The Kremlin paved the way Sept. 27 to annex part of Ukraine and escalate the war by claiming that residents of a large swath overwhelmingly supported joining with Russia in stage-managed referendums that the U.S. and its Western allies have dismissed as illegitimate. Pro-Moscow officials said all four occupied regions of Ukraine voted to join Russia. According to Russia-installed election officials, 93 percent of the ballots cast in the Zaporizhzhia region supported annexation, as did 87 percent in the Kherson region, 98 percent in the Luhansk region, and 99 percent in Donetsk.
Boeing released a video announcing that the B-52 Commercial Engine Replacement Program has completed wind tunnel testing using a model of the B-52 Stratofortress. The clip provides the best look yet at how the aircraft will appear with its new F130 engines. Rolls-Royce won the long-anticipated re-engining deal, which is supposed to help ensure that the bombers can keep flying into the 2050s and probably beyond.
Air Force Special Operations Command will test an airborne laser in flight on an AC-130J gunship in 2023, a year later than planned. A flying demonstration of Lockheed Martin’s Airborne High Energy Laser, which will be integrated on an AC-130J Ghostrider, will start in summer 2023 and run through fall.
As Hurricane Ian intensifies on its way toward the Florida coast, hurricane hunters are in the sky doing something almost unimaginable: flying through the center of the storm. With each pass, the scientists aboard these planes take measurements that satellites can't and send them to forecasters at the National Hurricane Center.
In a speech that was as much an unofficial farewell as a proud update of the U.S. Space Force’s youthful evolution, Chief of Space Operation Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond told an influential audience that the service is on a strong footing and that it has deftly avoided two major traps. The first, Raymond told Guardians and Airmen during his keynote address at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference, is “that we wouldn’t think bold enough. The second challenge was that when we did think bold the bureaucracy might stifle our bold thinking.”
The agency responsible for safeguarding the nation’s nuclear weapons didn’t fully implement key practices that manage cybersecurity risks on its computer systems, including some used for weapons design, according to a recent report. And neither did its contractors. The National Nuclear Security Administration and its contractors failed to fully implement six foundational cybersecurity risk practices in its IT environments, according to a Government Accountability Office report.
A White House official said Russia’s sanctions-struck defense industry is creating an “opportunity” for U.S. and western defense firms to take a bite of Moscow’s share of the market. “As a practical matter, countries that have had to rely on Russian equipment are going to find it very difficult to get even basic supplies from Russia’s defense industrial base,” said Cara Abercrombie, the National Security Council’s coordinator for defense policy and arms control.
The last time the Air Force had an open competition to build a new aerial refueling plane, the fight became so nasty that it became known as “the tanker wars.” Now, with the service currently weighing both a near-term and long-term strategy for new tankers, it’s hard not to wonder if there’s a redux of the brutal lobbying fight on the horizon. Stepping into that potential battleground was the combination of U.S. firm L3Harris Technologies and Brazilian firm Embraer, offering a modified version of the latter’s KC-390 tanker effort, equipped with a boom refueling system.
The Air Force’s secretive next-generation fighter platform is still in the design process and has not formally entered its engineering, manufacturing, and development stage, Secretary Frank Kendall said. The acknowledgment marks a step back from June, when Kendall publicly said the highly classified Next Generation Air Dominance program had already hit the key milestone.
U.S. and allied intelligence agencies are stepping up efforts to detect any Russian military moves or communications that might signal that Vladimir Putin has ordered the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, according to five current and former U.S. officials. But any indications that the erratic Russian leader has decided to unleash the unthinkable—in a desperate attempt to re-seize the initiative or bully the international community to meet his demands—could come too late, they warned.
For nearly two weeks in October 1962, the world stood on the brink of nuclear annihilation. American medium-range nuclear missile deployments in Turkey prompted the Soviet Union to place medium-range weapons of its own in Cuba. When the United States discovered the missile sites, President John F. Kennedy and his staff debated a response to the Soviet threat. Any misstep might have led to a nuclear exchange that would kill millions. In the end, the only casualty was Maj. Rudolf Anderson, a U-2 spy plane pilot whose work led to a peaceful resolution of the crisis.