The Pentagon wants to have an Enterprise Management and Control (EM&C) system up and running by 2027 to enable military forces to switch rapidly from one satellite band, orbit, or communications network to another, as needed.
The U.S. Space Force is to build EM&C and is collaborating with DoD.
“We’ve got an [EM&C] implementation plan that runs from [20]23 to [20]27,” Mike Dean, the head of DoD satellite communications (SATCOM) under Pentagon chief information officer John Sherman, said in a phone interview on Oct. 2. “EM&C looks to automate resource allocation, integrate the data management, move everything to the cloud, and rapidly implement electromagnetic interference mitigation, whether it’s [the interference] friendly or adversarial.”
EM&C is to lessen the number of DoD “data silos” and manual management and control procedures.
“One of the big components of it is having a network layer interface, looking at a group of APIs [Application Programming Interfaces] so we can tie in all these service-provided networks,” Dean said of EM&C.
DoD communications satellites include Boeing‘s [BA] Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS), Lockheed Martin‘s [LMT] Mobile User Objective System for the U.S. Navy, Defense Satellite Communications System (DSCS) III, Advanced EHF, and Military Strategic and Tactical Relay (Milstar). DoD has also used data from commercial geosynchronous orbit (GEO) satellites by Echostar‘s [SATS] Hughes Network Systems, SES SA, and other companies, and, since 2002, 66 low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites by Iridium Communications [IRDM] for narrowband communications through Enhanced Mobile Satellite Services phones. Narrowband is typically slower than wideband communications.
Before the introduction of WGS in 2007 to replace DSCS, 80 percent of DoD wideband use was commercially provided, whereas today 50 percent or more of DoD wideband is from WGS, Dean said.
Since 2020, DoD has been moving to harness optically-linked LEO satellites.
The Space Development Agency is pursuing Transport Layer LEO communications satellites in two-year “tranches,” and has so far awarded contracts to Lockheed Martin and York Space Systems.
In a separate LEO communications effort, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command in July awarded 16 companies five-year indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracts with five-year options to establish commercial communications for military use under a Proliferated Low Earth Orbit (PLEO) Satellite-Based Services program (Defense Daily, July 25).
SpaceX is a frontrunner for such PLEO contracts, as it has more than 5,000 Starlink communications satellites in LEO and has been allowing, with some interruption, use of data from such satellites for Ukrainian military forces. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently indicated that Starlink will be for civilian/commercial use, while the company’s Starshield satellites will be for military use.
“Even with that PLEO contract, you’ve got all these vendors,” Dean said of the future EM&C on Oct. 2. “If we’re gonna be able to rapidly shift a customer–one of our warfighters–between service-provided networks, let’s say we’re going from WGS to Starshield, one, we have to know what terminal capabilities they have. We have to know if their terminal is a hybrid terminal. We have to know if it can do different orbits, different wave forms. We have to have a terminal registered, meaning, if it’s a military purpose-built terminal, it’s got to register with our EM&C in an automated fashion. If it’s gonna be used in another service-provided network, I don’t necessarily need that service-provided network’s registry, but I might need certain information from that registry to populate my catalogue so that I can stay up-to-date and know what menu of options I have and how do I move these terminals back and forth.”
The lower orbits of LEO and medium Earth orbit (MEO) are to allow significantly accelerated sensor-to-shooter and decision-making timelines, especially for expeditionary military forces and those on the oceans, compared to comparable timelines for military GEO satellites.
Advanced DoD SATCOM is not a new effort. Between December 2016 and June 2018, the Pentagon conducted a Wideband Analysis of Alternatives (AoA) for a WGS follow-on. The Pentagon has now moved to make commercial SATCOM part of DoD’s SATCOM architecture, rather than an add-on in times of capacity shortfall–an idea advocated by the AoA. During DoD’s solicitation of AoA input from vendors, Viasat Inc. [VSAT] proposed a “best available network” concept under which DoD could use whatever network provides incremental resilience and operational gains, even if that network does not score as high as others in capacity improvement or other metrics.
Vendor lock is “a huge concern” for DoD and one of the reasons the Pentagon is pursuing a diverse set of SATCOM options, Dean said on Oct. 2.
“Some of our international partners kind of went down that road [and] completely outsourced to one or two providers,” he said. “What you find is you lose your flexibility.”
“Let’s say we outsourced all of our SATCOM to one or two providers,” Dean said. “Then one of those providers decides, ‘Doing combat is not in my ethical space, and we’re gonna walk away from this.’ You can’t have that in the middle of an operation.”
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall expressed a similar view last month (Defense Daily, Sept. 18).
“If we’re gonna rely upon commercial architectures or commercial systems for operational use, then we have to have some assurances that they’re gonna be available,” he said. “We have to have that. Otherwise, they’re a convenience and maybe an economy in peacetime, but they’re not something we can rely upon in war time, and we need both.”
DoD said on June 1 that it had reached an agreement to continue funding Starlink service for the Ukrainian military, but it declined for “operational security” to release the terms or the amount of that agreement/contract—one which may be open-ended with no funding cap.
Published reports have said that the Ukrainians in September last year asked for Starlink support in a possible attack on Russian naval vessels in the Crimea’s Sevastopol, but SpaceX CEO Elon Musk declined because of his perception that it could lead to Russian use of nuclear weapons.
SpaceX has been “a great partner” on Starlink, Dean said on Oct. 2 when asked whether Starlink was the “only game in town” currently for DoD commercial, low-latency communications “They’re certainly helping the industry modernize. Competition has a lot of good benefits that come with it. When you get a disruptive technology like that, it causes everybody to step up their game. From a practical standpoint, you could say they are one of the few games in town right now. OneWeb would argue with that because they’d say, ‘We’ve been up here for a while.'”
Another competitor, Amazon‘s [AMZN], is to launch two Project Kuiper Protoflight satellites on Oct. 6 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla., as part of an effort to put 3,236 satellites into LEO over the next decade to provide global broadband access.
On Oct. 2, Dean said that DoD will need a healthy number of commercial SATCOM providers.
“The real question becomes, ‘How many is too many?’ Dean said “And for LEO, orbit and spectrum is gonna decide that because there are only so many orbital planes you can occupy that at some point the spectrum is gonna get congested. We definitely wanna have diversity and the flexibility and agility to have all this capacity when and where needed.”
“I want three-dimensional chess,” he said. “I want LEO, MEO, GEO, HEO [highly elliptical orbit]–multiple, non-GEO orbits. We have to be in all of those to be globally competitive.”
Dean also said that the Pentagon is making progress on updating, integrating, or replacing front-line SATCOM terminals among the 17,000 “legacy” wideband user terminals, having 135 designs–numbers found during the wideband AoA. The U.S. Navy, for example, is buying Satellite Terminal (transportable) Non-Geostationary (STtNG) SATCOM terminals from Louisiana-based Bascom Hunter Technologies, Inc.
Software-defined terminals have the benefit of reducing workload and operational impacts, as they may receive updates in the field.
Avoiding vendor lock and ensuring DoD SATCOM transmission through such means as cyber protection and a wall against adversary access to the SATCOM supply chain are important, but new methods to allow a plethora of commercial LEO providers are also critical, Dean said.
“Cyber security and protection–how do you do that? Typically, with GEO transpondent systems, we’ve done that a certain way on the ground. We call it transmission security,” he said. “But those mitigation controls were intended for a time when our satellite communication was designed a certain way. These new LEO providers, their spacecraft, their wave forms, might not allow us to do mitigations that we’ve traditionally done in the past. What I’m trying to do is work with everybody to say we don’t want to screen out a lot of systems and say that we can’t consider using you for military communications because you don’t use this particular type of protection.”
“What I want to think of instead is maybe with some of these systems, because they’re doing handoffs so rapidly or because their beams are so tiny, maybe some of these vulnerabilities that we would have to mitigate against are no longer at issue,” Dean said. “The great thing about the explosion of these [LEO] services we’ve seen, even in Ukraine with Starlink, we’ve seen their services denied, and we’ve seen them work right around it in rapid fashion. We’re gonna have the ability to more rapidly respond to a condition and implement a new control than in the typical time frame we’ve had before because that’s just their business model, by necessity now. We’ve seen in real time in a combat theater one of these PLEO service providers respond to a threat, and it was pretty amazing how fast they did it.”