Air Force 
battlefield airmen from Eielson AFB, Alaska, who have been training for a year-and-a-half with the Army’s 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team from nearby Ft. Wainwright, left with the 172nd for Iraq Sunday—marking USAF’s first joint effort with a Stryker unit. Some 20 tactical air control party airmen—members of Eielson’s 3rd Air Support Operations Squadron— will direct combat and ISR aircraft from their Strykers, each manned with an Army driver and gunman, reports the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. (Read here about TACPs and ALOs.)
The U.S. military is carrying out intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions along the southern border and off the coast of Mexico using U.S. Air Force RC-135 Rivet Joint and U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon aircraft as part of the Pentagon’s effort to secure the southern border at the direction of President…