Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne last week was at Eielson AFB, Alaska, where the 3rd Air Support Operations Squadron was among his stops at a base that Wynne said would “be a major base for us well into the future.” At the 3rd ASOS, which is located at nearby Ft. Wainwright and which provides air liaisons, terminal attack controllers, and combat weathermen for ground units, Wynne talked about the “need to establish, as a habit of thought in our ground commanders, spherical situational awareness so that they realize that our [joint terminal attack controllers] and our air support can really provide them the stuff that ensures victory.” A couple of weeks earlier, Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley was at Goodfellow AFB, Tex., where he told airmen, many of them students in intelligence training, that in the war on terror “the air component is killing more people” than the land component despite media attention on the ground force. He laid much of that success on intel airmen who see problems across operational, tactical, and strategic levels. Among questions for Moseley was one about the service’s new dress uniform, which he said was still in the works. “I’m trying to make sure what gets put out to all of you is what you really want,” explained the Chief.
A provision in the fiscal 2025 defense policy bill will require the Defense Department to include the military occupational specialty of service members who die by suicide in its annual report on suicide deaths, though it remains to be seen how much data the department will actually disclose.