As the Globemaster III racks up its 4 millionth flight hour, planners ready upgrades and begin to imagine what comes next. The Air Force’s 222 C-17s are the major portion of a global fleet of 275 aircraft flown by nine nations, including an international consortium. They are the go-to airframe to transfer personnel and materiel to combat zones and remote locales around the world, enduring conditions from dirt airstrips in the Syrian desert to ice and snow in Antarctica. Air Mobility Command anticipates keeping “the Moose” relevant out to around 2060, while it develops requirements for a “family of systems” that someday will replace it.

As the first flight of the B-21 Raider bomber draws closer, Gen. Timothy M. Ray, head of Air Force Global Strike Command, toured Northrop Grumman’s production facility and the test enterprise that will put the jet through its paces beginning next year.

The stand-up of the Space Force, and now its early overhaul and the creation of a new Space Systems Command, are all about resilience: Ensuring that space capabilities, which the whole country relies on, could survive a concerted attack by a near-peer adversary. As part of that drive, a new acquisition system is meant to ensure that new satellites and other space vehicles are cyber-secure before they’re put in orbit and stay that way afterward.

The Defense Logistics Agency is monitoring the military’s fuel inventory levels as a major cyberattack has halted operations of a large-scale fuel pipeline on the nation’s East Coast. Colonial Pipeline, which delivers about 45 percent of gasoline and jet fuel on the East Coast, stopped operations because of a ransomware attack targeting its systems.

Lockheed Martin is withdrawing personnel who support Iraq’s F-16 fleet from a major operating base because of threats from militias in the region, a step that will likely limit the fleet’s operations. The move comes after contractors temporarily left the base in recent months because of the threat from Iranian-backed militias.