“The partner interaction on events like this is amazing,” said Lt. Col. Christopher Troutman, 42nd Communications Squadron Commander and the 42nd Air Base Wing lead for President Joe Biden’s visit to Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala. “The integration with advance teams and local community partners was outstanding and provided Team Maxwell an incredible opportunity to showcase the base while supporting our Commander-in-Chief. We learned a great deal, developed great professional connections, and can now apply this experience to our daily missions.”
Boeing said May 5 it will move its headquarters from Chicago to the Washington, D.C., area, where company executives would be closer to key federal government officials. The company said it will use its campus in Arlington, Va., as the new headquarters, and it plans to develop a research and technology hub in the area.
The Air Force this month will suspend its 4-year-old “base of preference” program for Airmen who are on at least their second enlistment contract, saying it fails to send most applicants to the installations they want. Stopping the initiative at the end of May can also offer the service more flexibility to move Airmen around as military staffing needs dictate.
“After making progress for years in getting Congress to approve unpopular early weapons retirements, the Air Force is hitting a brick wall. Service leaders have simply gone too far—with plans to get rid of 1,500 aircraft over the next five years while buying just 467 new aircraft. The plan to shrink and age the Air Force further and faster is also colliding with readiness challenges and a stubborn fighter gap,” writes Mackenzie Eaglen, a resident fellow in the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
The Air Force Research Laboratory’s rocket propulsion arm is asking space companies to help identify technologies and capabilities the military will need to launch missions on short timelines. The organization known as AFRL’s “rocket lab” based at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., is “soliciting information and comments from industry on their ability to meet future responsive launch missions and to identify specific investments in technology that would improve responsive capabilities,” said a request for information.
It is incumbent upon aerospace companies and defense agencies to digitally transform their operations to be more productive, innovative, and collaborative. The key to their business transformation is digital transformation, writes Dale Tutt, Vice President of Aerospace and Defense Industry, for Siemens Digital Industries Software.
Defense Department officials May 5 pushed back on reports that U.S. intelligence assets are providing information to Ukrainian military forces to help them target Russian generals, saying instead the focus is on defensive issues. “The United States provides battlefield intelligence to help Ukrainians defend their country,” Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby told reporters during a press conference. “We do not provide intelligence on the location of senior military leaders on the battlefield or participate in the targeting decisions of the Ukrainian military.”
A military college student said in a lawsuit filed May 5 that armed services officials deemed him unfit for service because he tested positive for HIV. The student, who is identified in the lawsuit only as “John Doe,” said in the complaint filed in federal court in Burlington, Vt., that he was deemed unfit for service and dropped from the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and the Vermont Army National Guard despite being healthy, asymptomatic, and on a treatment regimen that renders his viral load undetectable.
Testifying in front of the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on cybersecurity, Andrew Moore, vice president and director of Google Cloud Artificial Intelligence, said he’s encouraged by the creation of the Pentagon’s chief data and AI officer role but is worried about lawmakers’ support of the Defense Department's AI efforts being “just lots of talk. I wish that person great success. This is how we’re going to succeed … by having a centralized effort to put an artificial intelligence strategy across the whole DOD,” Moore said May 3. “What I worry about … for this individual, is whether they are going to get enough support from the government and from the center of DOD to actually make changes that are needed.”
One reason the Russian military has struggled to win territory in Ukraine is its lack of a strong corps of non-commissioned officers, or NCOs, which are more crucial than ever to success on the modern battlefield, U.S. military officials and experts say. "The Russians are practicing a top-down, very, very top-heavy directive in nature—sort of, settled orders coming from the top, which is not necessarily the best thing to do in a dynamic battlefield," said Gen. Mark A. Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Air Force Tech. Sgt. Alexander House has administered hundreds of the Air Force’s new annual physical fitness tests and has learned a trick or two that could help others pass the test with as little pain as possible. An F-35 crew chief at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, where he also serves as a unit fitness program manager, House recently took to the unofficial Air Force subreddit to share some of his hard-won wisdom, where many other commenters seemed to appreciate the effort.