Air Force Special Operations Command can expect to get four AC-130 Gunships this year and 10 MC-130H Combat Talon IIs by 2010, if Congress approves Air Force budget plans. Air Force leaders Michael Wynne and Gen. Michael Moseley told members of the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday that USAF also supports the AFSOC effort to expand its combat aviation advisory forces to “assess, train, advise, assist, and integrate more nations’ air forces into the [global war on terror.]” And, for the future, they said that USAF is working the “persistent surface attack system of systems as the follow-on to the current AC-130 Gunship.”
An important U.S. Air Force E-3 Sentry AWACS command and control plane was among the aircraft damaged in a March 27 Iranian missile and drone attack on Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia, people familiar with the matter told Air & Space Forces Magazine.