Some 40 doctors and medical technicians from the Ohio Air National Guard’s 121st Medical Group flew to Osan AB, South Korea, to help members of Osan’s 51st MDG train and set up an expeditionary medical system at nearby Suwon Air Base. “We used this visit to practice receiving” follow-on forces, said Col. Rawson Wood, 51st MDG commander, in Osan’s Feb. 26 release. For more than a week, the visiting Air Guardsmen from Rickenbacker ANGB, Ohio, constructed a tent to house the EMEDS—a modular, scalable temporary hospital for use in wartime or humanitarian assistance—tested and inventoried more than a thousand pieces of equipment, and completed training scenarios to ensure the facilities were adequate, states the release. Wood said these activities were meant to ensure that the EMEDS “could be a functioning system in case something happened here on the Korean peninsula.” (Osan report by SSgt. Sara Csurilla) (See also Expanded Medical Capabilities.)
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.