More than 30 senior Air Force leaders, including Secretary Michael Donley and Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh, recently attended a cyber summit at JB Andrews, Md., to discuss the service’s role in cyberspace and work towards defining the path forward for supporting the US military’s cyber mission. These officials “are very interested in this,” said Lt. Gen. Michael Basla, the Air Force’s chief information officer, in a Dec. 11 release. The mid-November summit helped provide a baseline understanding of what the Air Force’s capabilities are in this mission area, its roles and responsibilities, and what the combatant commanders need the Air Force to provide, said Basla. The participants also reviewed the Air Force’s “cross-domain capabilities and interdependencies” with cyber, he noted. The summit concluded with initial guidance “to quickly review” Fiscal 2014 cyber objectives and develop positions for the Fiscal 2015 program objective memorandum to address the US military’s emerging cyber requirements, said Basla. (See also Cyber Summit and Defining the Air Force’s Cyber Role and Vexing Cyber Issues.)
The Air Force and Boeing agreed to a nearly $2.4 billion contract for a new lot of KC-46 aerial tankers on Nov. 21. The deal, announced by the Pentagon, is for 15 new aircraft in Lot 11 at a cost of $2.389 billion—some $159 million per tail.