The Air Force’s Fiscal 2012 spending plan doesn’t have any money in it for buying kits to perform a service life-extension program on some of the service’s F-16 fighters, but does provide $25 million for studies of a “potential SLEP,” and “defining what it would mean,” said USAF budget director Maj. Gen. Alfred Flowers in a Pentagon briefing. Flowers also said that if USAF must operate under a continuing resolution for Fiscal 2011, it doesn’t have the authority to launch a program to equip its F-15s with advanced radars. “We are worried” about that, Flowers said, because without the new radars, “we are at risk of having to ground some aircraft in the future.”
The Pentagon plans to use U.S. Air Force C-17s and C-130s to deport 5,400 people currently detained by Customs and Border Protection, officials announced Jan. 22, the first act in President Donald Trump’s sweeping promise to crack down on undocumented immigrants and increase border security.