Today's D Brief: Afghan pilots' fate up in the air; USAF minority recruiting takes a hit; Top Army PAO suspended; And a bit more.
By Ben Watson and Jennifer Hlad
September 23, 2021 11:16 AM ET
The D Brief
A “large portion” of the U.S. Air Force’s C-17 fleet is reportedly out of service for repairs following hundreds of emergency evacuation flights out of Kabul as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. Out of the U.S. military’s 387 flights, “330 were flown by C-17 Globemaster III aircraft and those planes carried out 79,000 of the more than 124,000 evacuees,” the Wall Street Journal’s Nancy Youssef reports.
One reason this matters: President Joe Biden nominated Air Force Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost, who is currently in charge of Air Mobility Command, to lead the U.S. Transportation Command. Her drama-free confirmation hearing already happened this morning before the Senate Armed Services Committee, which flagged no significant opposition to her likely new job.
Elsewhere, U.S. officials are trying to biometrically ID Afghan pilots who escaped to Tajikistan as Kabul was falling in mid-August, Reuters reported Wednesday from Washington. More than 140 of them are “detained at a sanatorium in a mountainous, rural area outside of the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, waiting and hoping for over a month for transfer by the United States.” More than a dozen other Afghans are reportedly in more relaxed conditions in Dushanbe.
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2021/09/the-d-brief-september-23-2021/185564/
