Rape allegations. Drill sergeants having sex with multiple trainees. Threats by the drill sergeants to discharge trainees for failing the physical fitness tests if they told anybody what was going on. An old-boy network among the …
Air Force
Probably Not Vanilla Wafers
From Monday’s contract announcements:
The Boeing Co., Huntington Beach, Calif., is being awarded a $36,197,205 firm-fixed-price, cost-plus-fixed-fee contract to produce 12 modified wafers for the Minuteman III missile system. The location of the performance is Orange County, Md. Work is to be completed by Aug. 31, 2015.
…
$45,000,000
Designation Resignation
Battleland was at a party this weekend where someone got the X-37B confused with the X-47B. You’d think the Air Force and the Navy would have a Joint Operating Coordination Committee on Aircraft Designation and Nomenclature to avoid fielding two new aircraft with such similar designations (but you’d be wrong: back in the early 1980s …
Air Force Capt. Tony McPeak, Over Vietnam
Merrill “Tony” McPeak served as the U.S. Air Force’s 14th chief of staff – its top officer – from 1990 to 1994. A fighter pilot — who flew over Vietnam, in war, and as a member of the Air Force’s Thunderbirds aerial acrobatic team, in peace – McPeak ran the service during 1991’s Gulf War. He has always been an outspoken …
$4,752.73
The Powers That Be
This Friday, the Air Force will award Francis Gary Powers – the pilot of the ill-fated U-2 spy plane shot down by the Soviets in 1960 and held captive for 21 months – a posthumous Silver Star. It’s the latest in a series of sorrys the U.S. has offered Powers’ family following his poor treatment at the hands of the the government he …
“Look at the current level of air defense and anti-missile defense -- these aircraft will not get anywhere. Not ours, not theirs.”
Blimp Disaster 2.0
It wasn’t so long ago we wrote of the Air Force losing an $8 million blimp due to bad weather and the private-contractor ground crew’s failure to anticipate and adjust to it in time to save the airship. That snafu happened in …
1960s-Era Choppers Guarding 1970s-Era Missiles
$179,750
The Pentagon’s “Washington Monument Strategy”
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 …
The F-35: Super Plane for Super Cruise
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 …