“The Air Force has about the right structure except for the need to add long-range strike—more long-range strike,” former Defense Secretary William Perry testified last week on Capitol Hill. Perry was highlighting one of the Congressionally chartered Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel’s Air Force-related recommendations for defense policymakers. Perry specifically told the House Armed Services Committee July 29 that the review panel thinks the Air Force should move forward with “another deep strike [platform]” as a follow-on to the B-2. This platform, he continued, should “have the kind of stealth capabilities that the B-2 has.” Such stealth attributes are a “unique capability that the United States has today and one which will be very important . . . in any new deep-strike bomber,” said Perry. He co-chaired the bipartisan 18-member panel with Stephen Hadley, national security advisor to President George H. Bush. Continue
A provision in the fiscal 2025 defense policy bill will require the Defense Department to include the military occupational specialty of service members who die by suicide in its annual report on suicide deaths, though it remains to be seen how much data the department will actually disclose.