The U.S. Space Force (USSF) is requesting nearly $248 million in fiscal 2025 research and development funding for a new program, Protected Tactical Satellite Communications-Global (PTS-G).
PTS-G is “a key and enabling capability of the USSF force design that bridges the gap between the more focused capabilities provided by Protected Tactical SATCOM – Resilient (PTS-R), and the broadly-available but also the lower assured access capabilities provided by existing/emerging MILSATCOM and commercial services,” according to a Space Force budget justification. “PTS-G also augments current and future warfighter capability with increased global capacity. PTS-G is a moderate degree of assured access communications across military Ka-band and X-band using a disaggregated and proliferated sets of lower-complexity satellites.”
Space Force and U.S. Strategic Command have worked on PTS and the Protected Tactical Enterprise Service (PTES) ground system program to counter adversaries’ satellite jamming through the use of a Protected Tactical Waveform (PTW).
PTS is the follow-on to the Lockheed Martin [LMT] Advanced Extremely High Frequency communications satellite constellation.
Boeing [BA] this month said that Space Force‘s Space Systems Command (SSC) had awarded the company a nearly $440 million contract to build the 12th Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) communications satellite, which is to deter jamming through the PTW with antenna nulling in the Ka-band (Defense Daily, March 6). WGS-12 is to connect military forces through the PTES ground system.
SSC “will develop the PTS-G space and ground systems to provide worldwide assured-access communications for tactical warfighters,” Space Force said in its fiscal 2025 budget justification. “PTS-G will consist of two types of space vehicles (PTS-G-Ka and PTS-G-X), and ground infrastructure (system controller/hub with gateways), and will connect to existing Protected Anti-jam Tactical SATCOM (PATS) ground infrastructure (mission management system and cryptographic key management system) developed under the [PTES] program.”
At a pre-budget release briefing last week for reporters, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said that “if you look at the Chinese space order of battle today–the Russians are a problem, but not as much–and you look at what that order of battle is gonna be in five years and you compare where we are and where we think we’ll be, we’ve really got a problem in space.”
“China has fielded a combination of anti-satellite and space-based targeting capabilities,” he said. “They’re threatening our space assets and our joint force, and we’ve gotta respond to that. We’re making good progress on the resiliency side of the equation–making our space assets more resilient. I’d like to move faster on that, but we’re making good progress. We’re making some progress on counter-space, but that’s another area in which I’d like to move more quickly.”