Building each U.S. Space Force Counter Communications System (CCS) 10.3 Meadowlands takes a year or two for L3Harris Technologies [LHX] at its Palm Bay, Fla., plant, and several such systems are in the works at any one time, as the company explores foreign military sales for Meadowlands, an L3Harris official said on Friday.
“It’s a software-designed system which will allow us to rapidly and affordably add new capability as the threat environment changes,” said Erik Ballard, the space antennas general manager for L3Harris Space and Airborne Systems. “That’s a huge benefit.”
Meadowlands received fielding approval on May 2 after Space Force accepted the first two systems on April 8, and Space Force tested Meadowlands between Apr. 14 and May 2, Space Operations Command said last month (Defense Daily, May 20).
“This significant upgrade is a lighter-weight and more compact version of the CCS 10.2 that provides remote capability, automation, transportability, reduced footprint, and multi-system management,” the command said at the time. “Utilizing a more open architecture software system, CCS Meadowlands will simplify software updates to ensure the nation’s warfighters can keep pace with evolving threats and missions while also allowing one operator to control 300 percent more simultaneous missions from a geographically remote operating location.”
Space Force has said that Meadowlands’ predecessor, CCS Block 10.2, achieved initial operational capability on March 9, 2020 as Space Force’s first space control system.
CCS Block 10.2 has a “large number of racks,” Ballard said. “It’s fitting in a bus, versus now it [Meadowlands] is like fitting in an SUV. Meadowlands is certainly going to decrease that logistics footprint and help with mobility and transportability CONUS [continental United States] and OCONUS [outside of CONUS].”
Meadowlands, as many development programs, has not been without its technical hiccups and delays.
Air Force plans have called for the buy of some 30 Meadowlands systems, the first four of which L3Harris was to deliver by April 2023 (Defense Daily, Nov. 9, 2020).
Expected delivery of the first Meadowlands got pushed back until this December, but the Department of the Air Force’s reorganization last year around mission areas–Mission Delta 3 for space electromagnetic warfare, for example–helped L3Harris to deliver the first two Meadowlands in April, Ballard said.
Meadowlands “System Verification Test 1 was one of the very early milestones,” he said. “That was met at the end of 2022. There were some technical issues. There were some increases to the test program added by SSC [Space Force Space Systems Command]. Those tests are tied to specific range windows, meaning you can only execute them when you have availability. There were also some other things added to the program. What we’ve done is made sure all that was buttoned up so we could execute well on the production program in parallel [with development]. We are doing that.”
The Meadowlands name stems from the system being a departure from the block upgrade approach of CCS, first introduced in 2004. The system is to jam adversary satellite communications, early warning, and propaganda. Four years ago, the Department of the Air Force reported 16 CCS 10.2 systems in the field.
In April last year under the Biden administration, then Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall lamented that the Department of the Air Force had scrimped on fiscal 2025 funding for counterspace to deter China because of constraints in the Budget Control Act (Defense Daily, Apr. 30, 2024).
The May 2 fielding approval of Meadowlands “enables crews to enter the Deliberate Readiness Development phase whereby Guardians will train and certify on the upgraded capability,” Space Operations Command said last month. “Next steps include upgrading the operating system to fulfill remote operations capabilities and multi-system management in the near future.”
Space Force has discussed three non-kinetic space control/counterspace systems–the CCS ground jammer introduced in 2004 and its 10.2 and 10.3 Meadowlands upgrades; Alabama-based COLSA Corp.’s Bounty Hunter system, a ground-based satellite communications interference detection system, which achieved initial operational capability on Aug. 7, 2020; and the Space Rapid Capabilities Office’s Remote Modular Terminal (RMT) ground-based jammer by Virginia’s Northstrat, CACI International [CACI]; and Colorado-based Seed Innovations, LLC.