Roger That: 16 former majors who were forced out of the Air Force file class-action lawsuit

Sixteen former Air Force majors are suing the service after they were involuntarily discharged in 2011, according to Air Force Times.

The officers, represented by Tully Rinckey PLLC, are demanding the Air Force reinstate them to active duty, pay their back pay, and reimburse them for fees and costs under the Equal Access to Justice Act, according to a release from the Washington, D.C., law firm.

The law firm said the fault lies with then-Secretary of the Air Force Michael B. Donley who blocked their 16 clients from completing 20 years of service to qualify for retirement.

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Just weeks after previously closed military ground combat and special operations jobs were declared open to women, the Marine Corps' special operations command has had its first female applicants, according to Military.com.

Maj. Gen. Joseph Osterman, commanding general of MARSOC, told Military.com the command has already received several requests from female Marines to enter the assessment and selection pipeline to become a critical skills operator. While Osterman could not specify how many women had applied, he said the first female applicant surfaced only days after the Jan. 4 deadline Defense Secretary Ash Carter set for new jobs to open.

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A former Navy SEAL who shot Osama bin Laden and wrote a bestselling book about the raid is now the subject of a widening federal criminal investigation into whether he used his position as an elite commando for personal profit while on active duty, according to two people familiar with the case, according to The Intercept.

Matthew Bissonnette, the former SEAL and author of No Easy Day, a firsthand account of the 2011 bin Laden operation, had already been under investigation by both the Justice Department and the Navy for revealing classified information. The two people familiar with the probe said the current investigation, led by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, expanded after Bissonnette agreed to hand over a hard drive containing an unauthorized photo of the al Qaeda leader’s corpse. The government has fought to keep pictures of bin Laden’s body from being made public for what it claims are national security reasons.

The retired SEAL voluntarily provided investigators with a copy of his hard drive as part of an agreement not to prosecute him for unlawfully possessing classified material, according to the two people familiar with the deal.

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Defense News is reporting that Chinese soldiers were “co-conspirators” in a plot to steal US military secrets, including designs for the F-35 stealth fighter and other warplanes, according to a Canadian newspaper.

The unnamed pair allegedly worked with a recent immigrant to Canada now facing extradition to the United States to identify and raid secure databases of US military contractors, said the Globe and Mail newspaper, citing a prosecution summary of a cyber espionage probe launched in 2014.

It is the first publicly stated link to the Chinese army in a hacking case that first came to light in 2013, when US officials revealed a broad Chinese campaign of espionage had gained access to designs for two dozen major weapons systems critical to missile defenses, combat aircraft and naval ships.

This story was originally published January 21, 2016 at 9:24 AM with the headline "Roger That: 16 former majors who were forced out of the Air Force file class-action lawsuit."