Col. Timothy Vigil, who is 12th Air Force’s Warfighting Headquarters special assistant, gave his new boss—Lt. Gen. Norman Seip, commander of 12th Air Force—and the head of US Southern Command, Army Gen. John Craddock, a tour of 12th Air Force’s new Combined Air and Space Operations Center at Davis-Monthan AFB, Ariz. The new CAOC, which was originally expected to open this month, is still under construction, but officials expect it to be up and running in November. It will join five other operational “Falconer” centers around the world.
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…