Air Mobility Command aircraft operating in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq were shot at 215 times in 2006, Gen. Duncan McNabb, AMC commander, told attendees at AFA’s Air Warfare Symposium Friday. That’s the bad news. The good news is that a combination of tactics, techniques, procedures, and defensive systems mean that the aircraft were only hit six times, with no US aircraft shot down. McNabb noted, however, that enemy fire did bring down an RAF C-130 in late 2005.
The long-standing method for communicating data down from space via radio frequencies has the potential to create deadly data bottlenecks that could slow and stymie future operations, according to a new report from AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. The report makes the case for combining RF with optical communications…