The Air Force has decided to give control of most of the service’s combat search and rescue forces back to Air Combat Command, where they were about two years ago. In October 2003, USAF moved the bulk of CSAR assets—people and equipment—from ACC to Air Force Special Operations Command. (We wrote about the switch in August 2003.) The ACC commander at the time, Gen. Hal Hornburg, admitted that ACC had done “a less than adequate job” of budgeting for CSAR. What has changed
The Air Force awarded a $13.08 billion contract to the Sierra Nevada Corporation on April 26 for its Survivable Airborne Operations Center aircraft, the successor to the service’s E-4B “Doomsday” plane. Like the E-4B, officially called the National Airborne Operations Center, the SAOC will be meant to withstand a nuclear attack and keep…