The head of U.S. Space Force said this week that he expects DoD to finish a study this fall that may help provide insight on whether commercial spectrum use will conflict with a portion of the 3.1-3.45 GHz S-band designated for the ground moving target indication (GMTI) Space Based Radar (SBR) under development by the intelligence community (IC) and the Space Force.
Military forces are to use SBR as a replacement for the Northrop Grumman [NOC] Joint STARS aircraft.
“Can you provide your professional military advice on how detrimental it would be to your mission and the security of our nation, if you lost the use of this portion of the spectrum?” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) asked Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman during a March 14 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC)..
“I’m not exactly sure because we haven’t done the technical analysis of exactly what vacating or sharing any of that spectrum would look like in terms of cost and technical performance, but we do have a study ongoing and so we would hope that any legislative decisions or decisions along these lines would wait for that study to come out later this fall so that we could make the decision with data-informed analysis,” Saltzman replied.
Rounds has wanted to move back the Federal Communications Commission’s auction of space in the 3.1-3.45 GHz band for 5G networks until September to allow DoD and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to complete their joint study on DoD’s spectrum needs.
At the SASC hearing, Rounds told Saltzman he was “concerned about the DoD’s approach to providing space-based [GMTI] capabilities to warfighters, following the divestment of the JSTARS platform.”
“It’s my understanding that this [space-based GMTI] capability is being moved under the funding authorities of the intelligence community,” Rounds said. “Can you share with me how you are assuming that the JROC [Joint Requirements Oversight Council]-validated requirements are captured in the acqusitions process of a platform owned by the IC community?”
“Because of the way the funding has been moved, we are focusing on two areas where we think we can provide some detailed level of colllaboration,” Salztman replied. “The first is in milestone decision authority. There are some decisions which reside at the OSD level and could be delegated to [Assistant] Secretary [of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration Frank] Calvelli…The other side is the operational concepts. This is still a DoD/a Space Force mission to do this for the joint force and so we have the responsibility to provide the operational concept for how this would work, and we will have to work closely with the program managers and the sensor developers to make that happen.”
The SBR sensors under development are “more survivable relative to the current threats we’re facing, and we’re gonna do it at a global scale, as opposed to a very small AOR [area of responsibility] the way that JSTARS [did],” Saltzman said.
Former Chief of Space Operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond disclosed the SBR effort in 2021.
To inform its fiscal 2024 budget request, the Department of the Air Force was to complete a force design for future GMTI last year–a force design that would likely use a mix of space and air assets (Defense Daily, March 30, 2022). The Space Force Space Warfighting Analysis Center (SWAC) worked on that as SWAC’s second priority force design. SWAC delivered its first force design on hypersonic missile warning and tracking–a proposed mix of low and medium Earth orbit satellites–in January last year.