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Why Now? 

Why Now?: The Air Force on Monday declined to provide any answers on its new RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aerial vehicle beyond its initial bare-bones press release (see USAF Reveals New Stealth Drone), but Pentagon officials told Daily Report that USAF had officially acknowledged its existence to make it easier to integrate the vehicle into operations in Southwest Asia. Since the UAV will soon be operating openly from forward airfields, more photos are bound to emerge. (This same explanation was offered when the F-117 was brought out of the "black.") The service was getting a lot of questions not only from the press but also other nations about the aircraft. Word of the new drone first appeared in an April 2009 blog of the British magazine Unmanned Vehicles, but USAF refrained from comment until a French blog Secret Defense of Liberation newspaper published an actual—though grainy—photo on Dec. 1. Continue
 
12/8/2009 
Verbatim

Preemptive Action
"Since the [Defense] Department's acceptance of the independent estimates last fall, we've been, in just about every respect, acting as if the program were in a Nunn-McCurdy breach. ... We've been taking all of the mitigating and corrective action that we would take as if there were a Nunn-McCurdy breach."
—Air Force Secretary Michael Donley, discussing with reporters the restructure of the F-35 strike fighter program announced in February 2010 and the probability that the program will soon exceed Nunn-McCurdy cost-monitoring thresholds that would necessitate, per US law, a program review and corrective steps, Washington, D.C., March 2, 2010. 

Verbatim

Message for Grandma
"She has working for her as a citizen in the United States an Air Force Reserve that has some very talented, capable, patriotic, and willing individuals doing the business to keep this nation free. Just like her generation—the 'Greatest Generation'—was, I am very proud of the folks that we have got. If not the second greatest, then they are an extension of the greatest generation and they are ready, willing, and able to do the things that she would want them to do to make sure we keep our freedoms."
—Lt. Gen. Charles Stenner, Air Force Reserve chief, responding to a reporter's question on what the reporter should tell his 85-year-old grandmother to convey to her the importance of Air Force Reservists to the nation's security, Orlando, Fla., Feb. 19, 2010.

 

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