Lt. Gen. David Deptula, the officer who has overseen the Air Staff’s intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance office (A2) since July 2006 and been the driving force behind the Air Force’s ISR transformation, is retiring, service officials announced Thursday. As a denizen of the famous “Black Hole” in Saudi Arabia, he was the principal attack planner for the Desert Storm air campaign. In the late 1990s, he served as joint task force commander for Operation Northern Watch and there flew 82 combat missions. He later ran the air operations center during the early air war against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan in 2001. Deptula entered the Air Force as a student pilot in 1976. During his career, he amassed more than 3,000 flight hours in F-15s, T-37s, and T-38s. This includes more than 400 combat hours. Deptula’s successor hasn’t been announced yet. (For more on Deptula, see ISR Revolution from the June issue of Air Force Magazine and Beyond CAP Fixation from the Daily Report archive.)
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III chaired a China-focused military briefing Oct. 27, part of a biweekly series of briefings with senior military commanders about China’s growing threat in the wake of an orbital hypersonic weapon test that elicited public worries from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “What we…