|
|
That’s the cost of flying the President’s plane, Air Force One – a modified 747 – for one hour, according to a new Congressional Research Service report. According to Battleland’s steam-powered calculator, that works out to $50 a second. h/t Project on Government Secrecy
Whenever federal bureaucrats running the nation’s parks get antsy that their purse is likely to shrink, they roll out something long known as the “Washington Monument strategy.” That’s the tried-and-true technique of warning the public that if money isn’t forthcoming, one of the first budget cuts will force the shutting down of the popular obelisk [...]
Tom Cruise steps onto the tarmac – cool and confident in his flight suit and dark aviator glasses. While his co-stars still call him Maverick, this isn’t Top Gun and that’s not an F-14 fighter plane. This is Top Gun 2, and the fighter plane he’s getting into is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) [...]
The military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC, to its friends and foes), is a political economy that places the interest of the domestic factions benefitting from huge defense budgets ahead of the interests of soldiers, airmen, or sailors who do the fighting and those of the taxpayers who pay the bills. Put bluntly, the MICC’s factional politics place [...]
The South Koreans believe their friendly neighbors to the north have jammed the Global Positioning Systems on hundreds of airliners flying in and out of South Korea’s major airports in recent days. It could be a typical North Korean tactic: come up with a low-cost way to cause trouble, especially one that’s difficult to trace. Luckily, [...]
– General Norton Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff, explaining Tuesday what he is telling Congress when lawmakers want to keep more aircraft flying than the proposed 2013 Pentagon budget supports.
At least that’s the word from Air Force Major Dave Blair – himself an MQ-1 Predator instructor pilot – in the latest issue of Air & Space Power Journal. As technology changes warfare, he argues, the military needs to change, too. The Air Force isn’t welcoming its growing workforce of remotely-piloted aircraft – RPA – personnel. [...]
The Single Integrated Operational Plan — SIOP, for short — was the non-descript label the U.S. military assigned to its doomsday plan to wage nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Born in 1961, the many-layered targeting list died in 2003, after the end of the Cold War. A key developer, Air Force Lieut. General Glenn [...]
A flock of U.S. Air Force F-22 fighters has moved to the United Arab Emirates, within striking distance of Iran. Perhaps we’ll finally see the Raptor prove its mettle, against Iran’s long-in-the-tooth F-14s, bought during the shah’s reign. Or perhaps not. There also were six F-22s nearby – in the UAE, of all places — [...]
