The need for smaller, rapidly fielded U.S. Air Force communications gear was a key lesson that emerged from last month's Castle Forge exercise in which U.S. Air Forces Europe (USAFE)-Air Forces Africa tested out the Air Force's agile combat employment concepts to use U.S. and allied airpower from dispersed locations to defend NATO countries in the Black Sea region--an area that has become a flash point due to Russian revanchism in Ukraine. While USAFE had done its own agile combat…