The Defense Department and federal intelligence agencies are standing up a space operations center that will be functional in six months, the deputy defense secretary said today.
“We’re going to develop the tactics, techniques, procedures [and] rules of the road” to defend the country’s space architecture, said Robert Work, who called the center “the thing we need most” in the realm of space. “That is our highest priority, and that is where we think we’ll have the highest payoff.”
Additionally, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James will soon be named the principle space adviser to the defense secretary, he said during a June 23 speech during the GEOINT Symposium held in Washington, D.C. The position would allow her to give advice to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter apart from the defense space council, which advises by consensus.
Those actions highlight the growing importance of space, as well as the geospatial intelligence coming from space-based assets that provide troops highly accurate maps and charts, data for mission planning systems, targeting support and 3D renderings of buildings, Work said.
“The ugly reality that we must all face is that if our adversary were able to take space away from us, our ability to project decisive power across transoceanic distances and to overmatch adversaries in theater once we get there—both of which are the very essence in our conventional turn of posture—would be critically weak,” he said.
If the country’s space assets were compromised, command and control could be significantly degraded, as well as the country’s ability to detect and track adversary ballistic missiles, he warned. Satellite links that connect unmanned aerial systems could be denied.
Therefore, it’s imperative for the military to counter adversary space capabilities, especially their space-enabled precision strike and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, he said. To help facilitate that end, the president’s fiscal 2016 budget shifts $5 billion of Defense Department and intelligence agency investment into space security.
“It doesn’t sound like a lot, but in this budget environment, that was a big, big muscle move, and a topic of this year’s strategic portfolio review on space is to figure out if we need to go further,” he said.
The Defense Department also plans to “double down” on geospatial intelligence in the future, although Work did not say whether that will entail a greater investment in such programs. Department officials want to be able to establish patterns of life from space so they can isolate when something unusual is happening on the ground, and they want to know that information as quickly as possible, in order to dwindle the enemy’s response time, he said.
“If suddenly small boats are swarming in the gulf, or pirates are starting to congregate off [the Gulf of] Aden, we want to know. If Russian soldiers are snapping pictures of themselves in war zones and posting them in social media sites, we want to know exactly where those pictures were taken,” he said.
Key to that will be figuring out how to harness the data provided by commercial satellites, Work said. Within the next five years, there may a dozen geospatial intelligence constellations up and running with more than 500 small satellites.
“If we are successful we will continue to move the GEOINT community beyond just a provider of pixels and increasingly a service provider, which allows us to understand more and more of the world around us,” he said. “They’re going to have to be prepared to categorize and prioritize what is going to be a mountain, a massive amount of data. They’re going to have to be able to sift through this crush of data to gain the ability to understand and even predict what is happening.”
To incorporate commercial technologies, the government must build speed and flexibility into the acquisition process, said Robert Cardillo, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). Cardillo said he sat in a panel on small satellites yesterday to learn more about what products are on the market.
“What I’m trying to do is to make sure is we’re best positioned to take advantage” of innovative technologies, he said in a speech this morning.
One example of NGA doing just that is the recently launched GEOINT Pathfinder program, he said. The program will be spearheaded by a team of data scientists, application developers, open source researchers, methodologists and analysts. Their first task will be using only unclassified data and commercial products to answer intelligence questions over a 90-day period.
“The goal is to see if we can deliver high quality, unclassified GEOINT to our customers,” he said. The Air Force’s previous commercial satellite communications (COMSATCOM) Pathfinder experiments in West Africa went well, but Cardillo wants to see efforts accelerated and content made more accessible.
It will also be critical for new technologies to incorporate a higher level of automation, so that analysts can focus on parsing data as quickly as possible, he said.