Air Force Plans to Start Building New Over-the-Horizon Radars in Oregon in 2028

April 21, 2025 | By Unshin Lee Harpley

The Air Force has tapped sites in Oregon to build its first two new Over-the-Horizon Radars, capable of detecting inbound missile threats from up to 4,000 nautical miles away.

In a notice published in the Federal Register last week, the service announced it was initiating an environmental review expected to last two years across two regions in the state.

Compared to other conventional radars, the OTHR enables long-range detection by bouncing radio waves off the ionosphere—starting roughly 50 miles above Earth—and beyond the planet’s curvature, allowing it to detect a wide range of threats like bombers, cruise missiles, and surface ships. Once a threat is detected, the radar system passes target location onto other manned or unmanned aircraft, or land-based radars that can reconfirm the type and number of threats.

The radar consists of two main components: the transmitter, which sends out the high-frequency radio waves, and the receiver that captures the reflected signals.

*Homeland Defense Over-the-Horizon Radar Systems 1 and 2*, source: Department of Air Force, https://othrnweis.com/project-overview/

“The proposal is for two transmitters to be in Christmas Valley, Ore., and two receivers in Whitehorse Ranch, Ore.,” a spokesperson for the 366th Fighter Wing, host wing at Mountain Home Air Force Base, Ida., told Air & Space Forces Magazine. The two sites are approximately 200 miles apart to minimize signal interference between the transmitter and receiver, and Mountain Home would “manage” the systems.

Both locations are unincorporated areas of the state without active government structures. The Christmas Valley area is currently owned and managed by the Oregon Military Department, where the Air Force plans to acquire approximately 2,622 acres to construct the transmitters side by side. The Whitehorse Ranch area, a federally managed region under the Bureau of Land Management, will provide nearly 5,000 acres for the two receivers to be built. Additional infrastructure, including communication cabling and maintenance buildings, will also be built.

The Air Force expects the final environmental statement to wrap up by September 2027, and if the review is favorable, construction on the two radars will begin “at the end of 2028,” the spokesperson added.

If, however, the initiative were not to move forward, the project’s official website states that “threats could approach North America without early detection, resulting in reduced decision time for military and national leaders to deter, de-escalate, or defeat threats, placing North American homeland security at risk.”

The Air Force has been eyeing OTHR radars for years; Gen. Glen VanHerck, the former head of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, has said they will give the U.S. military “better eyes around the world.” After a Chinese spy balloon transited the continental U.S. in early 2023, VanHerck reiterated his call to lawmakers, saying he had a gap in domain awareness technologies and needed OTHR fielded in a few years, not the better part of a decade.

In the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress directed the service to procure up to six OTHRs. However, in June 2024 the Air Force told Congress that it would no longer fund the program in FY24 as planned, postponing the decision to 2026.

VanHerck’s successor, Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, has reiterated the calls for OTHR and a better domain awareness network to detect threats. Earlier this month, Guillot told lawmakers that these radars are “critical to continental defense,” forming, alongside other systems, the “foundation for the Golden Dome construct”—President Trump’s initiative for the nation’s comprehensive missile defense.

“We can’t defeat what we can’t see,” Guillot, told lawmakers April 1. “To that end, I appreciate the department and congressional support for fielding all domain capabilities, such as Airborne Moving Target Indicator satellites, Over the Horizon Radars, the E-7 Wedgetail, and Integrated Undersea Surveillance System (IUSS)… Looking forward, NORAD and NORTHCOM modernization is crucial to outpacing our competitors.”

Lockheed Gets $180 Million to Convert Three F-35 Jets to Test Aircraft

April 21, 2025 | By John A. Tirpak

Lockheed Martin received a $180 million contract modification April 21 to convert three F-35s to flight sciences aircraft, the Pentagon announced. The work is needed “to prevent any increase in the test capability gap,” per the contract announcement.

The F-35 Joint Program Office has urged Congress for several years to expand its test fleet, so as to supplement aircraft that are becoming structurally fatigued and maintain a high tempo of testing as the program moves from the Technology Refresh 3 program to Block 4 improvements.

The contract modification “adds scope to procure materials, parts, and components in support of the conversion,” the Pentagon said. Conversion of production-representative aircraft to flight sciences test aircraft typically involves adding equipment such as spin chutes, cameras, load-sensing instrumentation, telemetry gear, and other equipment, while removing some hardware not needed for the test function.

The converted aircraft will also “allow for future, holistic flight science testing of Block 4 capabilities for the Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy, non-U.S. Department of Defense program partners, and Foreign Military Sales customers,” the Pentagon said. The work is to be completed by December 2028.

Delays in testing for TR-3 led to the government putting a yearlong hold on accepting F-35 deliveries from 2023-2024. The hold was lifted last summer, when program director Lt. Gen. Michael Schmidt determined that the TR-3 software was sufficiently stable to allow safe and productive flight operations.

The JPO has identified a current shortage of test aircraft and looming aircraft retirements as partially to blame for delays in testing TR-3. The JPO has also said the scope of the Block 4 upgrade will require a higher test tempo than has been achieved in recent years in order to get operational capability to the field in a timely manner.

The JPO originally planned to convert six aircraft for flight sciences work but increased that number to nine, which are to be sourced from 18th Lot of F-35s. The additional three aircraft were added to the JPO request by an amendment in the fiscal 2025 Air Force budget sponsored by Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.). Schmidt told Air & Space Forces Magazine in 2024 that the test team has been supplementing its force with production aircraft, but that these are not the optimal solution for flight sciences testing.

The Government Accountability Office has warned that sourcing the jets from Lot 18 means they likely won’t be delivered until 2029.

The Navy awarded the contract, as it currently has acquisition authority over the program.

New Doc Spells Out How USSF Will Use Space Control to Gain Space Superiority

April 21, 2025 | By Greg Hadley

Standoff strike. Defensive escorts. Deception and dispersal.

The Space Force spelled out how it plans to fight a war in space in a new document last week, defining and refreshing many terms already familiar to military planners as USSF leaders seek to “normalize” orbital warfare.

“There’s been this undercurrent of ‘Space is special’ for decades—it’s classified,” said retired Air Force Col. Jennifer Reeves, now a fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. “And I think this is trying to do the exact opposite. It’s saying, ‘No, no, we are a warfighting service the way everybody else is a warfighting service. There is a joint lexicon here that applies to us as well, and this is what it is.’ And then they go into a deeper dive on some of the things on how it’s specific in space.”

The new “Space Warfighting: A Framework for Planners” lays out Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman’s vision as proclaimed at the AFA Warfare Symposium that the service would do “whatever it takes” to achieve space superiority.

“Space control comprises the activities required to contest and control the space domain,” the framework states. “The desired outcome of space control operations is space superiority. Space control consists of offensive and defensive actions, referred to as counterspace operations.”

The document lists more than a dozen types of counterspace operation:

Orbital pursuit, or maneuvering close to an adversary spacecraft before employing weapons

Standoff strike, or space- or terrestrial-based long-range fires that can attack without needing to get close to the target

Electromagnetic or cyber attacks on the networks that link an adversary on Earth to their satellites in orbit

Strikes on terrestrial facilities an adversary needs to access space or control its assets in space

Escort, or “Dedicated protection for friendly spacecraft using space-to-space capabilities.”

Suppression of adversary targeting

Passive defensive operations like deception, dispersal, and mobility

The Space Force does not yet have the ability to perform all the operations it lists—the framework mentions hitting terrestrial targets with space-based fires, for example—but by taking an expansive approach, the service is preparing Guardians—and the rest of the Pentagon—to think differently about how they use space, said retired Space Force Col. Charles Galbreath, also a fellow with the Mitchell Institute.

“In five years, we’ll look back at this document and say, ‘We have evolved our thinking even further,’” Galbreath said. “So this is a good snapshot and a forward vector, because some of these things are not here today, but they are things that people are thinking about and that might be essential. And they’re also things that our adversaries could do to us.”

The document dives into the functions necessary to perform counterspace operations, such as communication, maneuver, intelligence, command and control, and targeting—all familiar terms in joint doctrine.

“It’s trying to say, ‘OK, Space Force planners, these are the terms you should be using when we’re talking about warfighting in space,’ and to help organize our thinking and our plans and strategies,” Galbreath said.

At the same time, it acknowledges space-specific considerations. Planners have to develop new rules of engagement and measures of effectiveness, and consider the physics of spaceflight and the impact of debris in orbit.

“It’s this balance of trying to use the common lexicon so everyone understands where we are,” Reeves said. “But then on the other side, there are some unique characteristics of the domain, much like there are unique characteristics of every domain … that we have to take into consideration.”

Space Superiority

The new framework defines terms and their importance for the joint force.

“Space superiority allows military forces in all domains to operate at a time and place of their choosing without prohibitive interference from space or counterspace threats, while also denying the same to an adversary,” the document states.

Given the vastness of space, it is unlikely any actor will achieve complete superiority at all times. So the framework calls for “concentrating effects” and doing so at“the time and place of our choosing,” just as Air Force leaders do for air superiority.

Achieving superiority is fundamental to the rest of the U.S. military, Saltzman asserts in the document. “Space superiority is not only a necessary precondition for Joint Force success but also something for which we must be prepared to fight,” Saltzman wrote. “Gained and maintained, it unlocks superiority in other domains, fuels Coalition lethality, and fortifies troop survivability. It is therefore the basis from which the Joint Force projects power, deters aggression, and secures the homeland.”

DOD’s Transgender Ban Is Caught in Courts, Leaving Some Troops in Limbo

April 21, 2025 | By David Roza

Hundreds, or possibly thousands, of transgender service members have returned to work after two judges ordered preliminary injunctions blocking Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ban of transgender service members and recruits. But the long-term future for transgender service members will remain uncertain until these and possibly other cases play out in the courts.

Two U.S. District Court judges, one in the District of Columbia and the other in the Western District of Washington state, each ordered preliminary injunctions in March, blocking the ban from being enforced pending judicial review of the legality of the order.

The Pentagon appealed both orders. The D.C. appeals court granted an administrative stay, putting the lower court’s ruling on hold March 27. But it did so with a caveat: The government may not start discharging transgender service members while the court continues to review the government’s request for an emergency stay. The D.C. appeals court will hear oral arguments on that question on April 22.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, reviewing the other case, denied the government’s request for an administrative stay, then denied the government’s request for an emergency stay on April 18.

Following the March ruling, in order to comply with the injunction, the military services ordered back to work those transgender troops who had been placed on administrative leave prior to the order. They also suspended a policy requiring transgender military members to follow the dress, grooming, and physical fitness standards that applied to their birth sex. At the same time, the military paused both voluntary and involuntary separations for transgender troops, and lifted its hold on shipping transgender recruits to basic military training. A requirement that transgender members use the personal pronouns and bathrooms appropriate to their sex at birth was also suspended.

Now that the ninth circuit has denied the emergency stay, the ban cannot be enforced, said Shannon Minter, the legal director at the National Center for Lesbian Rights and one of the lead attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the D.C. case.

Oral arguments for a stay order, such as those scheduled for April 22, are unusual; such cases are usually decided based on written briefs, Minter said. “I think [the appeals judges] are just trying to be extremely careful and make sure they issue the most well-informed, thoughtful decision they can,” he said.

The government can still appeal to the Supreme Court for an emergency stay. Either way, fully resolving the case at that level could take years. A preliminary injunction blocking a 2017 attempt to limit transgender military service took two years to resolve, with the Supreme Court issuing an unsigned 5-4 decision to stay that lower-court ruling. A similar outcome is likely this time, as the court’s conservative majority has only grown since then.

There is no statute barring the military from discriminating based on gender identity, said retired Air Force Col. Joshua Kastenberg, a former Air Force judge now teaching law at the University of New Mexico.

“From a legal perspective of where the law is right now, the plaintiffs have a higher hill to climb than the administration does on this,” Kastenberg said.

For now, plaintiffs in the D.C. case, including 15 transgender troops and five recruits, would like to put the ban behind them and focus on work and training, said Jennifer Levi, senior director of transgender and queer rights at GLAD Law, which is also representing the plaintiffs. That could be more difficult for transgender troops who accepted voluntary separation offers from the administration earlier this year. All such separations are presently on hold.

“It remains a fraught time in limbo and every individual is facing different circumstances,” said Col. Bree Fram, a transgender Guardian who noted she was sharing her personal views and not speaking on behalf of the Space Force or the government.

The Ban

President Donald Trump issued an executive order soon after his inauguration requiring the Pentagon to establish rules barring transgender individuals from military service. “It is the policy of the United States Government to establish high standards for troop readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity,” the order states. “This policy is inconsistent with the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria.”

Gender dysphoria refers to the stress or anxiety people can feel, sometimes to severe levels, when their gender identity does not match the sex or gender they were assigned at birth. Not all transgender individuals feel gender dysphoria, but for those who do, transitioning to a different gender can help, according to the American Psychiatric Association. Transitioning can be accomplished through behavioral changes, such as dress and mannerisms, or through medical interventions, such as hormone replacement therapy or gender-transition surgery.

In February, a senior defense official said there were 4,240 service members known to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and about 1,000 members have received gender-transition surgery since 2014; it is unclear how many of them are still serving. But not all transgender troops are diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and not all those who do receive surgery. Estimates of the number of transgender individuals currently serving in the military range from between 1,320 and 6,630, according to a RAND study, to 15,500 according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, which bills itself as “the leading research center on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy.”

There are no systems for tracking precise numbers of transgender service members, said Alex Wagner, who was Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for manpower and reserve affairs from 2022 to January 2025. “There are only two sexes specified in [the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System], and our uniform, grooming, and PT standards are based on those,” Wagner said.

Courts generally defer to the military’s judgment on matters of national security, wrote judges Ana Reyes and Benjamin Settle, of the D.C. District Court and the Western District of Washington, respectively. In this case, however, they decided that deference was “unjustified” considering the possible harm to the plaintiffs’ livelihood, the alleged violation of equal protection and due process guarantees under the Fifth Amendment, and what they described as a lack of evidence to prove the government’s case.

The government agrees “that Plaintiffs are mentally and physically fit to serve, have ‘served honorably,’ and ‘have satisfied the rigorous standards’ demanded of them,” Reyes wrote in her opinion. “Plaintiffs, they acknowledge, have ‘made America safer.’ So why discharge them and other decorated soldiers? Crickets from Defendants on this key question.”

Reyes, a Biden appointee, issued her injunction March 18, and Settle, who was appointed by then-President George W. Bush, issued his March 27.

Between the two cases, the plaintiffs included a Navy fighter pilot, an Army Special Forces medic, an Army artillery officer, an Air Force weapons officer, a Space Force satellite operator, and an ammunition loader on an AC-130 gunship, among other troops.

NGAD Images Doctored to Hide Most, If Not All, True Design Features

April 18, 2025 | By John A. Tirpak

Images of the F-47 Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter, released by the Air Force on March 21 when the program was awarded to Boeing, are mere placeholders and aren’t intended to accurately portray the aircraft, despite showing only a small portion of it, Air Force and industry officials told Air & Space Forces Magazine. The idea is to keep adversaries guessing about the true nature of the NGAD design.

The images show a stealthy-looking aircraft from its nose and cockpit back to the leading edges of the wings, which display pronounced dihedral, or an upward-angle. They also show canard foreplanes, which appear to be fixed, not articulated. No air intakes are shown.

Although many aviation experts have penned extensive analyses of the F-47 images, particularly of the canards—the use of which would be difficult to square with the notion of the F-47 as an “extremely low observable” design—they should be “taken with a large grain of salt,” an Air Force official said.

“We aren’t giving anything away in those pictures,” he said. “You’ll have to be patient” to see what it really looks like, he said, adding “Is there a resemblance? Maybe.”

A former senior Pentagon official, asked at the time of the F-47 announcement about the unusual canard and wing configuration, replied, “Why would you assume that’s the actual design?”

Sources said that, in anticipation of the NGAD announcement, Boeing artists produced images that already deliberately distorted some of the NGAD’s features, and the Air Force then further altered them. Boeing Defense, Space, and Security does not use any of the released images on its website and did not include them in its NGAD announcement press releases.

An Air Force spokesperson noted that the two images are available on the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS), where they are labeled as “artist renderings.” An Air Force spokesperson said they are “free to use.”

Shown is a graphical artist rendering of the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) Platform. U.S. Air Force graphic

As for the canards, the former defense official said “it’s possible to have canards and be stealthy,” but stopped short of saying that they are indeed a feature of the F-47.

China’s J-20 Mighty Dragon fighter, whose stealth Air Force officials have characterized as being in the same class as that of the F-22, employs a canard and delta wing design, but deflection of those control surfaces have to be managed extremely carefully so as to not to break the angles required to be low-observable to radar.

The Air Force has a long history of withholding imagery of stealth aircraft until the real articles are about to break cover and fly where they can be seen—and photographed—by the public. But even then, the Air Force has consistently shown only distorted pictures in the early days of revealing new stealth aircraft.

B-2

In April 1988, the Air Force released the first official image of the Northrop B-2A stealth bomber; a painting that blurred-over the aircraft’s exhausts and presented the aircraft from an angle that made it difficult to determine its true wing angle of sweep, size, and intake configuration.

F-117

In November 1988, Pentagon spokesman Dan Howard displayed a heavily doctored photograph of the then-secret Lockheed F-117 stealth strike aircraft at a press briefing. The first image was foreshortened to disguise the true angle of sweep of the F-117’s wings, and create ambiguity about its engine intakes, exhausts, sensor apertures and size. The tactic was so successful that model companies rushed to production with kits that featured broad wings like those later seen on the B-2 bomber, rather than the true narrow, arrowhead shape of the F-117. The Air Force only fully revealed the F-117 in 1990, because the jet, which had previously only flown at night and mainly in restricted airspace, was about to participate in daytime training missions.

F-22

Lockheed used fictional but consistent imagery of a delta-wing fighter with canards in its late 1980s advertising during the Advanced Tactical Fighter competition. Only when the Air Force officially rolled out the YF-22 in 1990 was the true, conventional planform of the fighter revealed.

B-21

The first artist’s rendering of the B-21 Raider, released in 2016, obscured the air intakes and exhausts, and left most of the cockpit transparencies in shadow; again presenting the aircraft from an angle that made it hard to determine its size and wing angle of sweep. Subsequent artist’s concepts were released in 2021 revealing the unusual configuration of the cockpit transparencies, and more detail of the depth of the keel and shape of the wings, but continued to conceal the intakes and exhausts. It was not until the aircraft’s rollout in December 2022 that details of the nose were revealed. At that event, photographers were strictly limited to photographing the aircraft from the front only. And it was not until the first flight from Northrop Grumman’s Palmdale, Calif. facility in November, 2023—not announced ahead of time—that the true shape of the planform and first details of the exhaust were captured by non-government photographers on the airfield fenceline. The Air Force did not release official images of the B-21 in flight until several months later.

The only departure from this pattern involved the Joint Strike Fighter. The companies in that contest were free to share artist’s concepts of their aircraft during the late 1990s, and the nearly-final configuration of the F-35 was displayed at the time Lockheed Martin was selected as the competition winner in 2001. At that time, however, there was less concern about adversaries gaining insight from such imagery: Russia’s military was considered moribund from lack of funds, while China was not yet considered capable of exploiting such information.

Air Force MAJCOMs, Given New Guidance, Pull Back on Family Days

April 18, 2025 | By Greg Hadley

When acting Air Force Secretary Gary A. Ashworth rescinded service-wide “Family Days” last week, he left it to commanders, directors, and supervisors to decide for themselves if they wanted to grant the extra days off. Ashworth’s guidance urged only that, in accordance with USAF regulations, they “re-evaluate their pass structures to best align with warfighter readiness.”

Two Air Force major commands have updated their policies on Family Days, or passes, to preserve some days and cut a few others. Most commands are still reviewing their schedules, promising updates to come.

Family Days are intended to extend holiday weekends for eligible uniformed Airmen, typically by adding a Friday to the three-day weekend. Aircrew, maintainers, and security forces Airmen, among other jobs, are often ineligible due to mission requirements. Federal law prohibits civilian employees from being given extra days off.

The next federal holiday is Memorial Day, making Friday, May 23, the next anticipated Family Day. So far, no command has rescinded that date. Here’s where each MAJCOM stands on Family Days so far:

Air Force Global Strike Command

Most previously scheduled Family Days remain in place for the rest of the year, with two exceptions, according to a memo leaked on social media and confirmed by Air & Space Forces Magazine. AFGSC canceled two anticipated Family Days: Friday, June 20, following the Thursday, June 19 Juneteenth holiday, and Friday, Oct. 10, which would have preceded the Monday, Oct. 13 Columbus Day holiday.

Air Mobility Command

Air Mobility Command cancelled four Family Days: Friday, April 18, ahead of Easter Sunday; Friday, Aug. 29 ahead of Labor Day on Sept. 1; Friday, Oct. 10 ahead of Columbus Day; and Monday, Nov. 10 ahead of that Tuesday’s Veterans Day.

Air Force Reserve Command

A memo circulating on social media says that AFRC has rescinded all of its Family Days. The command did not immediately respond to a query from Air & Space Forces Magazine.

Space Systems Command

The Space Force’s main acquisition arm has “rescinded command-wide family days for 2025 beyond Independence Day,” a spokesperson told Air & Space Forces Magazine. Instead, the command is “empowering and encouraging its commanders, directors, and supervisors to focus any future pass days/structures on organizational/unit goals that align with warfighter readiness; execute our mission with excellence; or maintain our competitive advantage.”

SSC had previously scheduled Family Days for Friday, Aug. 29 (Labor Day); Friday, Oct. 10 (Columbus Day); Friday, Nov. 10 (Veterans Day); Friday, Nov. 28 (Thanksgiving); and Thursday, Dec. 26 (Christmas).

Air Education and Training Command

Lt. Gen Brian S. Robinson is “reviewing the Major Command level policy in accordance with the guidance and any updates will be forthcoming,” an official told Air & Space Forces Magazine. In the meantime, commanders and supervisors still have the authority to grant passes.

“A unit commander may delegate approval authority of individual Annual Leave requests to no lower than an Airman’s first-line Supervisor in the chain of command. In all Leave and Pass considerations, readiness and the capability to continue the unit’s mission remain a primary consideration,” the official added.

Air Force Special Operations Command

AFSOC is still finalizing its updated Family Days schedule, an official told Air & Space Forces Magazine. Some previously scheduled days are likely to be cancelled.

Air Combat Command

“In accordance with the Secretary’s guidance regarding family days, ACC is reviewing our policy and updates are forthcoming,” an official told Air & Space Forces Magazine. Individual commanders still have the authority to issues passes in the meantime.

Air Force Materiel Command

AFMC is reassessing its policy but has not issued any updates yet. Notably, the command is perhaps the most civilian-heavy in the Air Force, and civilians never could take Family Days.

Pacific Air Forces

“Pacific Air Forces is reviewing its own policy on leave and passes, balancing the resiliency and personal readiness of our Airmen, and their families, with our collective warfighting readiness,” an official told Air & Space Forces Magazine.

U.S. Air Forces in Europe-Air Forces Africa

USAFE-AFAFRICA is still reviewing its policy on Family Days, an official said. Personnel are encouraged to use their annual leave “as an important part of maintaining overall well-being, morale, and readiness.”

As Military SATCOM Use Grows, Rivals Vie to Cut SpaceX’s Market Share

April 18, 2025 | By Greg Hadley

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—In the Space Force’s push to increase its consumption of commercial satellite capabilities, satellite communications stands out as the template.

“If you look at the commercial satellite communications industry, we’ve been integrated for quite some time, providing our services alongside MILSATCOM,” said Todd Gossett, of SATCOM provider SES Space & Defense. “We’ve seen, over the past decade, a much more purposeful integration of these commercial capabilities into the military alongside purpose-built capabilities [into] what we now call hybrid space architecture.”

The question now is how broadly the Space Force will look to leverage additional SATCOM providers.

Defense officials announced late last year they are expanding the Proliferated Low Earth Orbit (PLEO) Satellite-Based Services program from a maximum of $900 million to $13 billion, based on demand across DOD. But some worry that there is insufficient competition in the marketplace.

“From a strategic perspective, industry can meet those needs,” said Col. A.J. Ashby, senior materiel leader for strategic SATCOM, at the Space Symposium last week. “It’s just, how robust is that industrial complex to deliver those capabilities? What we don’t want to do is find ourselves in a situation where you have a single commercial provider that can deliver that capability, because if you find yourself in vendor lock, it could increase costs and delay delivering that capability to the warfighter. So we want to make sure that we have a robust and viable industrial base to deliver on all military capabilities.”

SES, Iridium Communications, Inmarsat, and Viasat are all well-established, decades-old providers. But as in the space launch business, a singular dominant player has also emerged in SATCOM. And it’s the same firm: SpaceX, with its massive Starlink constellation. Out of $660 million in task orders already assigned for the PLEO program, most went to SpaceX, a defense official said last fall. Among the program’s 20 approved vendors, no one is close to SpaceX right now.

“It’s just that SpaceX [and] Starlink was obviously first to market,” the official said at the time.

Other companies are racing to catch up. Amazon aims to launch thousands of its Project Kuiper satellites in LEO, but has not yet put one in space. Others, like Canada’s Telesat, have plans for a LEO constellation but are hoping to differentiate their offerings in other ways, president of government solutions Chuck Cynamon told Air & Space Forces Magazine.

“We are geared towards enterprise, government, and defense,” said Cynamon, adding that because Telesat waited to pivot to its low-Earth orbit constellation, it has seen new Pentagon requirements and strategy released in the past year or so that it can “factor … into our offering.”

Telesat’s Lightspeed constellation in LEO, scheduled to reach space in 2026, will have advantages for the military over Starlink or even its militarized cousin, Starshield, Cynamon claimed.

“One of the things that we think we’re offering that is a bit more unique … is the opportunity to offer a capacity pool, something that a government can own that would be sovereign,” Cynamon said. “So if the U.S. government owns a pool of capacity, whether it be bought by the volume or the throughput, it is theirs to own within the Lightspeed ecosystem…. They own the capacity, whether globally or regionally. They can sub-allocate it. So if you have various regions of the world that you want to concentrate your capacity,” the customer can do so.

Assured access to commercial services in the event of a conflict or crisis is a crucial concern for the Space Force as it seeks to integrate its options into a more seamless whole. U.S. Space Command boss Gen. Stephen N. Whiting said at the symposium that the Space Force is looking to leverage automation to gain flexibility and advantage.

“We are transforming our SATCOM resiliency by moving away from labor-intensive methods using stovepiped systems to automated systems that can maneuver between orbits and between different frequency bands to outpace our adversaries,” said Whiting. “Making SATCOM missions more robust and responsive and resilient is vital to meet the needs of our joint force on tactically relevant timelines.”

Charlotte Gerhart, deputy director of military communications and PNT, highlighted that same approach for the Space Force’s tactical SATCOM requirements. “Our ability to put capability wherever we need to, when we need to do it, that mobility aspect, is one of the key things that we look at,” she said. “ … Our ability to command and control without being, for lack of a better term, constrained by other users on the system.”

The Space Force is working on a “hybrid” SATCOM terminal that can shift between multiple frequencies and connect with both military and commercial constellations. So is the Navy, presenting opportunities for scale but also challenges to coordinate between the services.

Cynamon and others in industry are urging Pentagon decision-makers “not to lock yourself into one provider terminal today,” such as Starlink’s dedicated SpaceX terminal. Telesat, he said, intends for its Lightspeed constellation to be terminal-agnostic, giving military customers more flexibility.

Yet SpaceX’s ubiquity and proven performance are winning warfighting customers. The Air Force has used Starlink for forces everywhere from Europe to the Indo-Pacific, and in 2023 the Space Force awarded SpaceX a $70 million contract for Starshield. Breaking that lock will be a lucrative business for others, but competing for market share will be hard given Starlink’s head start.

AFA Inaugurates New Headquarters with Doolittle Raider Toast

April 17, 2025 | By Greg Hadley

The Air & Space Forces Association celebrated the grand opening of its new offices with a decades-old tradition recalling its founding president, Medal of Honor hero Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, and the stories of the Doolittle Raiders, who executed the first strike on Imperial Japan five months after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin headlined a star-studded crowd of current and former military and civilian leaders.

The Raider toast dates back to the early years after World War II, when Doolittle and the other survivors began to gather for reunions celebrating the legendary April 18, 1942, raid over Tokyo. Over the years, the survivors among the 80 Airmen who executed the raid would gather to raise a glass in honor of their comrades who had died in the previous 12 months: “To those who have gone.”

The last “Doolittle Raider,” Lt. Col. Richard Cole, died a day after the 77th anniversary of the raid, on April 9, 2019.

AFA revived the toast in 2024, inviting other AFA Chapters and Air Force units to join in the celebration remotely. This year expanded the theme by tying it to the ceremonial opening of its new building in Pentagon City, steps away from the Pentagon in Arlington, Va.

“It’s only fitting that the ribbon-cutting of today’s new headquarters should segue into a ceremony that honors the men who laid the groundwork for American airpower,” AFA President and CEO retired Lt. Gen. Burt Field said. “Because really that’s how AFA started, all the way back in 1946, before there was an independent Air Force. And then fast forward to when the Space Force was established, and we altered our name. … As long as there are Airmen and Guardians, there will be an AFA advocating for them, educating the public about them, and supporting them and their families.”

Allvin was toastmaster for the occasion, which he said marked an opportunity to not only reflect on the past, but draw inspiration for the future.

“We need to celebrate these times, not only to honor the memory of those courageous Airmen, but to reignite ourselves: to think about, ‘What does it take?’ … These were not hand-selected Airmen who were trained over time. These were 80 ordinary Airmen who did an extraordinary thing. And [so] think about, ‘What can be possible?’”

Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, speaking before the ribbon-cutting, cited Doolittle’s legacy, which goes beyond the raid.

“On the fourth of February, 1946, the Air Force Association was not founded as a veterans group, but rather as an advocate for airpower,” Saltzman said. “Thanks to the efforts of its first president, Jimmy Doolittle, the organization rapidly made its mark. It played a key role in driving U.S. government to establish the Department of the Air Force in 1947 and its campaigning helped ensure the Air Force’s status as a separate and coequal service with the Army and the Navy. It’s something I know a little bit about, and that’s not an easy task.”

Scores of Air Force and Space Force leaders past and present, industry officials, AFA employees, and guests—along with hundreds following along online—toasted “to those who have gone,” and then celebrated the road ahead.

“I’m pretty sure Jimmy Doolittle would be very, very proud of how this organization has evolved and continued to look forward,” Allvin said.

AFA’s Grand Opening and 83rd Doolittle Raiders Memorial Toast on April 17, 2025. Photo by Jud McCrehin/Air & Space Forces Association

Maryland Guard A-10s Still Flying in ‘Combat Readiness’ Exercise

April 17, 2025 | By Unshin Lee Harpley

The Maryland Air National Guard may be starting to say goodbye to its A-10 “Warthogs,” but it is not slowing down in the meantime, as it recently wrapped up a 11-day “combat readiness” exercise along the East Coast to prepare some of its Airmen for a planned deployment to the Middle East.

The exercise, which ran from April 1-11, included operations from Badin, N.C.; Tampa, Fla.; Savannah, Ga.; and Fort Meade, Md., a 175th Wing spokesperson told Air & Space Forces Magazine. Six A-10s from the 104th Fighter Squadron took part, as the wing’s Airmen conducted close air support operations and assisted naval forces in controlling simulated surface threats.

“I’ve seen a lot of success in our responses, especially at the tactical level,” Capt. Casey Smith, 175th Wing chief of plans and exercises, said in a release. “We had very fast response times, showcasing the strength of our training and our ability to adapt quickly under pressure.”

Airmen also practiced setting up and sustaining forward bases while establishing security perimeters. The Airmen focused on responding to scenarios that mirrored deployment conditions, including ground and cyber attacks.

Airmen assigned to the 175th Wing, Maryland Air National Guard, construct a small shelter system at the 145th Regional Training Site in Badin, North Carolina, April 4, 2025. U.S. Air National Guard photo by Senior Master Sgt. Christopher Schepers

“Some of our Wing staff are scheduled to be deployed in FY 2026,” the spokesperson said. “We’re partnering up with [the] Wisconsin Air National Guard to take on a mission for U.S. CENTCOM.”

U.S. Central Command oversees the military operations in the Middle East, and the Air Force has had a steady flow of deployments to the region following Israel’s war on Hamas began in October 2023.

That flow has increased as of late, as the Pentagon tries to counter Iranian-backed Houthi threats and to reopen shipping lanes in the Red Sea. The service has since deployed six B-2 stealth bombers to Diego Garcia and several A-10s from the Idaho Air National Guard in support of its campaign targeting the Houthis.

However, the Maryland ANG’s “tank-killer” aircraft won’t be part of the upcoming deployment; the spokesperson said that the 175th Wing will instead be deploying as part of a Expeditionary Air Base team, which focuses on consolidating leadership and support functions into cohesive teams to enable aircraft operations, instead of fulfilling those functions piecemeal.

Since 2023, the Air Force has been sending XAB teams of Airmen to the Middle East, as the service replaced its Air Expeditionary Wings with expeditionary air base units. The goal is to move to Air Task Forces, then Combat Wings, as Airmen spend more and more time training together stateside.

The first A-10 from the 175th Wing flew to the Boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona last month, and by the beginning of fiscal 2026, the fleet will be nearly fully retired, as the wing plans to transition to a cyber mission without any aircraft, pending an environmental review this fall.

The decision, which leaves Maryland as the only state without a flying mission, has sparked strong pushback from Guard leaders and local politicians State leaders, who have vowed to push for the restoration of a flying mission. Progress, however, remains elusive.