After March 31, Alaska will be on its own plowing snow off the runway at Galena, a Yukon River community 275 miles north of Fairbanks. As reported by the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, the decision has taken Alaskan officials off guard. USAF has always helped clear Galena Forward Operating Location, and, when the BRAC commission voted to close the FOC, it urged USAF to withdraw its help slowly to ease the local impact. An Air Force spokesman, MSgt. Tim Hoffman, told the paper that the plowing, which cost $442,000 each year, isn’t justified now that operations are ending.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III chaired a China-focused military briefing Oct. 27, part of a biweekly series of briefings with senior military commanders about China’s growing threat in the wake of an orbital hypersonic weapon test that elicited public worries from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “What we…