Tax-exempt pay. Extended leaves of absence for parenthood. Fewer permanent change of station moves. Those are some of the “outside the box” ideas the leaders of the House Armed Services Committee’s military quality-of-life panel said they are mulling as they barrel toward an early 2024 goal of providing recommendations to improve service members’ pay, child care, housing, and other issues key to people’s decision to join or stay in the military.
Following a request for information from the Air Force that identified engine thrust range targets for its forthcoming Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program, a General Atomics executive name-checked some appealing candidates that could power the company’s own unmanned offering. “The [Williams International] FJ44, that’s a really nice engine. Pratt & Whitney has a real nice set of turbofans that we’ve used in the past,” David Alexander, president of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, said in a Nov. 14 interview with Breaking Defense at the Dubai Airshow.
The military has struggled to provide adequate access to mental health care for years. And even as it has worked to reduce the stigma and consequences of seeking help, provider shortages have created appointment logjams and long wait times—if an appointment is even available at all. In a report released Nov. 16 by the RAND Corp., researchers make the case for expanding access through virtual visits, but caution that the Pentagon will have to get the implementation right if they want to make telehealth as effective as in-person care.
The Department of Defense is in the process of creating a new “incident repository” that will catalog problems that Pentagon officials encounter with artificial intelligence. The development effort was mentioned in a new “tools list” that was released by the department this week as part of a broader AI “toolkit” that it unveiled on its Tradewind website.
Lockheed Martin is preparing to send the U.S. Air Force its advanced TPY-4 radar for further evaluation, following months of internal testing and tweaks at company facilities in rural New York. The software-defined sensor, capable of detecting and tracking everything from small drones to jets to ballistic missiles, is slated to replace the decades-old TPS-75 radar as part of the Three-Dimensional Expeditionary Long Range Radar effort, or 3DELRR.
A new type of semiconductor prototyped by DARPA and Raytheon promises to run much cooler than typical chips, a breakthrough that could lead to much better radars for warplanes, drones, and air defense systems. Raytheon is getting $15 million to further develop these extra-cool gallium nitride, or GaN, semiconductors under DARPA’s Technologies for Heat Removal in Electronics at the Device Scale, or THREADS, program.
Aurora Flight Sciences has offered a new look at an experimental high-speed, runway-independent, vertical takeoff and landing-capable aircraft it is developing for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Such a design, which features an array of dedicated lift fans, could provide valuable operational flexibility and help reduce vulnerability in future conflicts, especially high-end ones against a potential near-peer opponent like China.
Lockheed Martin announced Nov. 16 it plans to launch a payload to orbit next year to demonstrate 5G fiber-like connectivity from space. The experiment is part of a larger project, known as 5G.MIL, that the company started in 2020 in response to military demand for high-speed wireless communications.
An annual review of suicide among veterans found that rates increased in 2021 during COVID-19 lockdowns, with the largest jumps among young women with some military service, according to a report released Thursday the Department of Veterans Affairs. Among young women, when compared to their civilian counterparts who never joined the military, female veterans between 18 to 34 years old were nearly three and a half times more likely to take their own lives in 2021. And among women of all ages who died by suicide in 2021, veteran women were nearly three times as likely to use a firearm than a civilian.
The slow-moving L-4 Grasshopper was the ideal plane for spotting hidden German armor during World War II. With a top speed of around 75 miles per hour, it wasn’t the ideal fighter-bomber or ground attack aircraft. That role was best left to the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, which could blaze across a field strafing enemy targets at well over 425 miles per hour. Or was it? If you asked Maj. Charles Carpenter, also known as “Bazooka Charlie,” he would tell you that it all depends on what the little L-4 Grasshopper is shooting at those targets. When he turned his Grasshopper into a bazooka six-shooter for the Battle of Arracourt, it looked a lot like the L-4 was just what the doctor ordered.