Operation Noble Eagle—the long-running homeland air defense mission that has consumed some 43,000 sorties since the 9/11 terrorist attacks—is a stateside endeavor but that doesn’t mean it can sustain itself without deployments. NORAD reports that several thousand airmen deploy each year to support ONE.
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.