The United States will provide combined arms maneuver training to Ukraine geared at enabling the Ukrainian military to better conduct joint operations at the battalion level, the Pentagon announced. The new training course, which begins in January, will be led by 7th Army Training Command in Germany and teach about 500 Ukrainian troops per month, Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters during a briefing.
The Defense Department has greatly underestimated the number of people exposed to dangerous levels of harmful chemicals and downplayed the exposure risk in an internal report published this year, an environmental advocacy group charges. A Pentagon study completed in April estimated that roughly 175,000 people at 24 installations consumed water that contained per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, collectively known as PFAS, during the time that it was contaminated above the lifetime exposure levels once considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency.
From a distance, the all-white business jet parked neatly in a hangar underneath a giant American flag looks a lot like the other sleek, luxurious private planes arriving and departing from this Virginia airport. But inside, this plane is far more working class. The cabin, full of server racks, looks more like an IT closet than an executive aircraft. The seats are cloth and two computer consoles are connected to a dozen or so antennas protruding from the plane’s belly. To the U.S. Army, this plane—or something like it—is a ticket to the future of warfare, built to monitor the complex communications of an adversary nation-state from standoff distance, rather than the simpler chatter of insurgents right below.
The U.S. Department of the Air Force is committed to cloud computing and migration, and in the near future could become “a cloud-first place,” according to Chief Technology Officer Jay Bonci. The investment in cloud at the department, which includes the Air and Space forces, stems from a need to be durable, adaptable and always connected, Bonci told C4ISRNET during a livestreamed event Dec. 14. The forces are among the most spread out, with systems stretching to the stars and bases dotting the U.S., Europe and Asia.
Soon after his Senate confirmation hearing in February, Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisitions and integration, started to put together a list of problems he saw in DoD’s space procurements and possible ways to fix them. It turned out to be a really long list that eventually Calvelli boiled down to a three-page memo he released Oct. 31. “After I started actually working on this, I realized I was writing a novel and no one was ever going to read this,” he said Dec. 15 at a Washington Space Business Roundtable event near Capitol Hill.
California-based artificial intelligence software company C3 AI on Dec. 13 revealed what the first three orders in its new five-year, $500 million production-Other Transaction agreement with the Missile Defense Agency will encompass. The agreement was established to further accelerate the adoption and scaling of its suite of AI-aligned technologies within MDA.
A pilot ejected from a Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning II fighter jet during a failed landing at the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth on Dec. 15. “We are aware of the F-35B crash on the shared runway at Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base in Fort Worth and understand that the pilot ejected successfully,” Lockheed Martin said in a statement. “Safety is our priority, and we will follow appropriate investigation protocol.” Lockheed Martin assembles the fighter jet at a facility that shares the runway with the joint reserve base. At the Pentagon, a spokesman said that the aircraft was being flown at the time of the crash by a U.S. government pilot, although it had not been transferred to the military yet by Lockheed.
Happy holidays to all you national security nerds out there! This is red-nosed Rudolph checking in for Santa this year. The old man has asked me to share his gift list for the season with you while he and Mrs. Claus battle all the leaks in their gingerbread house. That global warming thing is kicking our reindeer butt up here!