A DoD sharing or abandonment of the S-band portion of the electromagnetic spectrum could harm military forces and entail significant work around costs, Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown told the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) during his July 11 nomination hearing to become the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Since August 2020, Brown has served as the Air Force’s 22nd chief of staff.
“Proposals for DoD to share or vacate the S-band may result in setting the DoD back several decades compared to near peer adversary nations and result in significant financial costs,” according to written answers Brown provided in response to advance policy questions by SASC before the July 11 hearing. “Vacating this band is not an option, and no decision should be made prior to the current study is completed and reviewed.”
By September, DoD may finish a study that may shed insight on whether commercial spectrum use will conflict with military use of the 3.1-3.45 GHz S-band (Defense Daily, March 15).
At a May hearing, Brown said that a “number of weapon systems” operate within the S-band, including C-130 Station-Keeping. Brown said that it would cost about $2 billion to redesign C-130 Station Keeping to move it off of S-band.
Sierra Research, Inc.–now part of Leonardo DRS [DRS], a U.S. based subsidiary of Italy’s Leonardo–built the APN-169 and APN-243 Station-Keeping Equipment (SKE) radars. SKE is to enable the Lockheed Martin [LMT] C-130 to fly in close formation in low-visibility conditions and to locate downed aircrew with a location beacon.
At the May SASC hearing, Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, the chief of space operations, suggested that vacating S-band would mean the loss of several hundred million dollars that the U.S. Space Force has invested in developing the Northrop Grumman [NOC] Deep-Space Advanced Radar Capability (DARC) ground-based radar (Defense Daily, Apr. 14, 2022). The latter is to improve upon Northrop Grumman’s Ground-Based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance System for tracking deep-space objects. In February last year, Space Force awarded Northrop Grumman a $341 million contract to build the first DARC radar, which is to field in the Indo-Pacific region in 2025.
Saltzman said that moving DARC off of S-band would result in Space Force having less monitoring of deep space.
During the July 11 SASC hearing, Sens. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) and Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) expressed their concern about a DoD abandonment of or a federal auctioning off of portions of the S-band portion of the spectrum.
In Rounds’ questioning, he also referenced the ongoing Pentagon and intelligence community discussions about lines of authority for acquiring and using space ground moving target indication (GMTI) to replace the Northrop Grumman Joint STARS aircraft. The Department of the Air Force has said that it is collaborating with the National Reconnaissance Office to develop the Space Based Radar.
“I’m not confident the warfighters will get this vital capability that they need to close the kill chain in the future,” Rounds said of space GMTI. Rounds asked Brown whether he would work as CJCS “to make certain that our men and women on the front lines have full and priority use of the platforms conducting GMTI missions in the future,” and Brown replied, “I will.”