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The Russian ministry of defense has declared 2024 as the year when several nuclear weapons will enter the inventory of Moscow’s strategic forces, moving a number of goalposts that were meant to be reached last year. Deputy Defense Minister Alexei Krivoruchko said on Jan. 26 that the entry into the armed forces of the Sarmat strategic missile system, Tu-160M bombers, and the Borei-A nuclear submarine Knyaz Pozharsky are the main tasks for 2024.
U.S. officials have confirmed to CBS News that plans have been approved for a series of strikes over a number of days against targets—including Iranian personnel and facilities—inside Iraq and Syria. The strikes will come in response to drone and rocket attacks targeting U.S. forces in the region, including the drone attack on Sunday that killed three U.S. service members at the Tower 22 base inside Jordan, near the Syrian border.
In a first, the Air Force’s newest wing, focused on electronic warfare reprogramming, integrated with the service’s famed Weapons School to expose students to its capabilities and provide more realistic training. The 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing was created in 2021 as a result of the Air Force’s landmark electromagnetic spectrum study to reinvigorate spectrum within the service. The unit has three primary missions: rapid reprogramming, target and waveform development, and assessment of the Air Force’s EW capabilities.
The U.S. Air Force’s Air Mobility Command is testing a new tool that uses artificial intelligence to plan moves as the Pentagon grapples with tough logistics challenges in the Pacific. The cloud-based tool, called Artiv, promises to complete “highly complicated operational wargaming analysis” in minutes instead of days, said Col. Bradley Rueter, who leads the command’s Commander’s Initiative Group.
The U.S. Air Force is pressing forward with plans to demonstrate point-to-point rocket travel perhaps in a few years. Among the reasons for optimism are SpaceX’s launch rates and ability to reuse rockets, which “dramatically changes the business case,” said Gregory Spanjers, chief scientist overseeing the rocket cargo program at the Air Force Research Laboratory.
Amid growing demand from U.S. military commands for capabilities that will allow satellites greater maneuverability and longer on-orbit lifetimes, DOD and industry officials are pointing to each other to spark a profitable market for the new technologies required. “From a military perspective, when we talk about commercial and the space economy, what we’re really doing is attempting to take advantage of the pursuit of the space economy without having to be the anchor tenant for all of those things,” Lt. Col. Leon Killings, deputy director of the Space Force’s Servicing, Mobility, and Logistics program, told a panel at the annual SpaceCom conference.
The Defense Department would have to undertake a detailed study of service members’ and spouses’ access to maternity care within the military health care system under bills being introduced Feb. 1 by a bipartisan group of lawmakers from both chambers of Congress. Lawmakers hope the bills will ultimately improve access to prenatal, birthing, and postpartum care for those covered by Tricare amid reports in recent years of women struggling to be seen by an obstetrician.
The acting head of the Pentagon’s independent weapons testing office says that while his team has developed new digital tools to evaluate the military’s most expensive systems, the war in Ukraine demonstrates the deadly effectiveness of U.S. weapons that have been put through rigorous live-fire test and evaluation.
The Space Force is expected to make history later this year when it launches its first Guardian into space on a NASA mission. Col. Nick Hague will pilot SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission, which will carry four crew members aboard the company’s Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station sometime in August or later, the service announced Jan. 31.
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