Gen. Stephen Whiting, the head of U.S. Space Command, said on June 24 that he does not yet know when the command is to receive the initial fielding of space-based ground moving target indication (GMTI) satellites under development by U.S. Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
“We’ll be on the receiving end of that when they’re ready to present it,” Whiting told a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Power Studies virtual forum. “I haven’t actually seen that date yet but eager to get a capability like that on orbit.”
Defense Daily will add any response from Space Force on the initial fielding date.
The proliferated low Earth orbit (LEO) GMTI satellites are to help replace Northrop Grumman‘s [NOC] Joint Surveillance Target Attack Reconnaissance System aircraft, which began service in 1991 before the U.S. Air Force retired the planes last year (Defense Daily, May 2).
Maj. Gen. Gregory Gagnon, the deputy chief of space operations for intelligence, said in April that proliferated LEO GMTI satellites will “make it difficult” for U.S. adversaries to disable U.S. GMTI.
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 the space-based radar system],” 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.”