Task & Purpose

An EC-130 Compass Call from the 55th Electronic Combat Group at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona, flew side by side with an EA-37B that will replace it at the 55th Electronic Combat Group on a “fini flight” for the older plane. The Compass Call served as one of the Air Force’s most secretive platforms. Along with their role jamming enemy radar, the EC-130 Compass Calls at Davis-Monthan hold a perhaps unbreakable record as the service’s longest continuously deployed unit.

A F-22 pilot had to think quickly and work out a plan to save his plane when a tribute flight went wrong. After losing a landing wheel, Capt. Michael Cloninger of the 90th Fighter Squadron had to find a way to safely land the jet. His successful belly landing of the F-22 earned him the Air Force’s top flight safety award. This week, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach presented him with the 2025 Koren Kolligian Jr. Trophy.

Hovering over Georgia this summer, National Guard helicopter crews flew from field to field searching for marijuana being grown illegally on private property. The Georgia Guard calls part of the mission “probable cause generation,” a role in a decades-old counterdrug partnership with civilian law enforcement where military helicopters provide police an aerial platform to search for marijuana. This summer, officials say they took a different approach in how they conduct those searches.

A soldier was awarded a Bronze Star for valor in the wake of a deadly Iranian drone strike on a U.S. Army operations center in Kuwait at the start of the war with Iran. On March 1, Iran launched a series of retaliatory strikes on American bases around the Middle East during the opening hours of the U.S.-Israel war with Iran. One of those attacks struck an Army position at Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, killing six Army Reserve soldiers.

The Army is weighing several changes to its uniform regulations, ranging from moving ranks to the collar for soldiers wearing everyday camouflage uniforms to possibly wearing baseball caps, or even making them responsible for maintaining a high shine on their dress shoes.

When American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center, millions of Americans instinctively thought it was a horrible accident. Then the second plane struck, and we realized grave coincidences are for the naïve. Al-Qaida’s attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in New York, at the Pentagon, and on United Flight 93 in Pennsylvania initiated two decades of conflict.

Aerial refueling tankers are the backbone of U.S. airpower, but the tanker fleet is falling apart. Most of the jets are KC-135s, which are over 60 years old, and the jet that’s supposed to replace them, the KC-46, is plagued by development issues and is already running low on spare parts. With no let-up in operational tempo, it’s becoming more difficult for the Air Force to maintain its tanker fleet.

A new handbook gives troops pointers on how to scan the sky for drones, how to estimate the length of a football field, and reminders that innocuous things like the shine of their glasses or left-behind MRE garbage can give their position away.

Flying across the world with modern GPS is not much harder than using a navigation app in your car, which is why most military planners expect the global satellite system to be knocked out early in any major future conflict. To prepare for a no-GPS sky, an Air Force flight last month over Alaska made a major leap toward how the U.S. military plans to fly to and from targets without the satellite system, overseen by the Pentagon’s newest technology unit.

Military members in jobs deemed to be closest to combat will have to keep up higher scores on their annual fitness tests under new Pentagon rules, though each service will decide on its own what those standards will be. A memo released Aug. 31 by the Department of Defense will require all “combat arms” troops — jobs whose duties and training are primarily aimed at direct combat — will need to maintain fitness scores of at least   70% in their service-specific fitness tests.