Veteran picked for Air Force post

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump will nominate a former congresswoman and veteran who served on the National Security Council during President George H.W. Bush’s administration to be his Air Force secretary, the White House said Monday.

For mer re pre s e nt a t i ve Heather Wilson, R-N.M., is currently the president of the South Dakot a School of Mines and Technology, a science and engineering universit y in Rapids Cit y, South Dakota. She was the fifirst female veteran elected to a full term in Congress, and left the House in 1999 after a failed primary run for the Senate seat now held by Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M. She served in the Air Force in the 1980s after graduating from the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, leaving as a captain, and was a Rhodes scholar.

“Heather Wilson is going to make an outstanding Secretary of the Air Force,” Trump said in a statement.

Wilson, 56, said in the same statement that U.S. interests continue to be threatened, and that she will “do my best, working with our men and women in the military, to strengthen American air and space power to keep the country safe.”