Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Joseph Dunford on Tuesday met with his Russian and Turkish counterparts in Turkey to “discuss deconflicting” operations inside Syria. A photo posted by the Joint Staff on Twitter showed Dunford sitting next to Turkish Gen. Hulusi Akar and Russian Gen. Valery Gerasimov in Antalya. The meeting, which comes on the heels of multiple close calls and other bombing incidents inside Syria, is the second time Dunford has met with Gerasimov within a month, following February’s meeting in Azerbaijan. Both meetings, according to Dunford and Defense Department officials, solely focused on deconfliction because legislation bars the US from talking about the possibility of military-to-military cooperation.
The Air Force will have an estimate of what it would cost to upgrade 33 Block 20 training F-22s to operational configuration by mid-September, and it will likely be “a tremendous number,” Brig. Gen. Dale White, program executive officer for fighters and advanced aircraft, told reporters at an industry conference.…