Author: Michael

A U.S. Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft assigned to the 127th Wing, Michigan National Guard, on their way to Air Defender 23, fly in formation behind a KC-135 Stratotanker assigned to the 128th Air Refueling Wing, Wisconsin National Guard, June 5, 2023. (U.S. Air Force National Guard photo).

Over 250 NATO warplanes, including about 100 from the US Air Force, will defend the skies of Germany against a major simulated invasion of a NATO country this week. 
The air exercise, dubbed Air Defender 23, began Monday and is the largest training event of its type in NATO history.

Lawmakers in the House Armed Services Committee are proposing to change the official job title of the Pentagon’s chief technology officer and designate new responsibilities for the position.
A provision in the mark for the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act by the Cyber, Information Technologies and Innovation subcommittee would rename the position of undersecretary of defense for research and engineering — a post currently currently held by Heidi Shyu — and change it to “undersecretary of defense for technology integration and innovation.

A key congressional subcommittee wants the Pentagon to accelerate the development and adoption of artificial intelligence tools to classify electronic signals on the battlefield for conventional forces.

FILE:: A Ukrainian soldier fires a rocket gun as Ukrainian troops in the Donetsk region, where the country’s most intense clashes occur, attend intensive combat training by using both domestic and foreign weapons amid Russia-Ukraine war in Donetsk, Ukraine on May 08, 2023. (Muhammed Enes Yildirim/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images).

Ukrainian forces have made incremental gains in the face of determined Russian resistance in the two days since Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on June 10 that his country’s spring offensive was underway.

China last week deployed a reconnaissance plane over Pacific waters east of Taiwan that Chinese media said monitored and collected information on an exercise involving the ships of the United States, Japan, France and Canada.
An intelligence-equipped variant of the Y-9 cargo plane likely monitored and collected information about the exercise, the Chinese state-backed Global Times reported on Sunday, citing analysts.
China’s Shaanxi Y-9JB electronic intelligence aircraft.

Members of the House Armed Services Committee want to create a new pilot program within the Pentagon geared toward quantum computing solutions that are capable of being developed and deployed in two years or less.
Section 218 of the HASC Subcommittee on Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation mark of the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, released Monday, would direct the Pentagon to partner with a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) and the quantum industry on the effort.

Three Democratic lawmakers in the US House of Representatives have introduced a bill to grant the necessary authorizations for the United States to transfer Virginia-class fast-attack submarines to Australia as part of the trilateral security agreement dubbed AUKUS.
The bill, the AUKUS Submarine Defense Act, was introduced by Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York and sponsored by Reps. Joe Courtney (Connecticut) and Ami Bera (California).

In March 2019, the Palau-flagged oil tanker Elhiblu 1 was hijacked by migrants who had just boarded, who realized that the crew intended to take them back to Libya, from where they had left in two inflatable boats. “The captain indicated on several occasions that he no longer had control of the boat and that he and his crew were forced, under the threat of various migrants, to continue to Malta,” the Maltese Armed Forces explained then, which intervened to release the boat. Three youths were subsequently charged in connection with the case.

According to a report, production errors and quality issues in Boeing’s F-15EX Eagle II program have pushed the fighter’s delivery schedule by at least six months, which could jeopardize its ability to meet key deadlines. A new report from the US Government Accountability Office.
Boeing originally expected to start delivering its last batch of F-15EX Eagle II fighters to the Air Force in December 2022, the federal watchdog wrote in its annual assessment of weapons systems, released Friday.

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Ukraine has accused Russia of blowing up another dam as part of its efforts to blunt the Ukrainian counteroffensive underway in the south and east of that country. Details are still emerging, but the dam in question is along the Mokri Yaly River, in western Donetsk, in a region where Ukrainian forces are said to have made their biggest gains. The incident comes six days after a significant portion of the larger Kakhovka dam was blown up, causing extensive flooding in the Kherson region, with both sides blaming each other for the destruction.