Nine members at Air Armament Center, Eglin AFB, Fla., joined forces last year, according to one team member, “to greatly improve the lethality and effectiveness” of the AC-130 gunship—and they did it six months ahead of schedule. They must have succeeded because the Air Force recently named the “Guns and Ammo Team” as the Outstanding Engineering Team for 2004. What did they produce? Two new 105mm rounds (PGU-45 and PGU-43) and the FMU-160B fuse. Officials at Air Force Special Operations Command, which owns the gunships, called the result “the biggest single weapon lethality upgrade for the AC-130 since the 1970s.”
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.
