US Transportation Command announced the release of a new strategy on Friday. The plan seeks to address the changing nature of global threats by prioritizing readiness, cyber capabilities, evolving to meet new challenges, and developing a flexible workforce. “We must anticipate and adapt to challenges that will require us to perform our missions more often in non-permissive, remote, austere, and distributed locations,” the report states. The command intends to meet these challenges, in part, through the use of “additive manufacturing to print exact working replicas of replacement parts” around the world instead of shipping them. Other solutions the report mentions include the use of “autonomous and robot-assisted ground and air refueling,” “drone delivery,” and “driverless vehicles.”
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…