Despite solid combat performance, the F-35’s high maintenance costs and ongoing parts supply problems continue to be a drag on the fifth-generation fighter aircraft, giving critics ammunition as Congress readies to receive the Biden administration’s first budget. Lockheed Martin is delivering F-35s at a rate ...
Technology
Lessons from the Battle of Britain loom large in how USAF constructs the Advanced Battle Management System.
The top four U.S. adversaries—China, Russia, Iran and North Korea—are improving their military capabilities but relying increasingly on cyber means to challenge the U.S. and blunt its influence around the world, the intelligence community's annual threat assessment says. The report comes amid military tensions with ...
The Defense Department's Space Development Agency wants to blanket Earth with a constellation of low-cost, open-architecture data-relay and missile-tracking satellites whose sheer numbers, along with their 1,000-kilometer-high orbits, would theoretically thwart some modes of interference—but not all. With all going according to plan so far, ...
At a hearing following the release of the 2021 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, Senators pressed U.S. intelligence chiefs on whether the United States is doing enough to deter and respond to foreign governments' hacking activities. U.S. Cyber Command boss Gen. Paul ...
The Air Force is experimenting with the use of 5G technology to provide mobile, distributed command and control and it eventually hopes to be able to do away altogether with fixed location air operations centers, according to the service’s deputy chief technology officer. "Today’s air ...
The Air Force has a new chief scientist: Victoria Coleman, who most recently was the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Coleman started in her role as the 37th chief scientist of the Air Force last week, and was ceremoniously sworn in by ...
The Air Force demonstrated the successful launch of a drone by a larger remotely piloted aircraft on March 26, with the XQ-58A Valkyrie releasing a small UAS from its own internal weapons bay. The flight test, the sixth for the Valkyrie, marked the first time ...
The first booster flight test of the Air Force’s AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon failed April 5. In a release issued April 6, the service acknowledged the failure is a “setback” for hypersonic progress, but said the test still provided “valuable information” for the program’s ...
