The Air Force needs to look at different ways to protect, resource, and design its network so that officials can accelerate the process of adding and utilizing new technology, said Lt. Gen. Bill Lord, chief of warfighting integration in the Air Force Secretariat. Speaking last week at AFA’s CyberFutures Conference just outside of Washington, D.C., Lord said he wants to see the service become “device agnostic.” In other words, that means the ability for government-issued Blackberries, iPhones, and other types of devices to work off of the same network without experiencing any compatibility issues. However, he cautioned that 24th Air Force at Lackland AFB, Tex., the Air Force’s cyber operations arm, is a “small crowd and can be quickly overloaded” with the onslaught of new technology. “There is huge pressure to bring devices onto the network, but then we have to be able to manage those devices,” Lord said.
The Air Force and Boeing agreed to a nearly $2.4 billion contract for a new lot of KC-46 aerial tankers on Nov. 21. The deal, announced by the Pentagon, is for 15 new aircraft in Lot 11 at a cost of $2.389 billion—some $159 million per tail.