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home > May 26, 2008 issue > article
Filling the SATCOM gap
By Brian Robinson
Special to Defense Systems
Communications demands, new threats in space and delays in delivery of systems are forcing the Defense Department to realign priorities
Military satellite communications is in a state of flux as the
Defense Department struggles to fund upgrades to its Cold War era
fleet of birds.
The first of DOD’s Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) constellation
of satellites was launched in October, the initial step toward a significant
upgrade of the Defense
Satellite Communications Systems
(DSCS) III.
However, the launch coincided
with the revelation of major delays
to other systems. The most significant
was to the Transformational
Satellite Communications Systems
(TSAT) program, which is intended
to provide wideband and protected
communications.
Because the first launch of
TSAT satellites is now unlikely
before 2016, the military will be
looking to fill gaps in bandwidth
demand. That opens the possibility
of greater use of commercial satcom
services to fill other program
shortfalls. The 2001 terrorist
attacks and the Enduring Freedom
and Iraqi Freedom wars sparked a
surge in satcom demand.
Meanwhile, DOD is also trying to realign priorities to put a focus
on Space Situational Awareness (SSA), a program that became more
urgent after China shot down a weather satellite in January 2007.
President Bush issued a classified memo in July 2007 that requires
government departments to improve the nation’s SSA capabilities.
Lt. Gen. William Shelton, commander of the Joint Functional
Component Command for Space, recently called improved SSA the
No. 1 operational need and the foundation for all space
operations.
Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, the Army’s chief information officer,
highlighted the need for satcom upgrades. In a presentation last year,
he noted that the total bandwidth used by the force of 542,000
deployed for Desert Storm in 1991 topped out at 99 megabits/sec.
During the Iraqi Freedom campaign, from 2003 to 2004, the 123,000-
member force required more than 3.6 gigabits/sec.
With bandwidth demand sure to increase given the strategic and
tactical requirements for real-time, networked battlefield images and
video to improve decision-making and with the greater use of
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with multiple sensors, the
upgrades are seen as vital to future warfighting capabilities.
“A single WGS satellite has greater capacity than the entire legacy
DSCS III constellation,” Gary Payton, Air Force deputy undersecretary
for space programs, told the House Armed Services Committee
in March.
DOD’s improved satcom capacity will be primarily delivered
through three programs. - WGS will be comprised of five satellites that replace DSCS II and
provide wideband communications through the X and Ka bands.
- The Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) and, eventually,
TSAT satellites will replace the Milstar fleet and provide protected
communications.
- The Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) will be comprised of
a fleet of as many as six satellites that will provide ultra-high-frequency
narrowband communications, replacing the UHF Follow-
On (UFO) system.
The first of the AEHF satellites is due to launch this year, and when
the system becomes operational, it will complete a worldwide MDR
ring. That ring will boost data rates for these low-detection/anti-jam
communications from a few kilobits/sec to 1 megabit/sec.
DOD is planning for a total of four AEHF satellites to be launched
by 2010, and Congress added an extra $125 million for the program
in the fiscal 2008 Defense Authorization bill.
MUOS, managed by the Navy, is designed to provide communications
on the move (COTM) as fast as 64 kilobits/sec for things such
as handheld terminals, aircraft, missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles
and remote sensors. It will allow four times as many such links as the
older UFO system, nearly 2,000, and will boost total throughput to
39.2 megabits/sec, compared with 2 megabits/sec for UFO.
This is “the common denominator for command and control, providing
the capability to communicate from tactical to theater levels
and between defense and nondefense agencies,” said Rear Adm.
Kenneth Deutsch, director of warfare integration at the Office of the
Chief of Naval Operations.
MUOS will allow for a more comprehensive and coordinated
approach to regional engagement, providing the capability to synchronize
efforts with other services, agencies and allied nations, he
recently told a panel of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
However, each of these programs has experienced delays, which
will affect both current and future bandwidth requirements. WGS
satellites were due to start launching in 2004, those for AEHF in 2005
and those for MUOS in 2007. MUOS will now start replacing the
UFO fleet in 2010.
TSAT UNDER FIRE
The hardest hit of all of these might be TSAT. It is a major element
of a planned secure, high-capacity global communications network
for use by DOD, intelligence agencies and NASA that will use 10
gigabit/sec to 40 gigabit/sec laser links. It has been under constant
criticism almost from its inception.
In 2004, the Government Accountability Office recommended
that TSAT be delayed until its critical technologies were more
mature and it was easier to see how they could be integrated. GAO
repeated its criticism a couple of years later. Last year, Congress
chopped $150 million from TSAT’s fiscal 2008 funding.
The Air Force, perhaps sensing the inevitable, is asking for only
$843 million for the program in fiscal 2009, and is planning to
spend some $6.6 billion during the next five years, or about $4 billion
less than originally expected. Design and development schedules
have also been pushed back.
The military space community’s challenge is dealing with technology
that is getting so expensive that it’s becoming unaffordable,
said Ed Anderson, a principal at Booz Allen Hamilton and a former
deputy commander of the U.S. Space Command.
“Cost is what’s driving these delays,” he said. “The TSAT delay
in particular is going to hurt
because the Army is looking at
that at as an important part of the
Future Combat System.”
The military can augment the shortfall with commercial capabilities,
and that’s not bad, he said. But some people are hesitant to do
that because they don’t know if they can depend on it always being
there when they need it.
However, he said, there has to be some way to provide the capability
because warfighters have come to depend on satellite communications
and the persistent awareness it provides on the
ground. The system enables 5,000 soldiers to control an area that previously would have taken
50,000 to cover, he said.
DOD’s demand for fixed satellite
commercial satcom grew 31
percent a year from fiscal 2000 to
fiscal 2006, according to the
Defense Information Systems
Agency, which buys commercial
satcom capacity for the military.
That frantic growth slowed during
the past couple of years but
still was around 12 percent.
Projections for future growth
are uncertain at best, said Joe
Mansir, deputy program manager
of satellite communications at
DISA’s Program Executive
Office.
“While DOD expects continuing
demand” for commercial
services, he said, “factors such as
the availability of WGS satellites,
the deployed Global War On
Terrorism force structure levels,
and fiscal pressures clearly impact
future demand, making precise
quantification challenging.”
In general, commercial satcom
can meet all of DOD’s
requirements other than for military-
specific needs such as jamresistant
communications, open
ocean coverage at all commercial
frequencies for things such as
spot-beam antennas, and for extremely high-throughput requirements
to small, disadvantaged terminals such as those on UAVs,
he said.
Others, however, see a continuing increase in commercial satcom
as inevitable. Even if the military were to deploy all of the
satellite assets it has budgeted for, said Jose del Rosario, a senior
analyst at Northern Sky Research, demand probably would still go
up.
“Soldiers need communications for intelligence gathering and to
move that data up to headquarters, then there’s the need for
remote sensing, for opening up new bases and so on,” he said.
“There’s no other way for the military to meet this demand.”
The military would prefer to use its proprietary assets but can’t
afford it, he said. Also, commercial services are much cheaper to
pull together; the cost of putting a military satellite in orbit is
around three times that of a commercial satellite.
THE COMMERCIAL ALTERNATIVE
Commercial satcom is already a big workhorse for the military
across the L, C and the Ku bands, said Kay Sears, senior vice president
of sales, marketing and business development at Intelsat. And
DOD is grappling with what should be the mix of commercial and
military satellite services.
Commercial providers have proven that they can be reliable
providers of satcom to the military, she said, and the bottom line is
that the industry has performed extremely well for the military at a time when it didn’t have its
own capacity.
Now, DOD wants to know what level of security commercial
companies can achieve and whether it should put a lot of day-today
communications through commercial systems and accommodate
surges in demand via its own systems, she said. There are also
some areas for which Intelsat and other companies would be prepared
to optimize their systems.
“But the kind of forecasts [of demand] we get from the military
are not what we can take to an investment community,” Sears said.
“We are willing to take risks, but we want to be able to measure
that.”
The key is the willingness of the military to engage with the
commercial satellite industry so that both sides can understand
each other’s needs, said Tip Osterthaler, chief executive officer of
Americom Government Services and a retired Air Force
brigadier general.
“The perception of government is that they can only buy on the
[commercial] spot market because they don’t have enough demand
for commercial companies to put satellites up for them, and that’s
not true,” he said. “They also believe that we have to pre-sell
capacity before we put satellites up, and that’s also not true.”
There’s also the possibility of commercial companies launching
hybrid satellites that carry two different kinds of payloads, one of
which would be military-specific. But that requires an understanding
of the risks involved, which requires a better understanding of
government needs and commitment,
“But we’ve not seen that effort yet,” Osterthaler said.
About 80 percent of military communications today is carried
on commercial systems, he said. At the same time, military traffic
accounts for only 20 percent of the commercial industry’s business.
So the industry can’t fundamentally reorient its business practices
to favor the military.
SPACE SITUATIONAL AWARENESS
Although it has not replaced the urgency of any of these satcom
programs and its need has been noted for several years, SSA was
thrust to the fore during 2007 following China’s anti-satellite test in
January 2007.
SSA is a ground- and space-based system that tracks and analyses
the orbits of objects in space — weapons, satellites or debris — to
determine what danger they pose to U.S. military space assets. It
also determines the status of the military’s own forces and what the
effect of the space environment has on operations.
One of the lessons learned from China’s test is there’s a tremendous
amount of SSA data available in many disparate systems and
security channels, Shelton said at a recent Senate hearing.
But “we clearly need improved processing and analytic systems
that continually compile and automatically fuse SSA information
in real-time to keep us abreast of space events,” he said.
Other needed improvements include networked sensors and
information systems to share information and allow future SSA
sensors to be plug and play, he said.
Congress responded by boosting fiscal 2008 appropriations for
SSA and space control to about $300 million. That is almost certain
to increase in fiscal 2009, with the Air Force asking for over
$421 million for those programs, with SSA slated to get around
$240 million of that.
And of that, about half will go for the Space Based Space
Surveillance (SBSS) Block 10 satellite, which is slated to replace the
Space-Based Visible sensor. The SBV, part of an instrument pack age on the Midcourse Space
Experiment craft, was designed
to prove above-the-horizon surveillance
capabilities using
broadband detectors to automatically
detect space objects. But
that craft is well past its shelf life.
SBSS is now slated to launch
in 2009. After the Block 10
pathfinder satellite is completed
and launched, the plans are for a
constellation of four, more
advanced SBSS Block 20
satellites.
Another $45 million of those
SSA funds are intended for
upgrades to the Space Fence, the
oldest of the United States’ space
tracking systems. It’s comprised
of a series of radar systems in the
southern United States stretched
along the 33rd parallel that track
objects in both low Earth orbit
and medium Earth orbit.
The Space Fence can track
objects as small as about 30 centimeters
in diameter. Upgrades
using the fiscal 2009 funds will
use higher frequencies to enable
it to detect and track much smaller
objects.
The other major element of the
SSA is the Rapid Attack Identification Detection and Reporting
System (RAIDRS). This system includes automated detection sensors,
information processors and a reporting architecture and is
meant to detect, identify, classify and report any event that threatens
the operation of military space assets.
A total of $57.8 million in fiscal 2009 is intended to fund the
development and deployment of the first Block 10 spiral of that
program, in addition to the initial concept definition and development
of the follow-on Block 20 system.
That’s aimed at collecting data from open and classified
sources that might help to predict attacks such as the one China
launched against its own weather satellite, only this time targeting
U.S. assets.
RAIDRS Block 10 is expected to be operational sometime in 2011.
Finally, the Integrated Space Situation Awareness program would
get $45 million from the SSA budget, up from $26 million the previous
year. That program’s goal is to produce a network-centric environment
that will provide automated, real-time correlation of the data
collected from all SSA components and translate that into actionable
information for commanders.
With the Chinese anti-satellite test as a catalyst, DOD said it added
funds for fiscal 2009 to accelerate the evolution of the Space Defense
Operations Center into a net-centric enterprise, which is its current
priority.
For many of these plans, however, the devil is in the details,
according to the Center for Defense Information. In an analysis of the
fiscal 2009 Air Force space budget, the center pointed out that Air
Force officials said the initial operating capability for the planned
upgrade of the Space Fence is again being pushed back, to 2015. It
had also earlier delayed a planned upgrade to an S-band radar system
capable of detecting small objects.
Meanwhile, Air Force officials said they would conduct an architecture
analysis of SSA sensors to be used to inform their fiscal
2010 budget process.
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