Angus Batey has been contributing to various titles within the Aviation Week Network since 2009. He has reported from military bases, industrial facilities, trade shows and conferences, on topics ranging from defense and space to business aviation, advanced air mobility and cybersecurity.
One potentially decisive battle of the Afghan counterinsurgency will take place early next year—not in country, but in a courtroom in Washington. That, at least, is the view of attorney David Rivkin, who believes that a pending decision by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia could have devastating repercussions for coalition forces in Afghanistan.
A 1940s-era hangar on an RAF base in Lincolnshire may not seem a likely front-line location in the battle for data security. But the Air Battlespace Training Center (ABTC) is more than a successful testbed for the British military’s Distributed Synthetic Air-Land Training initiative: Its information technology (IT) infrastructure points the way ahead in the increasingly vital business of ensuring the security of military data.
Of all the demands made on British armed forces in Afghanistan, the need for forward air controllers (FACs) is among the most pressing. So it is surprising to find that the Joint Forward Air Control Training and Standards Unit (Jfactsu), which trains FACs from every branch of the U.K. military, is housed in a dilapidated prefab building here.
