Air Combat Command’s 5th Combat Communications Group at Robins AFB, Ga., hosted the fourth United Architecture, a two-week exercise in which USAF and Royal Air Force combat communicators join forces—this time in the field. Robins journalist Holly Birchfield reports that 38 5th CCG airmen and 32 airmen from RAF’s 3 Field Communications Squadron spent the last two weeks in Americus, Ga., where they put their jointly developed air operability manual to the test. Maj. Corey Ramsby, US exercise commander, said that last year the groups deployed to RAF Fairford, UK, where they “validated” techniques developed “in the lab,” but that this fourth exercise provided a “field environment, simulating a bare-base.”
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.