Like their colleagues throughout the Air Force, the service’s top munitions experts hail the potential of cutting-edge aircraft like the F-35 Lightning II and B-21 Raider. But without enough of the right kind of munitions, they believe, these and other platforms could fall short of ...
Army Gen. James H. Dickinson, commander of U.S. Space Command, and USAF Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, commander of U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, discuss threats to the homeland during the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 3, 2022. Watch the video or read ...
Retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, dean of the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, moderates a panel discussion with Gen. Anthony J. Cotton, commander of Air Force Global Strike Command; and Lt. Gen. Thomas A. Bussiere, deputy commander of U.S. Strategic Command, ...
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has united NATO and proven a robust U.S. air and space capability that does not require a no-fly zone, but invasion could have been deterred if the U.S. had stronger air power, said experts at an AFA Warfare ...
F-22s from the 1st Fighter Wing landed at Al Dhafra Air Base, United Arab Emirates, on Feb. 12, fulfilling a pledge by Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III to deploy fifth-generation aircraft to the Gulf nation. The decision to deploy fifth-generation fighters, instead of F-15s ...
A pair of Pentagon officials working on joint all-domain command and control say an effort is needed to address “a lack of synchronization” on the project across the services—and to potentially expand cooperation. One of the major challenges to interoperability, a policy paper contends, has ...
The Air Force’s “4+1” fighter plan for the 2020s, unveiled in recent months, will leave the service with a fleet that’s too small and improperly configured to deal with peer threats. What’s needed is a plan that emphasizes stealth aircraft; rapidly retires non-stealthy and expensive-to-maintain ...
The building shook for only an instant and the soot from the smoke was clean within 48 hours, retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula recalled two decades after the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon. But America’s national security priorities had been lost in the fog ...
The two-war force-sizing construct should be restored in the next National Defense Strategy being developed by the Biden administration, according to a new paper from the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. The authors argued that a one-war capacity invites adversaries to take advantage of U.S. ...
Air Force Weapons School Class 21A celebrated almost six months of intense training at a June 12 graduation dinner attended by more than 1,000 graduates, faculty, staff, and family members. Retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, dean of AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and ...
Former Undersecretary of the Air Force Matthew P. Donovan will lead the Air Force Association’s new Mitchell Institute Spacepower Advantage Research Center (MI-SPARC), serving as an independent voice advocating for U.S. space capability. Donovan was Air Force under secretary, Acting Secretary of the Air Force, ...
The Air Force has long faced a silent crisis: It can’t train and retain enough pilots. And now, challenged to confront peer adversaries, rather than the insurgents it’s been engaging for the last 20 years, even the pilots the service can train aren’t getting the ...