Free Republic

Welcome to 2016 when male soldiers train in pregnancy simulators, tactical lactation stations dot the battlefield, women are fraudulently passed through Ranger School and US Navy sailors willingly surrender their boats and equipment to Iranian thugs without so much as firing a flare. It’s the era of breast milk in the field and Liberace joins Delta Force… A perfect storm, a Category Five hurricane of doom and destruction is sweeping over the US military with the deadly accuracy of the Angel of Death on Passover. We have a President who is intent on destroying the military through insane social engineering....

Erdogan locks US airmen, nuclear arms in Incirlik DEBKAfile Special Report July 20, 2016, 11:29 AM (IDT) Tags: Erdogan, Barack Obama, Incirlik air base, Turkey, US Air Force, Turkish army, US, Some 1,500 US airmen and their families have been locked in the southern Turkish air base of Incirlik together with a stock if tactical nuclear bombs since President Reccep Erdogan crushed an attempted coup on Saturday, July 16. In the four days up until Wednesday, July 20, therefore, no air strikes against ISIS in Syria and Iraq have been staged that Turkish base.

Missions by American warplanes flown from the Incirlik air base in Turkey against Islamic State targets will resume following a temporary shutdown in the hours after the failed coup, Defense Department officials announced Sunday.

Unconfirmed .... "Unconfirmed Reports Of Gunfire, Explosions Inside Incirlik Airbase - Local Sources"

Following the failed Turkish coup, U.S. military operations out of Turkey’s giant Incirlik Air Base - critical in the ongoing campaign against ISIS - came to a halt Saturday afternoon as the Turkish military closed the airspace around the base and suspended all US-led operations, mostly targeting the Islamic State.

The Air Force Research Laboratory has awarded target drone builder Kratos a contract to execute what it calls a Low-Cost Attritable Strike Unmanned Aerial System Demonstration (LCASD). This proof-of-concept initiative is centered on creating a (relatively) cheap unmanned combat aircraft that the USAF can afford to lose in combat, even opting to do so willingly by sending it on a one-way mission if need be. Alternatively, if the vehicle had the range to return to friendly territory, it could be repeatedly recovered and launched again on other missions, even from small bases without runways. The contract’s total value is $40.8...

Not many details yet, active shooter at Andrews.

“0 losses in 8 dogfights against F-15E Red Air” The U.S. Air Force F-35A fleet continues to work to declare the Lightning II IOC (initial operational capability) scheduled in the August – December timeframe. Among the activities carried out in the past weeks, a simulated deployment provided important feedbacks about the goal of demonstrating the F-35’s ability to “penetrate areas with developed air defenses, provide close air support to ground troops and be readily deployable to conflict theaters.” Seven F-35s deployed from Hill Air Force Base, Utah, to Mountain Home AFB, Idaho, to carry out a series of operational tests...

The U.S. Air Force Lost 12 Years Of Investigations Thanks To A Corrupted Computer File The U.S. Air Force Inspector General tracks all their investigations on fraud, abuse, and everything else down to office disputes in a database maintained by Lockheed Martin. Now it looks like somebody broke it, destroying data collected since 2004. Defense One and others are reporting that the USAF lost its records of 100,000 investigations in their Automated Case Tracking System due to some kind of file corruption that neither Lockheed Martin or the Air Force have been able to figure out. Apparently Lockheed Martin spent...

The U.S. Air Force has lost records concerning 100,000 investigations into everything from workplace disputes to fraud. A database that hosts files from the Air Force’s inspector general and legislative liaison divisions became corrupted last month, destroying data created between 2004 and now, service officials said. Neither the Air Force nor Lockheed Martin, the defense firm that runs the database, could say why it became corrupted or whether they’ll be able to recover the information. Lockheed tried to recover the information for two weeks before notifying the Air Force, according to a service statement. The Air Force has begun asking...

US Air Force Gen. Mark Welsh made comments at an Air Force Association event on Thursday that were uncharacteristically bullish on the prospect of restarting the F-22 program. Lockheed Martin shuttered the F-22 program almost five years ago. Since then, the top Air Force brass has been focused on the troubled F-35 program as well as looking decades forward to the Next Generation Air Dominance program. In April, however, Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio said in Congress: "In light of growing threats from a resurgent Russia and an aggressive China, further exploration into restarting the F-22 line is deserved." Welsh's...

WASHINGTON: When Boeing really, truly and finally won the airborne tanker competition by underbidding what was then EADS North America (now Airbus) by at least 10 percent, the chairman of the losing company, Ralph Crosby, said he believed it important that Boeing be watched closely to make sure they delivered at that price and on schedule. “If they aren’t, then they should be held accountable,” he said at the press conference announcing EADS would not protest the win. Well, Boeing’s KC-46 is quite late and very over-budget. It was supposed to be ready for a spring 2017 arrival at Altus...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Air Force's top civilian official said Friday she supports requiring young women to register for a potential military draft as Congress heads toward a divisive debate over whether to erase gender restrictions from Selective Service. Air Force Secretary Deborah James said there's no reason women shouldn't have to sign up just as men between the ages of 18 and 25 do. Women have never before been required to register in the United States and including them in a draft pool has outraged social conservatives....

Thunderbird jet crashed Thursday after a flyover of the academy's commencement, which was attended by President Obama, the US Air Force said.

Local news reporting a Thunderbird crashed and the pilot safely ejected.

The U.S. Air Force said Thursday a B-52 crashed on Guam shortly after takeoff, but all seven crew members made it out safely. No injuries were reported. The plane aborted on takeoff and caught fire at about 8:30 a.m., Pacific Air Forces public affairs said in an email. It crashed on the flight line of the base. The bomber was deployed to Guam from Minot, North Dakota, as part of the military's continuous bomber presence in the Pacific, The Air Force said. The crew members are with the 69th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron and were performing a routine training mission, it...

The United States Air Force is a unique service for a multitude of reasons. It was the first branch of the service to allow women into combat roles (security police) and has an entire career field dedicated to protecting air bases, aircraft, Air Force personnel and nuclear weapons. All of the other services require individual units to provide security for themselves, i.e. an Army aviation unit’s members, including her mechanics, are armed and trained as riflemen. Chuck Norris started his martial arts training when he was an air policeman in Korea. Besides Norris, the “Sky Cops” have a storied past...

EXCLUSIVE: It was just a few years ago, in March 2011, when a pair of U.S. Air Force B-1 bombers – during a harsh winter storm – took off from their base in South Dakota to fly across the world to launch the air campaign in Libya, only 16 hours after given the order. Today, many in the Air Force are questioning whether a similar mission could still be accomplished, after years of budget cuts that have taken an undeniable toll. The U.S. Air Force is now short 4,000 airmen to maintain its fleet, short 700 pilots to fly them...

During his long tenure at the Pentagon, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates made many good decisions that helped soldiers and enhanced U.S. security. But his choice to truncate the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor program at 187 jets was an exception. With threats to American air superiority growing, it is time for Congress to consider resurrecting the jet or finding a suitable replacement. Conceived in the 1980s, the F-22 Raptor was designed to secure dominance of the skies for decades. America needed fighters that could outperform the newest Soviet models from Sukhoi and MiG. To counter them, the Raptor incorporated cutting-edge...

RAF jets will battle American stealth fighters in mock dogfights over Britain for the first time in the coming days. British Typhoon fighters will take part in air-to-air combat drills against United States Air Force F-22 Raptor jets. The contests will be the first time the aircraft have gone head-to-head in UK skies, RAF sources said. A dozen F-22s arrived at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk earlier this week and are due to stay for practice missions with the RAF until the start of next month. An RAF source said the allies were likely to fight scenarios at both close visual...