The good folks at Kunsan AB, South Korea, actually got to spend some of the money they saved by being frugal with their precious dollars. According to the Wolf Pack Warrior, 8th Fighter Wing got more than $8 million in “fallout” money for Fiscal 2006. Actually, this is an annual occurrence—and marathon—around the Air Force, where money left over from buying items more cheaply than estimated goes into an end-of-year pot. The trick is to race to spend the fallout money before the midnight curfew rings on the current fiscal year. The 8th FW, like other USAF units, didn’t spend its fallout money on frills; instead it went for such items as aircraft parts and land mobile radios and some quality of life things, such as heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems for dorms.
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.
