At Wednesday’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the new Air Force budget proposal, Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne revealed that USAF now expects to reveal a location for the new Air Force Cyber Command in December. Last month officials said the service needed more time in its evaluation of the prospective sites and probably wouldn’t name a permanent location for the headquarters, now provisionally located at Barksdale AFB, La., until much later in the year. At the hearing, Wynne said that the Air Force had whittled the list down to 16 and expects to continue talks with representatives of all those states about the middle of this month and then cut off the supply of information so it make its evaluation. He expects the process conducted between July 4 and November to pare the list down to a short list of four prime candidates.
The Air Force overall reduced its size by 120 aircraft in fiscal year 2021, but kept about the same number of fighter, bomber and attack aircraft, according to data supplied by the service. The F-35 fleet saw the biggest increase while the B-1B bomber fleet saw the largest decline.