According to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the Pentagon already has taken $1.6 billion from the Air Force and Navy to turn over to the Army. The Air Force share is around $880 million, which came out of personnel accounts and which Air Force leaders believe will be coming back by the end of the summer. All hinges on the still embattled war supplemental funding bill. However, Gates also told the Senate Appropriations defense panel last week that DOD would probably reprogram more funds “in a few days” to sustain the Army for another week. He concluded that if the Pentagon “pulled out all the stops, used everything possible available to us, we could probably fund the war into July, but I would tell you, the impact on the Department of Defense in terms of disruption and canceled contracts and programs would be huge if we had to do that.”
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.
