For 18 years, somewhere over Afghanistan, Iraq, or — more recently — the Black Sea, an unremarkable-looking Bombardier business jet has been flying loops at 45,000 feet doing the most important job in modern American air combat: making everyone talk to everyone.

The Battlefield Airborne Communications Node (BACN) was the secret sauce that let an F-22 in northern Syria pass tracking data to an F-35 over the Caspian, while an A-10 in Iraq talked to a JTAC in a valley too deep for line-of-sight radio. Without BACN, half the cross-platform tactics the US Air Force has spent two decades practising simply do not work.

And after this week’s Pentagon announcement, BACN is finished. The Air Force is retiring the entire fleet of E-11A and EQ-4B BACN aircraft and pushing the mission to a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites called Starshield.

The “Internet in the Sky”

BACN was an emergency hack. In 2007, US ground troops in eastern Afghanistan kept finding themselves in valleys where their radios could not reach the AWACS overhead, and where their data terminals could not talk to the F-15s holding station above. Engineers welded a Boeing 737-style avionics suite onto a Bombardier Global Express and put it on permanent station. It worked.

Eighteen years later, BACN is the connective tissue between every US fighter, ground unit, and command post in any active theatre. It translates between the F-22’s Intra-Flight Data Link and the F-35’s MADL. It bridges Link 16 to satellite networks. It is, in plain English, the internet in the sky.

Why Kill It Now?

Two reasons. First, money: an E-11A costs roughly $40,000 per flight hour to keep airborne 24/7 across multiple theatres. The Air Force runs three of them per active region. The total annual operating bill is north of $300 million.

Second, and more importantly: Starshield works. Over 2024 and 2025, SpaceX deployed roughly 200 hardened military Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit. The constellation provides global coverage at gigabit speeds, mesh-routes around any single satellite outage, and is — crucially — much harder to shoot down than a Bombardier business jet flying predictable racetrack patterns.

The Risk Nobody Wants to Discuss

Starshield is a SpaceX product. The Pentagon now depends, completely, on a single commercial vendor for the connective tissue of every air operation. Senior Air Force officials have privately admitted this is uncomfortable, but the cost differential — Starshield delivers ten times BACN’s data throughput at one-third the cost — was decisive.

The retirement of BACN closes a chapter in airborne information warfare. It also opens a new one: the era when American air combat depends on commercial space infrastructure. Whether that is a feature or a bug, the next contested-space conflict will tell us.

Sources: Air & Space Forces Magazine, USAF press release, Defence News.