China on March 5 announced a 7.2 percent increase in its defense budget, which is already the world’s second-highest behind the United States at 1.6 trillion yuan ($222 billion), roughly mirroring last year’s rise. Tensions with the U.S., Taiwan, Japan, and neighbors with competing claims to the crucial South China Sea are seen as furthering growth in high-tech military technologies from stealth fighters to aircraft carriers and a growing arsenal of nuclear weapons.
The U.S. military carried out a new air drop of humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza on March 5, parachuting in more than 36,800 meals, as the Biden administration pressed a top Israeli official for greater aid access during talks in Washington. ... Aid dropped by air is an expensive and insufficient alternative to aid that is trucked in, given the scale of the humanitarian crisis, U.S. officials say. President Joe Biden's administration is pressing for greater access by land.
The Ukraine war has been fought largely on the ground in the past two years, with troops often locked in back-and-forth battles with heavy artillery and drone support. The countries’ air forces have played second fiddle because of Ukraine’s limited fleet of planes and Russia’s inability to gain the air supremacy it once expected. But as the Russian military presses on with attacks in the east, its air force has taken on a greater role.
The European Union is no longer just a peace project. On March 5, the European Commission presented a European Defence Industrial Strategy alongside a subsidy cash pot of at least €1.5 billion called the European Defence Investment Programme. Thierry Breton, the industry commissioner, underlined during the presentation of the strategy that Europe is facing an "existential threat," while foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned: “In response to Russia's aggression against Ukraine, the EU must bolster its defense capabilities.”
The Air Force updated a broad agency announcement and offered additional insights into the service’s vision for adapting AI capabilities on the battlefield. The amendment to the BAA, published Feb. 29, revises a key technical area and adds three subsections to the document that was originally issued in August 2023 regarding “artificial intelligence and next generation distributed command and control.”
Since September 2023, when North Korea’s leader met with the president of Russia, millions of rounds of ammunition have flowed from Pyongyang to support the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine, with Russia supplying desperately needed cash and food in return. The White House is “very concerned about this burgeoning partnership, which is moving quite rapidly,” Mira Rapp Hooper, the president’s top advisor on the Korean peninsula, said March 4 at the Joong Ang-CSIS Forum.
Despite Russia’s troubles on the battlefield in Ukraine and its relative decline as a space power, the head of United States Space Command warned against underestimating Moscow’s capabilities and intentions to challenge America’s dominance in the space domain. “Russia’s struggles following their invasion of Ukraine should not create a false sense of confidence that Moscow is fading in the space domain,” Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of U.S. Space Command, said March 5 in remarks at the Potomac Officers Club 2024 Space Summit.
Col. Ben Jonsson ... was nominated to receive a promotion to brigadier general by the Biden administration more than a year ago, in January 2023. But that promotion is now in jeopardy as Jonsson becomes the latest casualty of Republicans' war on "wokeness" in the military because of an op-ed he wrote in 2020 on institutional racism in the military.
Albania reopened a refurbished Soviet-era air base on March 4 which will host NATO jets as fears grow in the Balkans over creeping Russian influence. Italian Eurofighters and U.S. F-16s and F-35s flew in for the inauguration of the base at Kucova, 50 miles south of the capital Tirana, which was formerly named Stalin City when Albania was allied with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
As recently released data from the military services has shown, the participation of women in elite special operations roles―and even entry into the training pipeline for such roles―remains a rarity some eight years after these roles were first opened. The military is starting to take notice: a wide-ranging Army special operations study released in 2023 highlighted barriers to service, from ill-fitting body armor to “benevolent sexism” keeping women on the sidelines.
he 13th African Air Chiefs Symposium was hosted by the Tunisian Air Force with U.S. Air Forces Africa in Tunis, Feb. 26 to March 1. The symposium was attended by about 250 participants to include air chiefs, liaison officers, officials addressing Women, Peace and Security initiatives, and senior enlisted representatives from 36 African nations.
Canada’s CF-5 fighters were flown by two squadrons (433 and 434) whose role was reinforcement of NATO’s Northern Flank. They deployed regularly across the North Atlantic, refueling all the way, to land at their deployed operating base in Andoya, Northern Norway. ... When performing simulated air combat, pilots often generated side slip or yaw, which would regularly cause one of the two engines to be starved for air, resulting in a compressor stall. Sometimes the engines would wake up on the wrong side of the bed and decide to fail/compressor stall in an unpredictable fashion.