Two Americans and one coalition service member were killed and another 12 people were wounded in a March 11 rocket attack on Camp Taji, Iraq. Eighteen 107mm Katyusha rockets, which are traditionally linked to Iranian-backed militias, struck the base, located north of Baghdad. Iraqi Security Forces located the launcher, on the back of a truck, “a few miles” from the base, which hosts coalition personnel as well as rotary wing aircraft, Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve said in a statement.

Air Force acquisition chief Will Roper said March 11 the Air Force is still working on promising research despite a largely stagnant science and technology budget request for fiscal 2021 that is worrying some lawmakers. As the U.S. looks to develop advanced military systems like improved hypersonic weapons and enabling technologies such as artificial intelligence faster than Russia and China, Roper lamented that the service’s research fund lost ground to more pressing priorities. Nuclear modernization, joint all domain command and control, and the effort to stand up a Space Force pulled money and resources away from basic research in the 2021 request released last month. “Sometimes the innovation voices did not win at budget closeout,” Roper said. “[There are] a lot of things on the Air Force’s plate … and unfortunately when we had to make the budget balance, we had to look for areas to take risk.”

The first 747-8 aircraft has begun the modification process to become a VC-25B, or the next Air Force One. The process, which began Feb. 25, will include cutting out parts of the aircraft’s skin and structure in the forward and aft lower lobes to install new “superpanels” with structural upgrades and cutouts for doors, according to a March 11 release. The service expects to deliver the two VC-25Bs in 2024 to replace the two existing VC-25As. The aircraft are expected to serve for 30 years.

The Space Force aims to release details of its new satellite communications acquisition strategy this summer as the service considers how to combine government and privately owned technologies into one seamless enterprise. Space Force boss Gen. Jay Raymond last month signed off on a vision to overhaul how the service handles SATCOM. Clare Grason, head of the USSF’s commercial SATCOM office, said they have contracted help to figure out how to move to a service-based model, where the military can pay for comms by how much it uses, like per byte. The Pentagon wants to rely on a mixture of military-specific and commercial SATCOM to grow the amount of data it can pass around the world, share the cost of global comms with companies, and fall back on the growing pool of satellites and ground terminals if some malfunction or are attacked or destroyed.

A March 10 U.S. airstrike killed five al-Shabab targets in Somalia without harming any civilians, U.S. Africa Command reported later the same day. The attack—the fifth U.S. strike in Somalia this month—brings the number of al-Shabab militants killed by American airstrikes in March into the double digits.