Current SBIRS missile warning satellites (pictured) can be changed by the Next Gen OPIR constellation. (File illustration)
WASHINGTON: As Space Force’s new Space Warfighting Analysis Center strikes forward with its two latest precedence “force designs,” the middle’s director is cautioning that his workplace is navigating uncharted waters within the race to reform America’s nationwide safety house structure, together with the way it will get funded.
“A lot of this stuff hasn’t been done before, right? So, there’s no recipe and trying to come up with the analytical methods, the tools, the models,” SWAC director Andrew Cox informed Breaking Defense in an unique interview Tuesday. “It’s just grinding work, and it just takes time. There’s a high expectation that we deliver — and we deliver fast and we deliver well — and so I think that’s just a tremendous amount of pressure on us to create something out of nothing.”
SWAC is charged with the massively advanced effort to determine easy methods to transfer the US nationwide safety house structure away from its present reliance on small numbers of extremely succesful, terribly costly satellites in the direction of a extra resilient posture that may take up and bounce again from adversary assault, as Chief of Space Operations Gen. Jay Raymond defined Tuesday in a digital interview with the Mitchell Institute.
“We have got to shift the space architecture, if you will, from a handful of exquisite capabilities that are very hard to defend to a more robust, more resilient architecture by design. That’s what this force design work is doing,” Raymond mentioned. “And so we will began our pivot significantly to a resilient architecture this next year.”
The change is coming in initiatives referred to as power designs, with every specializing in a selected problem. SWAC’s first and still-classified power design, coping with missile warning and monitoring, was accomplished this previous fall.
The subsequent two priorities can be blueprints for growing a space-based, floor shifting goal indicator (GMTI) functionality and an area information transport functionality, in keeping with each Raymond and Cox. These two power designs are underway, with an eye fixed towards informing the fiscal 2024 price range.
But for SWAC and the Space Force, the plans themselves aren’t price a lot if there’s not a budgeting technique, which is the place coordination with different house companies comes into focus. Cox joked that SWAC can be “building Pinocchios” if it might probably’t transfer its blueprints for grow to be real-boy applications with funding behind them.
“If you’re not moving the ball forward in the budget, you’re really just doing a force design that ends up on a shelf that nobody uses,” he mentioned.
The Two Priorities: GMTI And Space Data Transport
Space Force’s plan to develop GMTI is considerably controversial, together with with Congress, due to the equities the opposite providers and the Intelligence Community (IC) have in supplying such tactical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) info to warfighters. The National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, as an illustration, historically have been the keeper of the keys on ISR, and have been shifting to enhance their skill to quickly present tactical ISR.
Raymond confused in his Tuesday interview that the evaluation of options being undertaken by SWAC to formulate the GMTI power design is being achieved with a group that features the IC and the price range gurus on the Defense Department’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) workplace. The thought, he mentioned, is to “come up with what’s the right answer for [the program], that doesn’t duplicate capabilities that are already being done.”
Cox informed Breaking Defense that SWAC has a narrower focus proper now on GMTI particularly, slightly than the bigger query of tactical ISR, partly due to SWAC’s restricted price range and bandwidth. (The SWAC has no devoted funding until and till congressional appropriators move an FY22 protection spending invoice, which features a $37 million request for the workplace.)
“We’re trying to do one mission at a time, or at least a couple at a time. There’s really no way for us to just come up with force designs for all the various Space Force mission areas simultaneously,” he mentioned. “A, I don’t have a budget to do it, and B, if I had the budget, I don’t think we’ve got the expertise to try to tackle all those things simultaneously. So, we’re trying to prioritize which missions we do first, and then working with the CSO, tackle each one of those things one at a time.”
The purpose of the opposite power design, house information transport, is to create a near-real time skill to switch all kinds of knowledge — basically to create a navy web. To pull that off, Cox mentioned his group is trying past conventional navy satellite tv for pc communications.
“Sometimes folks translate ‘space data transport’ as MILSATCOM. It is definitely not just MILSATCOM,” he mentioned. “What we’re making an attempt to grasp is what that house information spine must seem like that helps a wide range of customers and has a wide range of nodes. … There could possibly be industrial presents which can be a part of that spine.
“We want to understand if you’re trying to build, essentially, a space backbone or space internet that supports the warfighter and that includes commercial as well as your traditional acquisition elements, what does it look like?” he continued. “So it’s a big, big task.”
Preparing For The ‘Big Handoff’
Cox confused that whereas SWAC is concerned in advocating for funds to implement its power designs, these mission-specific blueprints don’t embrace suggestions for acquisition methods.
“That’s not our job,” he mentioned. “Our job is to try to develop the highest fidelity… understanding we can have of the the technical or the operational problem we’re trying to solve, down to the physics level.”
Instead, Cox defined, acquisition is the “big handoff” between the SWAC and house acquisitions companies akin to Space Systems Command (SSC), the Space Development Agency (SDA) and the Missile Defense Agency (MDA).
But SWAC is together with value estimates of various choices for future power construction in its power designs, he confused, with a purpose to show to the acquisition group the worth of the designs.
“We want to make recommendations that are cost-informed, that are threat-informed, and that are mission-informed to the most detailed level we can,” Cox mentioned. “But we don’t get into what’s the right acquisition approach, that’s only handed off — at first to the requirements community to write a good requirement, and then to the acquisition community to come up with a way to to build it and to buy it.”
Cox mentioned his group has realized the worth of working intently with not simply the Space Force “requirements community” — led by Lt. Gen. Bill Liquori, deputy chief of house operations for technique, plans, applications, necessities and evaluation — but additionally the “costing community” and the acquisition companies up entrance from the efforts that went into the missile warning/monitoring power design.
SWAC presently is working with MDA and SDA to advocate for FY23 funding to assist the plan to revamp how the Defense Department makes use of satellites to detect and observe each ballistic and maneuverable hypersonic missiles, he mentioned.
“I think the good news is by doing a lot of this really hard work, in terms of doing some of the higher fidelity analysis — trying to think through ‘What are the targets we’re trying to detect? What are the threats we’re trying to survive through?’ — we were able to get a lot of the community together behind the data,” Cox mentioned.
“One of our ‘lessons learned’ is by just doing all that really good homework up front, it really helps when you get inside the Pentagon and you’re trying to advocate for a change in an approach,” he mentioned. “Because as you can imagine, anytime you’re coming in with a sort of a different way of looking at things… you got to have all your ducks in a row and really understand what it is you’re trying to advocate.”
