Exercise Cooperative Cope Thunder in Alaska officially ends Saturday, but airmen from Misawa AB, Japan, plan to stay an extra week “to implement lessons learned during the exercise and to fine tune our flight tactics,” said Lt. Col. Stephen Williams, Misawa’s 13th Fighter Squadron commander, reports Stars and Stripes. About 200 fighter pilots, maintainers, and support personnel from Misawa are participating in CCT, the largest Pacific multilateral combat exercise.
The Air Force’s nascent KC-Z program, aimed at developing a next-generation family of systems for aerial refueling, will look to launch its analysis-of-alternatives study in 2024, years earlier than originally planned. Originally, the analysis of alternatives for KC-Z was set for “maybe in the 2030s,” Paul Waugh, program executive officer…