This series, Space in Focus, explores key space trends, challenges, and policy issues that will confront the next administration as well as offers recommendations for how to navigate them.
“Success no longer goes to the country that develops a new technology first, but rather to the one that better integrates it and adapts its way of fighting.”
This line from the 2018 National Defense Strategy remains especially relevant to the domain of space. The convergence of massive data collection, advanced computing, and global distribution networks enables unprecedented insights about activities on the Earth and in the space environment. But in a world where both the United States and China have access to the same cutting-edge technologies—each aiming to create “kill chains” of space sensors networked with weapon systems—the advantage will favor the nation that can more quickly integrate these technologies and adapt its way of fighting while disrupting the adversary’s ability to do the same.
Although technological solutions are within reach, the more significant barriers to integration and adaptation lie in policy, culture, and institutional divisions. U.S. government organizations are not incentivized to integrate, share data, or invest in the infrastructure necessary to enable data interoperability across disparate systems. These less visible, yet vexing, challenges will demand attention from senior leadership in the next administration to keep space capabilities a warfighting advantage for the military forces who rely on them.
Atop the list of priorities is the integration of defense and intelligence space capabilities to support warfighting. As China and other adversaries extend the ranges of their weapon systems, U.S. forces are being pushed further back. Increasingly, no U.S. military service will be able to effectively conduct its missions—whether long-range fires, maritime strikes, or missile defense—without relying on information from systems that they don’t own. Those missions will need the reach that satellites or other high-altitude platforms provide for battlespace awareness, threat detection, and targeting. One such example is the ability to track moving objects across vast areas, long done by U.S. Air Force Joint STARS aircraft but now moving to space, with satellites being built by the National Reconnaissance Office. These objects must be detected, identified, and tracked, with targeting solutions sent directly to military command centers, ships, airplanes, and ground units on tight tactical timelines.
They will be complemented by other constellations of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) satellites that will number in the hundreds. The scale and volume of data collected by these proliferated constellations will demand machine-driven processing and exploitation. Fortunately, with advances in computing, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI), the speed and scale at which information can be processed and analyzed has finally caught up to the volume of collection.
Although technology has caught up, the policies and procedures for integrated defense and intelligence operations have not. There remains an urge to treat overhead constellations as traditional intelligence-gathering systems, with all the policies and requirements that come with that designation. But these new constellations are, in many cases, fulfilling missions done previously by tactical or operational ISR assets, employed by combatant commands to support warfighting, not national intelligence, priorities. The policies and concepts of operation intrinsic to overhead intelligence collection must be adapted to allow for the direct and timely delivery of battlespace-relevant information and the fusion of different data sources at machine speeds—such as imagery and signals—without introducing unnecessary and unintentional constraints.
Data classification policies will need a hard relook to foster integration. The Department of Defense (DOD) took a positive first step this year, updating 20-year-old space classification guidance. However, for this guidance to have a day-to-day impact, it will need to be implemented through individual DOD space programs, operations, and planning activities, not only to enable greater data sharing within the DOD but also with allies and private sector partners. Similar efforts in the Intelligence Community (IC) are needed as data generated from its space assets is often marked as highly classified by default and its transfer to tactical networks operating at lower classification levels is less timely.
Further complicating warfighter support is that all these DOD and IC systems—whether satellites, communications networks, or military platforms and weapons—are operated by different services and agencies, are built by different contractors, and use different data standards and formats. It is unrealistic, with these legacy systems, to assume universal standards will be adopted. Instead, investments in software tools like application programming interfaces that automatically translate between incompatible systems, while also maintaining high cybersecurity, will be required to do machine-to-machine transfers of space data.
Meanwhile, the move towards proliferated satellite constellations, and the greater availability of commercial and allied data sources, will necessitate new approaches to constellation management and innovation in “ground systems.” When managing a limited supply of exquisite satellites, tasking those assets and prioritizing user demands are tightly controlled. With satellite inventories projected in the hundreds, the supply-demand equation shifts. Constellation management can now start to look like Uber or Amazon, where the emphasis is on orchestration, optimization, and handoffs across a large inventory of assets to meet simultaneous user demands. Among DOD space programs, ground processing systems have long been treated as an afterthought, lagging behind fielded satellites. However, some of the most noteworthy innovations to come will not be from individual satellites, but through the combinatorial effects of this asset and data-rich processing and analytic infrastructure.
No agency or service is incentivized to integrate. A dollar spent on integration is perceived as taking away from a dollar spent on core missions and programs. It took major legislation in the form of the 1986 Goldwater–Nichols Act to bring integration—or, jointness—to DOD in the areas of operations and personnel development, and only after stunning operational failures. In the present day, it is no wonder that the DOD’s combined joint all-domain command and control (CJADC2) initiative is being driven by the deputy secretary of defense, as experts have observed that each service was pursuing its own initiative, not aligned nor building towards interoperability. The deputy secretary is the first point of integration across the military services and agencies. Across defense and intelligence, the vice president is the first point of integration. This is not sustainable in an era where adversary threats and capabilities demand holistic capabilities that cross domains, organizations, and authorities.
Integration is one of those issues that—because it is everyone’s and no one’s problem—will slip through the cracks if senior leadership is not focused on it. While technological investments will be important, especially to build the connectivity between space sensors and weapon systems, challenging legacy policies and processes will be essential to adapt the use of space power for warfighting advantage.
Kari A. Bingen is the director of the Aerospace Security Project and a senior fellow in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
