Air Force Secretary Michael Donley said current operations are eating away at the money available for future investment. Speaking at AFA’s Air Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Fla., on Feb. 24, Donley said the ratio of operations and maintenance spending compared to expenditures on research, development, test, and evaluation in Fiscal 2012 was 64 to 34, but in the Fiscal 2013 budget request, it’s 67:33. While that may not seem like a big shift, it represents a swing of about $3.5 billion, from $39.3 billion for RDT&E in Fiscal 2012 to $35.8 for that investment in next fiscal year’s request, according to Donley’s figures.
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.
