Hezbollah looks increasingly like it may strike Israel independent of whatever Iran may intend to do, two sources familiar with the intelligence told CNN. The Lebanon-based militant group is moving faster than Iran in its planning and is looking to strike Israel in the coming days, one of the sources said. Iran, meanwhile, appears to still be working out how it plans to respond, multiple officials have told CNN.
Pilots, military aviation experts, and family members are voicing concerns about a recently released investigation report into a CV-22 Osprey crash off the coast of Japan last year that killed eight service members, saying the Air Force’s findings that the crew were partially to blame for the incident isn’t fair.
A gear crack that led to a fatal crash of a V-22 Osprey last year may have been started by weak spots in a metal used to manufacture that part, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.
As part of its wide-reaching effort to up its game in outer space, the Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC) is eyeing new “offensive space control capabilities” for its embryonic Theater Strike Effects Groups (TSEGs)—the first of which is being piloted at Indo-Pacific Command, according to SMDC head Lt. Gen. Sean Gainey.
Pentagon contract broker Shay Assad, a figure beloved by watchdogs and hated by industry, is back negotiating deals with the Air Force, helping to hammer out a contract with Raytheon for AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, Air Force officials told Breaking Defense. The AMRAAM negotiations mark the third program Assad has been tapped to assist, in addition to ongoing negotiations for B-52 upgrades and helping the Air Force close a deal with Boeing for the E-7 Wedgetail last month.
Foreign countries are buying more weapons through the U.S. Air Force than ever before, due in large part to global instability, officials say. “Business has been booming, I understand, for this team, as events happen around the world and our partner nations recognize that it's a dangerous world once again, things like Russia invading Ukraine,” said Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Geraghty, the director of the Air Force’s Security Assistance and Cooperation Directorate.
An Air Force Research Laboratory team convened to help the Space Force test and prototype new spacecraft concepts plans to launch its first experimental satellites as soon as 2026. AFRL created the Rapid Architecture Prototyping and Integrated Development, or RAPID, lab in 2022 to partner with the Space Force’s various architecture and system design organizations to wring out ideas for future on-orbit capabilities.
U.S. military components received and have been operating all-domain attritable autonomous (ADA2) systems in real-time via the Replicator initiative in a number of locations “around the world,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said Aug. 7.
A new version of the stealthy XQ-58 Valkyrie with built-in landing gear is in the works the drone’s manufacturer Kratos has disclosed. The addition of internal landing gear points to a potentially larger, heavier, and higher-performance derivative of the XQ-58 that could be better positioned to meet the requirements of the U.S. Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program and compete for other opportunities.
President Joe Biden says the U.S. isn’t at war anywhere in the world. But one giant asterisk to that claim is what’s been happening for nearly a year in the skies over the Red Sea. U.S. forces have launched roughly 800 missiles and seven rounds of air strikes against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels that have controlled Yemen since November in what has become the most sustained military campaign by American forces since the anti-ISIS air war in Iraq and Syria that reached its height in 2016-2019.
USAA has agreed to pay $64.2 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that its banks improperly charged fees and high interest rates that violated federal protections for service members who held loans.
