Continuing our midweek focus on stealthy jets, Air Force brass today said budget pressures are the reason that it will take until the mid-2020s for the next generation stealth bomber to be operational, despite the fact that it is being developed with existing and mature technologies.

Air Force leaders shed more light on the communications issues facing the F-22 Raptor today, telling lawmakers that the plane will not be receiving the same datalink being developed for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

The Air Force will buy between 80 to 100 of its future stealth bombers that are expected to come online in the mid 2020s, Air Force Secretary Michael Donley told lawmakers today. “Between 80 and 100 is the target, this program is very much focused on affordability and poised for technical success,” said Donley during a Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee hearing this morning. This is a significant reduction from reports earlier this year that hinted at a 175-plane buy.

Distance kept the United States’ fleet of F-22 Raptors out of the fight over Libya, Air Force officials revealed today after weeks of speculation on the matter. Had Raptors been based in Europe or the Middle East, they would have been used in Operation Odyssey Dawn to enforce the no-fly zone over Libya, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz told Senate appropriators this morning.

Pentagon budget officials today took a new tack in urging lawmakers to get the DoD a budget quickly, saying the lack of cash for FY-11 is flying in the face of the efficiency efforts they spearheaded.

Amidst all the talk about Libya today, two U.S. combatant commanders took a moment to bring cyber warfare in to the spotlight, calling for increased public private partnership on cyber matters due to the fact that the vast majority of cyber operations occur outside of the DoD’s purview.

Keeping in line with his comments about streamlining the wartime contracting and acquisition process, Ashton Carter, the DoD’s weapons czar today said the Pentagon is working to integrate steps to buy weapons quickly into the its war plans.

Undersecretary of Defense Ashton Carter, today told the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan that the DoD must institutionalize a rapid and flexible acquisition process to meet the unpredictable demands of 21st Century contingency operations and low-intensity wars.

After weeks of being grounded the three late model F-35 Lighting II Joint Strike Fighter test jets have been cleared to fly. The jets’ return to flight comes after program officials tweaked maintenance procedures which had led to the failure of two generators and an oil leak during a test flight of an F-35A on March 9.

UPDATED: HASC Chair Promises Fight as DoD Announces Stop Work Order;
General Electric and Rolls Royce suffered what could be the final blow in the second great engine war today as the Pentagon announced it issued a stop work order for the Joint Strike Fighter’s second engine.

Congress should not require the Pentagon to create a stockpile of rare earth minerals because companies will adjust their behavior to the international marketplace, a group of experts said today. “The sky is not falling. Contrary to what you are reading in some newspapers and articles we are not going to run out of anything any time soon,” said MIT professor Robert Jaffe.

Libya, Bahrain, Egypt, North Korea, Haqqani Network, al Qaeda, Rwanda, Bosnia: the list of unpredictable and largely unforeseen threats goes on and on. Should the US build a military largely predicated on these threats, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates has argued. Or will we return to the primary model of the last 60 years or so, where we built a military focused on defeating one dominant threat anywhere on the globe. Nathan Freier of the Center for Strategic and International Security examines the choices and says the Pentagon better be ready to respond to small wars and other disorders.

With the UN-sanctioned operations over Libya growing more complex by the day, with allied jets crashing, pilots being rescued, cruise missiles slamming into air defenses and aircraft taking out Libyan tanks and the costs to American taxpayers soaring, it’s a good time to have some of our experts examine the basic question: is this a good idea? Doug Macgregor, retired Army colonel and pungent national security analyst, argues below that the Libyan operations are exactly the wrong sort of operations for America’s military to engage in.

One of China’s top space executives is scheduled to come to the US and speak next month at the National Space Symposium, the nation’s premier space conference. The speaker will be Lei Fanpei, vice president of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. He is not the first PRC space expert to appear at the […]

Lockheed Martin believes there is a good chance the US will recommit to the tri-nation MEADS missile defense program, driven by its smaller manpower requirements, ease of transport and higher reliability. And Germany and Italian officials told a senior Lockheed official that they remain committed to MEADS and other countries may well join the program sometime in the next two years.

The first Arab state has publicly committed to enforcing the no-fly zone over Libya — Qatar — as initial battle damage assessments of yesterday’s air strikes indicate Qaddafi’s air defense have been seriously degraded. On the home front, the first signs of open worry from Capitol Hill surfaced with the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee saying he was, “concerned that the use of military force in the absence of clear political objectives for our country risks entrenching the United States in a humanitarian mission whose scope and duration are not known at this point and cannot be controlled by us.”

Within an hour of the great quake striking Japan, the companies that supply commercial satellite pictures to the intelligence community and the Pentagon had dropped everything and begun providing images of stricken areas. Geoey and DigitialGlobe stopped shooting images for commercial clients and “began emergency collection” of images which were then pumped in almost real time through a computing cloud and on to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency’s special web portal set up for such purposes,

The folks at Geoeye sent us images of some of the worst hit areas and the Fukushima nuclear complex that were combined using Google Earth. The analysts at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and with the Japanese government are doubtless poring over similar images.

UPDATED: UN Security Council OKs No Fly Zone

While the Air Force Chief of Staff says it will take a week to set up, the Obama administration has shifted its stance and now supports creation of a no-fly zone in Libya and would support air to ground strikes, apparently fearing a bloody showdown in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi.