air force

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.)’s amendment to strip funding for the F-22 fighter jet passed five minutes ago on the Senate floor. Levin’s office recorded the vote as 58 in favor and 40 against. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has just won his first major legislative fight over defense reform. It’s a significant [...]

The F-22 fight notwithstanding, David Axe reports that a recent Air Force document on the future of the service’s investment in unmanned aircraft entertains the possibility of pilotless drones to replace all piloted planes by mid-century. As David writes, the document doesn’t say that such a future is a certainty — how could it — [...]

In this corner: President Obama, Defense Secretary Bob Gates, (reluctantly) the service secretary and chief of staff of  the Air Force, this very smart Air Force captain, Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), and the current threat environment the U.S. faces. In that corner: Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa.), Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), a [...]

Building on yesterday’s announcement that Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) didn’t have the votes to strip funding for the Air Force’s F-22 fighter jet from the defense authorization bill, here’s an Air Force captain providing some really useful context — namely, the Air Force’s problems with adjusting to a threat environment where manned air combat isn’t [...]

Today was supposed to be a critical day for the Obama administration’s efforts to kill the troubled F-22 fighter jet. It goes like this: the Senate is taking up the fiscal 2010 defense authorization, which 13 pro-F-22 Senators on the Armed Services Committee last month used as a vehicle to overturn Defense Secretary Bob Gates’ [...]

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the defense budget, here’s the showdown you’ve been waiting for: Defense Secretary Bob Gates, who cut er, “completed” the Air Force’s F-22 fighter jet order at 187 planes, versus Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), a staunch advocate for the F-22, which is partially manufactured in his state. Chambliss [...]

Two atheistic groups and a lawsuit call on Washington to end its sanction of religion in the military. Critics decry this as an attack on a venerable tradition. But the blend of martial and spiritual in the armed forces is largely the residue of the fight again communism in the late 1940s and 1950s. What will the Obama administration do?

A labor strike at Boeing is the latest twist in a seven-year story of corruption and conflicting interests.