A U.S. Space Force official on May 2 said that the Space Based Radar (SBR) under development by the Space Force and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) will be a proliferated low Earth (LEO) constellation.
LEO has displaced geosynchronous as the orbit of choice for new DoD satellites, including those of the Space Force’s Space Development Agency (SDA).
SBR is to replace the retired Joint STARS aircraft by Northrop Grumman [NOC] for ground moving target indication (GMTI).
SBR “allows us to support multiple combatant commanders simultaneously,” Maj. Gen. Gregory Gagnon, the deputy chief of space operations for intelligence, told a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies’ Schriever Spacepower virtual forum. “Space is no longer only strategic. Space is tactical, and our adversaries have made it so.”
A proliferated LEO SBR “makes it difficult for them to take down,” he said.
The Department of the Air Force has said that SBR will fill regional and global gaps in GMTI coverage (Defense Daily, May 17, 2023).
Airborne GMTI assets are unable to gather data at long ranges beyond several hundred miles, due to the Earth’s curvature and threats from advanced air defenses, such as those of China, Gagnon said. At 62,000 feet, for example, the Air Force’s U-2 Dragon Lady by Lockheed Martin [LMT] has a 300 nautical mile line-of-sight surveillance distance, he said.
“I’m not concerned, from a technical readiness level, that we’re gonna have an issue [with SBR],” Gagnon said. “This is doing tracks from radars. The Department of Defense and our industrial base know how to do that. What we need to do is make sure that we can rapidly process and move those tracks into warfighting formations. The Space Force proposal, since we’re part of the joint force and we’ve stood up components in each of the combatant commands, is to make sure that our component can service their component partners, whether it’s the Army, maritime component or the Air Force component, with timely, relevant MTI capability, based off the direction of their joint combatant commander. The second big benefit of this is it can be completely integrated with the national intelligence community.”
In response to a question on counterspace on May 2, Gagnon echoed Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s remarks this week on U.S. counterspace and said that Kendall and other Department of the Air Force officials have made Congress aware of counterspace needs to counter China and Russia.
“I think about 25 or 24 percent of the Space Force budget is focused on responsible counterspace campaigning, or space superiority, if you will,” Gagnon said.
“I obviously can’t tell you all the pieces that are inside there [counterspace], but what I will tell you is we’re actively talking about this with our board of directors who pay for us–Congress–so that they understand the needs at a very precise level,” he said. “The PLA [China’s People’s Liberation Army] funding from ’24 to ’25 went up 7.1 percent. In the past, we often talked about defense budget as not a competitive issue vis a vis someone else. They’re going 7 percent. We aren’t. We have to make trades…I have champagne dreams, but I live on a beer budget.”
Kendall told the House Appropriations Committee’s defense panel on Tuesday that the department had to curtail counterspace funding plans in fiscal 2025 because of budget constraints (Defense Daily, Apr. 30).
”Our greatest regret, if you will, in the constraints we had this year was we couldn’t move forward more quickly on counterspace capability, in particular,” Kendall said on Tuesday. “Our pacing challenge is fielding a number of systems that threaten the joint force and are targeting assets like aircraft carriers. We need to have the capability to do something about those assets so they can’t provide an attack targeting surface to the Chinese military. That would be the highest thing on our list that we aren’t able to move forward as quickly as we’d like to.”
Gagnon said on May 2 that China’s peacetime military expansion, including a “550 percent” increase in on-orbit space systems since Dec. 31, 2015 when China created its military space component–the Military Aerospace Force–is “profoundly concerning.”
Just after the establishment of China’s Military Aerospace Force nearly nine years ago, “my lead scary story was they have these direct ascent missiles that can launch from western China and go up and destroy satellites, and they’re gonna build a lot of them and they have these lasers that can lase things and cause satellites not to work,” Gagnon said. “My main narrative today is way more concerning.”
“My main narrative today is of that rapid growth in things in space–for the last two years, they’ve placed over 200 satellites in space both years,” he said. “Of that, over half are remote sensing satellites purpose-built to surveil and do reconnaissance in the western Pacific and globally, satellites designed with a proliferated architecture so they’re resilient against attack, an architecture not designed for efficiency and cost effectiveness, but to go to war and sustain in war…They will be inside a rapidly expanding weapons engagement zone to track their target and put fires/weapons on that target, even against mobile targets. Few countries have that advantage. Our allies have had it because they’ve partnered with us [the United States], but it’s really just been us against mobile targets at extremely long distances. That monopoly is over.”