The BRAC Commission wouldn’t do it, but the Dutch may be responsible for the Air National Guard unit in Springfield, Ohio, retaining a flying mission. Lt. Gen. Craig McKinley, the new ANG chief, said at AFA’s Air & Space Conference last week that the Netherlands Air Force may be interested in coming to the base as a foreign military sales F-16 flying training unit. Under BRAC 2005, the Ohio Air National Guard’s 178th Fighter Wing in Springfield must disperse its F-16s to other Air Force units by 2010.
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.