Surrounded by more than seven miles of coastline and sitting just 14 feet above sea level at its highest elevation, MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida juts out into Hillsborough Bay like a uvula.

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“Approximately 93% of MacDill AFB is within the 100-year floodplain,” according to a 2022 base resource management plan. “Tropical storms typically flood much of the southern and northwestern portions of MacDill, and all of the base proper would be flooded by a Category 3 or greater hurricane.”

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In the meantime, CENTCOM personnel are working out of several locations, including Raymond James Stadium and Homestead Air Reserve Base near Miami, where the Joint Operations Center will be set up, a U.S. defense official told The War Zone.

SOCOM “dispersed to three different locations,” Col. Alexandra Weiskopf, the command spokesperson, told The War Zone. “With our Washington D.C. office, we will have comms up in four different locations and there will be no degradation to our continuity of operations."

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“Space Launch Delta 45 is monitoring Hurricane Milton and will continue making preparations as weather dictates,” spokeswoman Maggie Nave told us. “Patrick Space Force Base and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station have entered [hurricane preparation] HURCON status, which will be adjusted based on the anticipated timing of storm impacts. At this time, tenant units have moved aircraft assets out of the local area.”

Naval Station Mayport has sent three Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyers underway, while those vessels unable to leave are being placed on heavy moorings, spokesman David Holmes told us. The station has shut down operations and only essential mission personnel are allowed in.

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The preparations being made for Hurricane Milton are another stark reminder of how climate is affecting the military, especially in locations like Florida prone to these natural disasters

While there are no plans to shutter places like MacDill and Tyndall, the cost to keep them operational in the face of major hurricanes like Milton will only rise.

France has unveiled plans to develop a new uncrewed combat air vehicle (UCAV) that will complement the forthcoming Rafale F5 crewed fighter, as part of a new-look French Air and Space Force. The industrial side of the drone program will be headed up by Dassault Aviation, drawing upon its previous nEUROn UCAV demonstrator, which has already been used in trials with crewed combat aircraft.

Track The Tropics has been the #1 source to track the tropics 24/7 since 2013! The main goal of the site is to bring all of the important links and graphics to ONE PLACE so you can keep up to date on any threats to land during the Atlantic Hurricane Season! Hurricane Season 2024 in the Atlantic starts on June 1st and ends on November 30th. Love Spaghetti Models? Well you've come to the right place!! Remember when you're preparing for a storm: Run from the water; hide from the wind!

An interesting aggregation of lots of great sites, their graphics, and the information from around the web and world.

Senior Airman Devon Word, a conventional munitions crew chief from the U.S. Air Force’s 48th Munitions Squadron, solved a perennial ammunition handling issue faced by the 48th Fighter Wing at RAF Lakenheath, U.K., which often saw 20 mm rounds jamming while moving from the replenisher table to the ammunition loader. The frequent  jamming makes manual intervention necessary, with “15 minutes of troubleshooting per jam” required which “may also cause injury to the operator.”

In fiscal year 2023, according to the press release, there were 319 operations resulting in an average of 957 instances of jams using the replenisher table. These accounted for approximately 798 man-hours due to the need for at least four personnel during operations.

Word developed a specially designed 3D-printed insert that addressed the old design issue causing the stoppages – a gap between the rounds and the top of the replenisher table. The unit-level innovation could save the 48th FW and U.S. Air Force over 750 man-hours annually, the unit said.

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...some predictions estimate that there may be hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths from famine in Sudan in the coming year or two.

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In my research so far into models predicting famine numbers, however, I have been surprised at the extent to which the models are not transparent. That is, when two models disagree, with one claiming very high death estimates and others predicting more limited famine (there is clearly a famine already underway in some parts of Sudan), it’s unclear what drives these differences. If the data and code were publicly available, we could compare the models, see where they differ, and then identify which of these differences are in turn responsible for the different predictions they make. So that’s what I’ve set out to do, with hopes that I will find some fellow travellers along the way.