An Air Force C-17 aircrew recently transported a well-drilling rig from the Republic of Djibouti to Gode, Ethiopia, in Africa under the auspices of the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa. (CJTF-Horn is a little-publicized element of Operation Enduring Freedom.) A US Army unit is using the rig to dig four drinking-water wells for the Ethiopians. All of this feeds into the US effort to deal with terrorist inroads in the Saharan and Sahel regions of Africa, which are heavily Islamic and poor.
The Defense Innovation Unit is gearing up for the first flight of its commercially developed hypersonic testbed as soon as the end of February—part of a larger project to quickly increase the cadence of the Pentagon’s hypersonic flight testing and field advanced, high-speed systems and components at scale.
