The leader of the Air National Guard believes the Air National Guard needs more airmen to accomplish the missions assigned to it by the Air Force. That must be unwelcome news for an Air Force leadership that plans to cut around 22,000 slots from the Air Guard and Air Reserve components over the next five years, as part of an overall reduction of about 50,000 personnel. Lt. Gen. Daniel James III told lawmakers last week that ANG had “run three different scenarios” to reflect doing all and doing X percentage of what USAF expects the Air Guard to handle and “every time, we’ve come out with a number higher than 106,800 [air guardsmen].”
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.
