The Biden administration will send about $125 million in new military aid to Ukraine, U.S. officials said Aug. 22, even as Washington works to get a better understanding of Kyiv’s incursion into Russia and how it advances the broader battlefield goals more than two years into the war.
The Air Force and Army need to figure out how to provide base defense for small outposts around the Pacific before a key Air Force operating plan can succeed, according to the service’s top officer. The Air Force’s strategy to become more survivable and mobile, known as Agile Combat Employment, calls for increasing the number of bases it has in the Indo-Pacific and decreasing reliance on the handful of large airfields it already has in the expansive region.
China said it was “gravely concerned” after The New York Times reported this week that President Biden had secretly shifted the U.S. nuclear strategy to focus on countering Beijing. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Aug. 21 during a press conference that the U.S. was using the argument of China as a nuclear threat as a “convenient pretext to shirk its obligation of nuclear disarmament, expand its own nuclear arsenal, and seek absolute strategic predominance.”
Sierra Nevada Corporation has won a U.S. Army contract to serve as the lead system integrator for the service’s future long-range spy plane. The award for the High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System, or HADES, integration work covers a 12-year period worth $93.5 million initially and potentially up to $994.3 million, the Army announced Thursday.
Former GOP Rep. Mike Gallagher, a defense hawk who led the House select committee on China, has joined Palantir Technologies as the new head of its defense division, the company announced. Gallagher, who resigned from Congress in March and departed in April, started at Palantir in June. Doug Philippone, a venture capitalist who led the company’s defense arm since 2008, will stay with Palantir as an adviser, a spokesperson told Breaking Defense.
As the services grapple with increasing numbers of overweight troops in the ranks, booting fast food restaurants from bases could help cut obesity rates in the armed forces, according to the U.S. military’s top enlisted official. The comments made by Marine Corps Sgt. Maj. Troy E Black, the senior enlisted advisor to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. CQ Brown came in an interview late last month on the MOPs and MOEs Podcast.
Mynaric, a key supplier of optical communications terminals for satellites destined for the U.S. Space Development Agency (SDA), is facing significant production challenges that could impact the agency’s plans to launch its next batch of satellites by year-end.
Americans with well-treated HIV can no longer be barred from enlisting in the U.S. military, a federal judge ruled Aug. 20, striking down the Pentagon’s last remaining policy limiting the service of those with the virus.
A Czech company has unveiled an inflatable decoy of the F-16 fighter, notably wearing Ukrainian Air Force markings. The inflatable fighter, from a firm that is already known to be providing Kyiv with decoys of other items of military equipment, appears only a matter of weeks after it was confirmed that the first real F-16s had arrived in Ukraine.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted a new emergency use authorization on Aug. 8 to permit the use of a freeze-dried blood plasma by military medical personnel or those who work for the military in a deployed setting.
