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he Pentagon announced Wednesday at 5 p.m. that the Army and Air Force had picked the L-3 Communications team’s C-27J Spartan as the Joint Cargo Aircraft. The team includes L-3, Alenia North America, Boeing, and Global Military Aircraft Systems. The contract calls for purchase of up to 78 aircraft at an estimated cost of $2.04 billion. The team will manufacture the aircraft at Alenia’s plant in Italy and perform additional work at L-3’s Waco, Tex., facility. The Army issued the contract, but lawmakers have questioned whether the Air Force should take exclusive control of the intra-theater airlift mission.
The stand-up of the Space Force, and now its early overhaul and the creation of a new Space Systems Command, are all about resilience: Ensuring that space capabilities, which the whole country relies on, could survive a concerted attack by a near-peer adversary. As part of that drive, a new…