The Pentagon may provide insights this summer to Congress on the possible formation of a Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF)-like arrangement to allow commercial space companies to aid in the response to national security emergencies.
Under CRAF, U.S. civil air carriers have contracts with U.S. Transportation Command (TRANSCOM) to offer their aircraft to augment the capacity of DoD planes during national defense-related crises.
At an Apr. 26 hearing of the House Armed Services Committee’s (HASC) strategic forces panel, Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) said that he has spoken with Gen. David Thompson, the U.S. Space Force vice chief of space operations, about a CRAF fleet for space. Waltz asked John Plumb, the assistant secretary of defense, for updates on any DoD CRAF plan for space.
“I think it’s incredibly important as we look at resiliency, redundancy to really have these agreements in place now should we ever need them in a time of emergency,” Waltz said.
Plumb responded that “I fully agree we need to be able to access our commercial space partners and their capacity and bandwidth, something like a CRAF agreement, if not exactly that.”
In 2020, TRANSCOM was considering the business case and return on investment requirements for government and commercial parties to enter into long-term space transportation surge capability, CRAF-type agreements (Defense Daily, Oct. 9, 2020).
Plumb testified on Apr. 26 that Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks has charged various space organizations with examining CRAF-type arrangements, including Space Force’s Space Systems Command and the National Reconnaissance Office.
“I’m working on it from a policy, overarching piece,” Plumb said. “I would say as to when we can get back to you with a coherent story and we can provide where we are now, I would say in summer, we could probably provide a much more fulsome response as to where we are and each of these pieces and how they’re coming together. We’re all taken with it. It’s very important, and I think this is the right time to make sure we’re doing it.”
At the Apr. 26 hearing, Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-N.M.) said that White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico is developing and testing 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 (GEODSS) 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.
“We proved out the concept that DARC can actually work,” Frank Calvelli, the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisitions and integration, said on Apr. 26 in response to a question from Vasquez on continuing DARC research and development. “And, thanks to great work by Johns Hopkins APL [Applied Physics Laboratory] and those who have developed the prototype and because of that, we are building systems. We’re going to deploy them [DARCs] globally, and it’s going to be something we critically need to keep track of objects in GEO [geosynchronous orbit].”
While defense analysts have said that the February overflight of the United States by a Chinese surveillance balloon may reveal the low quality of China’s space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) of the U.S. and may have been a ruse by China to cause political turmoil in the U.S., Plumb’s prepared testimony to the HASC strategic forces panel on Apr. 26 give some indication of the numbers–if not the quality–of Chinese space surveillance.
In his prepared testimony, Plumb said that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) last year “conducted 62 successful space launches, placing 200 payloads into orbit, more than half of which were PRC ISR satellites.”
“Today, the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] benefits from more than 340 ISR satellites with optical, multispectral, radar, and radiofrequency sensors, and now owns and operates roughly half of the world’s ISR systems,” according to Plumb. “The PRC ISR architecture enhances the PRC’s worldwide situational awareness and could support the PLA’s monitoring, tracking, and targeting of U.S. and allied forces worldwide, especially in the Indo-Pacific region.”
“The PRC expects ISR capabilities will play an important role in future conflicts by enabling the PLA to acquire timely, high-fidelity information in order to conduct long-range precision strikes and conduct battlefield damage assessments,” he said. “The PLA continues to integrate ISR, PNT [positioning, navigation and timing], and SATCOM [satellite communications] capabilities into its weapons and command and control (C2) systems to provide over-the-horizon targeting information for its strike platforms in an effort to challenge U.S. freedom of maneuver on land, sea, and in the air. Recent PLA improvements to its ISR fleet enhance the PLA’s ability to operate farther from the Chinese coast and to monitor forces across the globe, including U.S. aircraft carriers, expeditionary strike groups, and deployed air wings. This makes U.S. and allied forces more susceptible to long-range strike and ultimately challenges our ability to conduct joint operations, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region.”