Lt. Gen. Michael Basla, chief of information dominance in the Air Force Secretariat, thinks a centralized approach to the cyber theater will save the Air Force money and generate capabilities for the armed services at large. He said joint efforts were essential to this end during a July 20 Pentagon briefing. “We are going to provide effective [information technology] cyber capabilities,” he said. “Effective really gets at the point of the best bang for our buck,” he added. In the past, Basla said, cyber operations were distributed inefficiently across different services and commands. “We had 10 major commands developing their capabilities, acquiring their capabilities, and fielding their capabilities. Not the best way to run a railroad,” he said. Similarly, the different services develop various cyber capabilities, some of which are useful across all of the services, he said. Basla sees joint cyber coordination as an excellent way to keep development costs down; this coordination is a challenge worth undertaking, he said. “I’m a joint officer in an Air Force uniform and I believe in the joint war fight,” he said.
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.