WASHINGTON — A battle is brewing over the fate of the MQ-9 Reaper, with a letter from the U.S. Air Force’s top civilian signaling that the service will again seek to curtail procurement of the General Atomics-made drone in the upcoming fiscal 2022 budget.
“Our current MQ-9 fleet is sufficient to support current and future operational and training requirements,” acting Air Force…
WASHINGTON — The F-35 joint strike fighter loomed like a ghost over the May 25 confirmation hearing of President Joe Biden’s pick for Air Force secretary, who famously called the program a case of “acquisition malpractice.”
If confirmed, Frank Kendall — who…
U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville recently earned headlines for admitting the service’s 2022 budget challenges will cap personnel at roughly 485,000. His assessment heralds hard modernization decisions servicewide, but the metastasizing threats to U.S. air and…
ROME — Directed-energy beams could be the next step in bringing down hostile drones, officials from the Italian Air Force are predicting.
“This technology is moving really fast and we are evaluating both microwave and lasers as solutions for stopping drones,” said Col. Salvatore Lombardi, director of the Air Force’s UAV center of excellence at Amendola Air Base, southern Italy, which…
WASHINGTON — By the end of this fiscal year, one company could rake in a contract worth up to $490 million to provide the U.S. Air Force with technologies to counter the threat of small, commercially made drones.
On April 13, the Air Force released a request for…
ROME — Fincantieri is to use all three of its U..S shipyards to build new FFG(X) frigates and will hire 600 more staff by year-end to handle the work, a company official said following the U.S. Navy’s order for a second vessel out of a potential 10 in total.
The…
WASHINGTON — The KC-46 will be the first aircraft to be outfitted with equipment that will make it a node in the U.S. Air Force’s new battle management system, the service confirmed Friday.
As part of the first capability release of the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System program, the service plans to outfit a portion of its Boeing KC-46 aerial refueling tankers with “an open…
ISLAMABAD — Nigeria’s Air Force officially took delivery of three JF-17 fighter aircraft Friday during a ceremony at a base in Makudri amid celebrations marking the 57th anniversary of the service.
The fighters were handed over by Pakistan Aeronautical Complex, which…
WASHINGTON — The Army has wrapped up an industry demonstration of a wide variety of possible Electric Light Reconnaissance Vehicles (eLRV), but the future of the program to procure such a capability remains uncertain due to the absence of funding.
The Maneuver…
WASHINGTON — The head of U.S. Transportation Command signaled Tuesday he is ready to support Air Force plans to start retiring some KC-135 aerial refueling tankers.
Last year, after the Air Force requested the authority to retire 13 KC-135s in fiscal 2021, TRANSCOM commander Gen. Stephen Lyons pushed back, arguing that retiring the legacy tankers without an operational KC-46 would exacerbate…
