The House zeroed out funds for the Air Force’s protected tactical waveform in its fiscal 2016 appropriations bill, but Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) said he will be pushing his colleagues to inject money for the program during conference.
The protected tactical waveform would allow the service to conduct secure communications through both military and commercial satellites, therefore cutting down on the need for the services to field costly new satellites. Because the Senate increased funding for the program in its own defense bill, Bridenstine is hopeful that House lawmakers can be persuaded to do so when lawmakers meet to hammer out details of the defense budget, he said during a June 12 Peter Huessy breakfast at the Capitol Hill Club.
“I am committed to doing whatever it is I can do to get that program funded. If we’re going to have commercial integration, we’ve got to have that capability,” he said.
Furthering the waveform’s development will be critical to a 2017 analysis of alternatives that will inform the military’s future space based communications architecture, said Bridenstine, who is a member of the House Armed Services Committee and the Science, Space and Technology’s environment and oversight subcommittees.
“We need distribution of our network systems. We need, in some cases, disaggregation. We need this kind of resilience built into the system,” he said. “Well how do you do that? Let’s take advantage of the global architecture of space based communications that already exists.”
That means fielding a waveform that is interoperable with commercial satellites, he added.
Second on Bridenstine’s list of space priorities is the Pathfinder 2 program. The Air Force in 2014 released a request for information on whether it was feasible to procure prelaunch transponders sometime fiscal year 2015 through 2016 to support Ku-band airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance communications.
Air Force Space Command’s Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) is responsible for purchasing satellites, but the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) leases capability from commercial satellite companies on the spot based on the needs of battlefield commanders. The result is that the service isn’t fully taking advantage of commercial communications equipment, and when it does, it costs too much money, he said.
Under the Pathfinder program, the government purchases “ a piece of hardware… but then we can exchange it for access to a global constellation that could even go well beyond one year, which is what DISA is currently limited to,” he said.
The House authorization and appropriations bills added funds for Pathfinder 2 despite it being zeroed out in the president’s budget request, but the Senate has not include money for the program so far.