A U.S. Air Force veteran has been arrested and charged for allegedly disclosing classified information related to American military aircraft and weapons to unauthorized individuals, the Justice Department announced June 27. Paul J. Freeman was charged with unauthorized possession and transmission of classified national defense information by a grand jury in Florida, according to court records.
May was a particularly deadly month for the Russian army in Ukraine, with an average of more than 1,000 of its soldiers injured or killed each day, according to U.S., British and other Western intelligence agencies. But despite its losses, Russia is recruiting 25,000 to 30,000 new soldiers a month—roughly as many as are exiting the battlefield, U.S. officials said.
Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee are lambasting appropriators who want to buy additional F-35 fighter jets in fiscal 2025 above the Pentagon’s budget request. The House’s FY25 defense spending bill would procure 76 new F-35s, eight more than the 68 requested by the Defense Department. This puts the spending bill at odds with the House’s FY25 National Defense Authorization Act, passed 217-199 earlier this month, which would cut F-35 procurement down to 58 aircraft.
As U.S. and French troops have withdrawn from Africa’s Sahel, the area has become “less safe” and has seen an increased number of extremist groups, U.S. Africa Command Commander Gen. Michael Langley told reporters in a press briefing. “Because of the expanded numbers across a number of factions or extremist organizations, whether we’re talking about JNIM [Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimeen] or ISIS, Boko Haram [Islamic sectarian movement] is still there. So it has increased across the region, and now is at the cusp of affecting coastal West Africa,” Langley said.
North Korea says it has successfully tested a ballistic missile fitted with a multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) payload—one that contains several warheads, each capable of hitting a different target. Meanwhile, South Korea claims that the test was a failure. Whether successful or not, the emergence of MIRV technologies is another indicator of North Korea’s rapidly developing strategic arsenal, which is growing in size and capabilities despite sanctions.
A Russian satellite in low Earth orbit broke up June 26, creating more than 100 pieces of trackable debris and briefly causing the International Space Station crew to take shelter. The satellite, Resurs P1, suffered some kind of event at around 12 p.m. Eastern June 26, U.S Space Command (USSPACECOM) said in a June 27 statement, creating more than 100 pieces of debris. The statement did not indicate any potential cause for the breakup.
The Air Force is mulling a bureaucratic shuffle that would refocus the service on four key areas it believes can improve how it organizes, trains and equips airmen for war. Those core missions—combat readiness, careerlong training, acquisition, and future force planning—will eventually fall under the purview of four major organizations, dubbed “institutional commands,” in charge of force-wide planning and policymaking, Air Force officials said in public remarks earlier this month.
The Missile Defense Agency’s (MDA) Next Generation Interceptor (NGI) program has faced cost increases as the organization prioritized schedule in the early stages, and the risky approach could force future budget pressure and delays, a new watchdog report says.
The Space Force is “transitioning” its repository for commercial and allied space monitoring data, the Unified Data Library (UDL), from a prototype to a program of record—with plans to ensure its contents can be more easily integrated with operational systems such as satellite command and control networks, according to a new report to Congress obtained by Breaking Defense.
The Defense Department’s watchdog has launched an oversight review of the military’s efforts to get humanitarian aid into Gaza through a maritime corridor, which relies on a pier that has struggled to stay operational because of poor weather. The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the Pentagon initiated the review along with the OIG for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), saying they would review “key aspects” of the humanitarian aid mission and the effectiveness of the U.S. military’s humanitarian aid efforts.
The Air & Space Forces Association recognized five senior military and government students for their superlative research and writing on key topics of interest to national security. This is the inaugural presentation of these awards by AFA.
In the wake of rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, the Defense Department’s Joint Staff is considering an internal office dedicated to helping the organization leverage emerging AI capabilities. The Joint Staff stood up an AI task force in February, comprised of staff members from across the entire organization.
There is one experience at the core of every military career, and it is that first day — even that first hour and minute—when your civilian life crashes to an end as you run straight into the reality of basic, Day-1 military training. Two military academies held that day June 26 for their newest rising freshmen, an annual tradition known at both the U.S. Naval Academy and Air Force Academy as “I-Day”—though perhaps predictably for the rival campuses, the “I” stands for different words.
