During a recent visit by a congressional delegation to Eglin AFB, Fla., Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s tactical air and land forces panel, said he heard “disturbing and concerning” updates from aircraft maintainers on the F-35 strike fighter’s Autonomic Logistics Information System. In addition to the “cumbersome” operation of going through the slow-loading pages of the software-driven diagnostic maintenance system, he and his colleagues learned ALIS has an 80-percent false-positive rate, explained Turner at the F-35 hearing of his panel on April 14. “I was taken aback,” said Turner. In response, Sean Stackley, the Navy’s acquisition executive, acknowledged that false positives with ALIS are a “very real concern.” Currently, ALIS is “not meeting the requirements on maintainability,” said Stackley. Planned upgrades must be put in the hands of maintainers as soon as possible, he said. ALIS currently has “red” score cards indicating its deficient performance, said Stackley; only a series of “incremental improvements” will get it to acceptable “green” levels, he said. (See also Fixed and Waiting to be Fixed.)
Recent Russian and Chinese tests of space weapons are a "natural consequence of military behaviors," and the U.S. must now "mitigate this threat," the Space Force's operations chief said. “When you are behind, you look for ways to seek vulnerabilities of your adversary and your competitor so that you can…