Weapons in space. Fighter jets powered by artificial intelligence. As the Biden administration comes to a close, one of its legacies will be kicking off the transformation of the nearly 80-year-old U.S. Air Force under the orchestration of its secretary, Frank Kendall.
Days after unveiling the latest breakthroughs in its military modernization, the Chinese navy has set afloat a new amphibious assault ship that could launch fighter jets, and videos have been circulating online showing what seems to be China's new generation of stealth fighter jets.
The Biden administration directed new airstrikes on Houthi targets in Yemen on Dec. 31, as the United States and its ally Israel struggle to halt a campaign of regional assaults by the Iranian-backed militant group.
President Joe Biden said Dec. 30 that the United States will send nearly $2.5 billion more in weapons to Ukraine as his administration works quickly to spend all the money it has available to help Kyiv fight off Russia before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
The Air Force is realigning its Headquarters Cyberspace Capabilities Center to the Office of the Chief Information Officer in an attempt to streamline information technology functions. The center, headquartered at Scott Air Force Base, Ill., was stood up in 2019 and was responsible for delivering cyber capabilities. The recently announced change making it a field operating agency that is secretariat aligned will require no movement of people, and it’s expected to reach full operational capability by October 2025.
The Air Force will set a new path for how it will fight air wars during the first year of the next Donald Trump presidency, which will have ramifications for decades to come. The Air Force struggled for much of 2024 to figure out how—and even whether—to proceed with its planned sixth-generation fighter, known as Next Generation Air Dominance, or NGAD.
No one could predict the twists and turns of the first Trump administration, even for an area as obscure and mundane as the defense industrial base, and it would be a fool’s errand to try to do that for a second one. Instead, let’s break down the current state of play in the political environment, look back at the first Trump term, and think about some of the major questions facing the defense industry during a second Trump administration.
President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees to lead the Pentagon and other key national security and veterans agencies face a pivotal month in January as the Senate gets to work in earnest on confirming Trump's cabinet.
The Air Force is expanding its retention and reenlistment bonuses this month to 89 of its toughest and highly skilled career fields, from working dog handlers and bomb technicians to flight attendants and paralegals.
The U.S. Air Force sent at least 39 A-10s to the boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona this year, more than double the number of Warthogs it sent into mothballs in 2023. The service is pushing steadily ahead with plans to retire the type for good before the end of the decade, if not well before then, though the venerable ground attack aircraft continues to see combat in the interim.
Hot on the heels of the first sighting of next-generation fighters by Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group and Shenyang Aircraft Corporation, Xian Aircraft Industrial Corporation on Dec. 27 flew its own airborne early warning and control (AEWC) aircraft based on the Y-20B strategic airlifter.
A new environmental study is intended to support the continued increase of SpaceX launches from a California spaceport, but that growth faces potential obstacles. A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off Dec. 28 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, deploying 22 Starlink satellites. That was the 46th and final orbital launch of the year from Vandenberg, a cadence not seen from that facility since the 1960s.
The Army was promised jetpacks. At least briefly. From the end of World War II to well into the 1950s, U.S. Army experiments kept pushing the idea of giving soldiers limited flight, as a way to make infantry more mobile and more effective on the battlefield.