Despite criticism from the Guard and the governors, senior Air Force officials say they did, in fact, consult, and made the case for eliminating older aircraft and shifting assets to make units more efficient. Jumper told the commissioners, “We don’t consider disagreements with a few adjutant generals out there in the states as a rift between the Air Force and the National Guard.”
The Space Force is playing midwife to a new ecosystem of commercial satellite constellations providing alternatives to the service’s own Global Positioning Service from much closer to the Earth, making their signals more accurate and harder to jam.