Speaking Wednesday at a Washington, D.C., conference, Gen. Norton Schwartz, Air Force Chief of Staff, said that the US military and its allies must be able to operate in a GPS-denied environment. The efforts by adversaries to jam or otherwise prohibit use of the position-navigation-timing data provided by the USAF-operated Global Positioning System satellites will only increase. However, having said that, Schwartz maintained that there is no intent to move USAF out of the GPS business. He called such a move “unlikely.”
The Air Force and Boeing agreed to a nearly $2.4 billion contract for a new lot of KC-46 aerial tankers on Nov. 21. The deal, announced by the Pentagon, is for 15 new aircraft in Lot 11 at a cost of $2.389 billion—some $159 million per tail.