people to actually learn them. There is much… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: This is a deflating month – literally — for Mav6, a small Mississippi defense company that’s been working five years to complete a massive military airship, the unmanned M1400 Blue Devil II intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) craft. On orders from the Air Force, “We’ve started to disassemble the airship,” reports David Deptula, CEO… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Speculation on how Iran was able to capture the Pentagon’s stealthy RQ-170 unmanned aircraft has consumed defense and intelligence insiders for weeks. But recent reports based on sources in Tehran claim the highly-classified drone was brought down by an Iranian cyberattack. Iranian engineers were allegedly able to hack into the unmanned aircraft’s control systems… Keep reading →

Washington: Air Force officials are struggling to wipe out a computer virus that has infected the ground control systems that guide Predator unmanned aerial vehicles and their successors. The control systems are based at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. The famous Predators used by the CIA to kill terrorists are controlled from a different… Keep reading →