Free Republic

When the first Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker took to the sky on August 31,1956, no one at the time could have expected it would still be flying 60 years later. But for the past six decades, this modified Boeing 707 has established itself as one of the workhorses of the Air Force’s inventory, providing air-to-air refueling, personnel and cargo transport, and aeromedical evacuation capabilities throughout the world. In the mid-fifties Strategic Air Command, under the direction of General Curtis Lemay, needed an air refueler that could keep up with the fighter and bomber aircraft of the day. At the time, B-52...

Air Force Gen. Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle, commander of Air Combat Command, this week declared the F-35A fighter jet ready for combat. While many pundits and politicians have questioned the worth of this jet, the only people who know the ground truth are the pilots themselves. A total of 174 U.S. pilots currently have been trained to fly Lockheed Martin’s F-35A Lightning II. The Heritage Foundation recently interviewed 31 of these former F-15C, F-15E, F-16C, and A-10 pilots. Each expressed a high degree of confidence in the F-35A, their new fifth-generation platform. Here are nine insights gleaned from those conversations: 1....

Roll the clock back six years to 2010. The US Air Force had just shelved a proposal to stand up a new wing of fighters based on the OA-X, a concept for a propeller-driven, light-attack fighter – reviving the role played by the Vietnam-era Douglas A-1 Skyraider. Instead, the USAF would acquire OA-X aircraft on behalf of cash-poor partners, and let them operate the type. If the concept proved useful to those nations, service officials said they would reconsider the merits of standing up a light-attack wing. Six years later, the Sierra Nevada/Embraer A-29 Super Tucano has made its combat...

With the F-22 Raptor, the Air Force acquired un equaled power to project air dominance. Lockheed Martin’s single-seat, twin-engined, all-weather fighter blended stealth, supercruise, great agility, and all-sensing avionics. Those features, plus high reliability and low maintenance, marked a huge leap in capability over USAF’s own F-15 Eagle, long the class of air combat. Indeed, the F-22 could not be matched by any known or projected fighter.

Visitor posts: Maryanne Lavelle Today at 4:35pm.Everyone is a panic about why there are police at the airbase right now and the entrances blocked. Can you give us an update of what's going on? Edin Sokan Today at 4:28pm.According to a local news Turkish police have closed all access to Incirlik airbase ( 10th Tank Base)

The Air Force said in a statement it expected to award up to two contracts for a new ICBM weapons system, or ground-based strategic deterrent, sometime next summer or fall. It also expected to award up to two contracts in the same time frame for a new nuclear cruise missile, or long-range standoff weapon. Modernization of the U.S. nuclear force is expected to cost more than $350 billion over the next decade as the United States works to replace its aging systems, including bombs, nuclear bombers, missiles and submarines. Some analysts estimate the cost of modernization at $1 trillion over...

Power was restored Friday to the base in Turkey used by U.S. and coalition forces for airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, American officials said. Incirlik Air Base in the southern part of the country had been without power since July 16 and relying on generators to conduct the strikes following the attempted military coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. "We will retain this capability should the power be interrupted again," officials from U.S. European Command, based in Stuttgart, Germany, said in a release. "Meanwhile there is a steady flow of hot food, water, and fuel...

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....