The US Army’s forward operating base Qayyarah West, Iraq—known in theater as Q-West—is the front line for approximately 200 civil engineering airmen with the 557th Expeditionary RED HORSE Squadron. “We’re kind of like a contractor, and we support the Army wherever they need us,” says SrA. Jesse Gent, a structural journeyman. In between their construction jobs, the airmen run truck convoys throughout Iraq.
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.