Daily Report

Nov. 22, 2011

McKeon Moves Against Defense Sequestration

Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), House Armed Services Committee chairman, said Monday he intends to introduce legislation this week to stave off “catastrophic” cuts to the Pentagon’s budget. He announced this after the congressional supercommittee failed to reach an agreement on...

Supercommittee Stumbles

The Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction failed to come up with a bipartisan plan to cut the nation’s deficit before its Thanksgiving deadline. “We are deeply disappointed that we have been unable to come to a bipartisan deficit-reduction agreement,”...

Going on Defense In Space

Just because the Department of Defense will be hard up for cash in the coming years doesn’t mean that the Air Force can just throw up the best deals into orbit, according to Gen. William Shelton, head of Air Force...

Telltale Cyber Fingerprints

The cyber domain needs to be looked at differently than air and space, said Maj. Gen. Suzanne Vautrinot, commander of 24th Air Force, USAF’s cyber operations arm. “At the very beginning, you have to get used to the fact you...

Modern Day Fighter Escort

Air Force cyber warriors are on the cutting edge of some of USAF’s most in-demand missions in ways that sometimes aren’t immediately apparent, said two top cyber officials at AFA’s Global Warfare Symposium in Los Angeles last week. “The [remotely...

Energy Horizons

The Air Force is expected to release a new document, tentatively called “Energy Horizons,” in the coming months that will outline the service’s energy-related science and technology innovations, said Mark Maybury, USAF’s chief scientist. The document will serve as a...

Learning from Nature

Air Mobility Command, in partnership with Boeing and DARPA, recently completed “a number of experiments” focused on flight formation, said Air Force Chief Scientist Mark Maybury. Specifically, the experiments found that if the Air Force mimicked bird formations with certain...

Allies in Pixel Skies

US and Canadian forces linked computers for NORAD’s first, real-time binational simulated air defense exercise. “These scenarios have always been executed in a US-only environment,” said Steve Boe, Air Forces Northern’s distributed mission operations simulator program manager. In one scenario,...

US, Indonesia Lay Out F-16 Deal

President Obama and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono announced the planned transfer of 24 surplus USAF F-16s to the Indonesia air force during the Pacific leaders’ summit in Bali, Indonesia. This acquisition “provides Indonesia with a much-needed capability to protect...