President Joe Biden plans to shift U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia and will conduct diplomacy through Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz rather than his powerful son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the White House said on Tuesday.
By
Theresa Hitchens on February 15, 2021 at 3:14 PM
DARPA’s LongShot drone, Northrop Grumman concept art
WASHINGTON: DARPA plans to flight test a prototype of a novel air-launched drone one designed to launch its own high-speed air-to-air missiles as soon as the first half of 2024.
LongShot is conceived as an autonomous, air-launched uninhabited aerial vehicle (UAV) that can serve as a sort of mothership, launching its own air-to-air missiles once in range of enemy aircraft.
DARPA has tapped General Atomics, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to provide preliminary designs under Phase 1 of its new LongShot program. LongShot aims to demonstrate a drone that would be launched by fighters or bombers flying at stand-off ranges, autonomously fly into enemy airspace, and then launch its own air-to-air missiles to take down enemy aircraft.
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Benjamin (Bibi) NetanyahuMORE “soon” and that the phone call would be the new president’s first to a leader in the Middle East .
“His first call with a leader in the region will be with Prime Minister Netanyahu. It will be soon. I don’t have an exact date for you,” Psaki told reporters at an afternoon briefing.
“Israel is, of course, an ally. Israel is a country where we have an important strategic security relationship and our team is fully engaged, not at the head-of-state level quite yet but very soon,” she added.
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Biden has held calls with a number of U.S. allies in Europe and Asia, including the leaders of France, Canada, the United Kingdom and South Korea, but not Netanyahu, spurring questions about why Israel had been left out of the group. Psaki said last week that it did not represent an “intentional diss.”