Air Force Space Command has successfully transferred 48 installations, including 34 main operating bases, 13 geographically separated units, and Air Force Reserve Command headquarters, to the service’s single, centrally administered computer network, the AFNet, said AFSPC Vice Commander Lt. Gen. Michael Basla Friday. “Today, the AFNet migration is our number one cyberspace initiative,” he said in his speech at AFA’s Air Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Fla. With more than 187,000 users already transitioned to AFNet, the result is a “much more defensible construct,” he noted. Barksdale AFB, La.; Laughlin AFB, Tex.; Osan AB, Korea; Yokota AB, Japan; and Vance AFB, Okla., are currently shifting to AFNet and all Air Force locations worldwide are expected to complete the transition in 2013, he said. “For years, cyberspace systems and capabilities were acquired via ad-hoc methods by individual units and by the time we made our first moves toward a single Air Force network, we were dealing with a security nightmare,” said Basla. AFNet is “designed to address this issue.”
The launch last month of Orbital Watch, the new Space Force program to share declassified U.S. government threat intelligence with private sector satellite operators and other commercial space companies, comes amid increasing concern about Chinese and Russian development of anti-satellite weapons.