Fleet wide aircraft readiness rates have remained consistent over the last two decades, but not the cost to operate and maintain the aircraft. “Our costs have increased pretty significantly just to attain those mission capable rates,” Faykes said. In the last decade alone, said Faykes, the cost to maintain readiness climbed 87 percent. An older fleet is requiring more and more money to keep in the sky.
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.
