Airmen and F-16s of the 23rd Fighter Squadron, Spangdahlem AB, Germany, have taken over NATO’s air policing mission for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, replacing German Fighter Wing 71. NATO units have been providing routine air defense—on three-month rotations—for the three Baltic states, since Lithuania joined the alliance in March 2004. Poland will replace the Spang unit in January.
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.