Tanker aircraft operating in US Central Command’s area of responsibility offloaded more than 1.05 billion pounds of fuel to more than 82,000 aircraft in 2010, according to statistics from Air Forces Central’s combined air and space operations center at an undisclosed air base in Southwest Asia. That’s an average of roughly 87.5 million pounds of off-loaded fuel each month. “I know my job has an effect on the war effort on a daily basis—and that is helping save lives,” said Capt. Wes Spurlock, a KC-10 pilot assigned to the 9th Air Refueling Squadron at Travis AFB, Calif., who served two combat tours in Southwest Asia last year. 2010 was the third straight year that tanker airmen offloaded more than one billion pounds of fuel to more than 80,000 receiver aircraft. (Scott report by MSgt. Scott T. Sturkol)
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.