National Guard officials are pushing for the Defense Department and Congress to create a Space National Guard, despite some uncertainty within the Pentagon about how to move forward. The Office of the Secretary of Defense is drawing up multiple options for what the Space Force’s reserve component might look like, including creating a single-component service with full-time and part-time employees instead of traditional Reserve or National Guard units, or possibly ditching the reserve component altogether, said Maj. Gen. David Baldwin, California’s adjutant general. “We don’t really know what [a single component] means, but they’re, again, doing their due diligence and they need the time to be able to churn through that,” Baldwin told reporters at a Feb. 12 briefing.

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif.—Military officials are looking at putting the 30th and 45th Space Wings under a new Space Force Systems Command to group the launch-focused organizations with others that handle procurement rather than warfighting. “In the [reorganization], we have seen different models where perhaps these two, the Western range and the Eastern range, they could go on to another field command like Systems Command,” Combined Space Operations Center boss Brig. Gen. Scott Brodeur told Air Force Magazine in a recent interview here. “One of the things that's on the table is, how do we look at our space launch organization in the future?” 

The new Air Force budget responds to the arrival of peer militaries on the world scene, the service's deputy chief of staff for operations said Feb. 12. The nation must shake off notions about Air Force capabilities that are 30 years old and no longer realistic, Lt. Gen. Mark Kelly said, adding the new force also relies on allies to provide capacity in a multi-theater war.

U.S. Special Operations Command’s armed overwatch planes eventually will replace the U-28 Draco, a small fleet of specialized and heavily used intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft, Air Force Special Operations Command boss Lt. Gen. James Slife said Feb. 12. Under the armed overwatch program, SOCOM wants to purchase 75 off-the-shelf aircraft within about five years to fly air support for special operators. The new, low-cost aircraft will conduct a similar ISR role as the U-28 as well as provide strike support. The U-28 has service life issues “because of how heavily we’ve operated those airplanes over the last 15 years or so,” Slife said.

The Air Force has updated its grooming standards to formally allow Airmen to grow neatly trimmed beards, standardizing the religious or medical exemption process. The updated Air Force Instruction, released Feb. 7, also formally allows Sikh airmen to wear turbans and Muslim women to wear hijabs. Groups such as the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which pushed the service to grant such waivers, called it a “step toward religious accommodation and inclusion for military personnel of all faiths.”