Daily Report

The heavy reliance on airpower to battle the resurgent Taliban and al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan has prompted the insurgents to change their tactics, according to American military leaders in the theater, reports USA Today. Brig. Gen. Michael Holmes, 455th...

President Obama wants a “comprehensive assessment” of the situation in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters last week. Gates acknowledged that the “goals we did have for Afghanistan are too broad and too far into the future” and should...

The Air Force plans to have the first of its newly acquired MC-12W intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance aircraft deployed to Southwest Asia by April, Brig. Gen. Blair Hansen, director of ISR capabilities on the Air Staff, told reporters in the Pentagon Friday. (Hansen's briefing slides) The concept for these manned, medium-altitude platforms—which are known as Liberty Project Aircraft—came out of the Office of the Secretary of Defense ISR task force last year as a means to quickly bolster the overhead ISR assets already in Afghanistan and Iraq and, in particular, to relieve the heavy burden being placed upon on MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles in the war theater. LPA will specifically address the warfighter’s demand for greater full-motion-video and signals intelligence coverage. Planned is a fleet of 37 aircraft. The first seven are based on the King Air 350 model, and the remaining 30 airframes on the King Air 350 Extended Range variant. All 37 aircraft are expected to be in the Air Force's hands by year's end, Hansen said. There will be two operational squadrons of 15 aircraft each and seven assets used stateside for training. The first eight LPA are used airframes undergoing modification. The remainder will be new airframes. (For more on the ISR burden, read High Stress Numbers Game)

F-35 Not in the Breach: The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is not facing an imminent Nunn-McCurdy breach, despite an early Jan. 23 entry at Aviation Week’s Ares blog that heralded this claim, which the author of the entry said he discovered in a statement on the Government Accountability Office transition Web page detailing DOD issues facing the new Administration and Congress. The “news” spread through the aerospace community like wildfire Friday and has appeared on several additional blogs. Under its entry on Air Force issues, the GAO transition Web page stated that the F-35 program “recently declared a Nunn-McCurdy unit cost breach.” That often signals that a program is in serious trouble and will face restructure or outright termination. The Ares blog entry all but accused outgoing F-35 program manager Maj. Gen. Charles Davis of deliberately concealing this development during a public presentation earlier this month. But the blog’s putative revelation was wrong. Michael Sullivan, GAO’s acquisition and sourcing management director, told the Daily Report Friday that the GAO transition page entry looked back over the past three years, including a December 2005 breach, which had been routinely reported by DOD in its April 2006 notification to Congress. Sullivan confirmed that there is no new Nunn-McCurdy breach and acknowledged that the GAO Web entry was poorly worded. The Ares blog corrected its JSF entry late Friday afternoon after a senior GAO official posted a comment setting the record straight (and said GAO would correct its transition page).

The F-35 program office issued a blistering rebuttal on Friday to the charge that the stealth fighter project has incurred a significant cost overrun (see above). A spokeswoman for the F-35 program said the Aviation Week Ares blog entry ostensibly...

The manufacturer of the F-35 said Friday the program is going swimmingly. In a statement for the press responding to an unfounded report of a significant cost overrun in the multi-billion-dollar stealth fighter project (see above), Lockheed Martin said its...

The Air Force would require an investment of $45.2 million annually starting in Fiscal 2012 to maintain the viability of Grand Forks as the potential home to the future KC-X tanker aircraft or another flying mission once the base’s KC-135s depart for good, according to a report that USAF sent to Congress earlier this month. To preserve this option and defray the base’s operating costs, the Air Force said it is mulling ideas such as placing underutilized space in caretaker status, promoting short-term leases as a revenue stream, or even demolishing unusable space. Grand Forks is losing its KC-135s by the end of 2010 courtesy of BRAC 2005. The base is already slated to take on a new mission next decade in the form of RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle operations (and the state’s Air National Guard will also operate MQ-1 Predator UAVs from Grand Forks), but the change will result in a net loss of about 200 airmen, the Air Force said. To mitigate the period during which the base experiences personnel reductions—the so-called “bathtub effect”—North Dakota’s Congressional delegation (Democrats Sen. Kent Conrad, Sen. Byron Dorgan, and Rep. Earl Pomeroy) is keenly interested in attracting additional missions, in particular the KC-X, to Grand Forks. (For more, see the delegation’s joint release and Conrad’s own release.)

According to China’s latest national defense whitepaper, released last week by the Information Office of China’s State Council, the People’s Liberation Army’s Air Force will “accelerate its transition from territorial air defense to both offensive and defensive operations” as one...

According to the Accident Investigation Board reviewing the June 27, 2008 crash of a C-130H2 near Baghdad Airport, three of the transport’s four engines decayed to 60 percent RPM while the pilot “reacted in accordance with applicable directives” to handle...

Air Sorties in War on Terrorism, Southwest AsiaJan. 21-22, 2009 Sortie Type OIF OEF OIF/OEF Total YTD ISR 52 28 80 827 CAS/Armed Recon 84 120 204 2,175 Airlift 270 270 2,762 Air refueling 90 90 1,034 Total 644 6,798...