Air Force Space Command has successfully transferred 48 installations, including 34 main operating bases, 13 geographically separated units, and Air Force Reserve Command headquarters, to the service’s single, centrally administered computer network, the AFNet, said AFSPC Vice Commander Lt. Gen. Michael Basla Friday. “Today, the AFNet migration is our number one cyberspace initiative,” he said in his speech at AFA’s Air Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Fla. With more than 187,000 users already transitioned to AFNet, the result is a “much more defensible construct,” he noted. Barksdale AFB, La.; Laughlin AFB, Tex.; Osan AB, Korea; Yokota AB, Japan; and Vance AFB, Okla., are currently shifting to AFNet and all Air Force locations worldwide are expected to complete the transition in 2013, he said. “For years, cyberspace systems and capabilities were acquired via ad-hoc methods by individual units and by the time we made our first moves toward a single Air Force network, we were dealing with a security nightmare,” said Basla. AFNet is “designed to address this issue.”
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.