With various nomenclatures assigned to a broad range of military and government agencies, divisions, organizations and units, confusion can often reign as to the exact responsibilities each one is responsible for in protecting the United States and the nation’s allies — this can lead to uncertainties for companies that are involved in the satellite and space industry as far as the correct channel to address when attempting to forward solutions for various missions and communication operations.
Fortunately, there are events, such as the MilSat Symposium, wherein those who manage these entities, or provide solutions for their projects, offer their sound advice and opinions to aid in the removal of confusion in unfolding the maze of regulations and help to determine the exact responsibilities within the military/agency/government (MAG) comms and space environs as to who does what, and when, and to whom.
“The biggest key to the future of the entire budget is a Joint All Domain Operation.” That is a key statement from General John Hyten, the Vice Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In that regard, this kick-off session was entitled “Joint All Domain Operations (JADO) — The Critical Role of Satellites” and featured a “Who’s Who” of subject matter experts. What follows are paraphrases of important points brought forward by each panel member when asked about describing JDO in layman’s terms.
Phil Carrai, the President of Space, Training and Cybersecurity for Kratos Defense and Security Solutions, opened the discussions
- Fred Kennedy, President, Momentus Space
- JADO is critical and satellites are obviously going to play a huge role in any JADO story… they have to, because how else are you going to communicate between the various domain operators? The only way you are going to do that is through space with AI capabilities… with vastly distributed capabilities, collection and comms… that’s going to happen… there’s a lot going on out here right now.
- We should be talking about how this is going to happen and how we’re going to get the military to turn and how to come at this problem from a commercial services standpoint where they are buying things on commercial contracts and commercial terms. I think DoD is ready for it.
- The only thing I’m worried about is that we’re not going to take full advantage of the capabilities that are out there… it would be very easy for us to say, well, let’s connect up all this expensive stuff we have right now and that would be… expensive… and that would take along time. How can we do this with the DoD that doesn’t break their bank? That’s going to mean more reliance on commercial, gotta figure out how to do this — this could be a very expensive undertaking. We don’t want to do it that way. We have to be able to get the right data to the right end user so they can actually go out and prosecute. This can’t be done with the same set of tools we have now.
- Major General Clinton Crosier (Ret.) of Amazon Web Services
- The U.S. has always led the world in the integration of military forces and joint, integrated, fighting SATCOM. Taking capabilities across forces and then integrating them in a coherent way to make rapid decisions for the most effect is key to overall success and whoever can bring the most amount of data together in the shortest amount time and can make the most sense of it and can then make the most relevance of that data… wins. It’s not the Army that goes to war, it’s not the Air Force that goes to war, it’s the Combatant Commands that goes to war. We’ve made great strides integrating our forces. JDO is all about taking extraordinary capabilities across our forces and integrating them in a coherent way to make rapid decisions in real time for the most effect.
- JADO is a necessity… Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADCC) is the necessity to operate JADO. Satellites have to be part of it… I think the cloud is a given part of what is needed… there are three key things that’ll drive satellites on a cloud to meet this JADCC mission . First, Global deployment and connectivity. There is no way you’re going to have JADCC unless we can connect these disparate operations centers, sensors and decision makers. The only way we can do that around the globe is through space capabilities. Satellites are critical to connecting that last tactical mile. But the challenge we’ve had in the past is that constellations are too expensive for a singular target and we just couldn’t get there with the current technology. It’s all changing. With the cloud, you can connect everything that’s going into that last tactical mile. The second key piece is security… it doesn’t do any good to have all of that connected unless we know we can secure the data. Our satellites and ground stations must be as secure as the rest of the infrastructure. The third piece is you have to have some way to make sense of it all in real time and we’re already struggling with that.
- Kay Sears, Vice President and General Manager, Military Space, Lockheed Martin
- The time needed to collect and assess information to make a decision has been radically shortened, primarily due to the Chinese and the Russians
- Source data is not our issue. We are deploying sensors everywhere we can, but how do we get all that data into a network.
Chris Shank, Vice President, Maxar Technologies
• The China Russia threat is what is challenging the United States. In addition to what Kay Sears said about speed, it’s also about range. These near-peer competitors have anti-access denial capabilities that we need to increase our range and that’s where space comes in.
- Peter Hoene, President and CEO, SES Government Solutions
- I like to simplify things… JADO to me is simply planning and fighting together across all domains and integrating sensor to shooter capabilities and getting that processed and out to the warfighter very, very quickly. The cloud is going to be huge for what we are trying to do with JADO.
- The US Government has fought the global war on terror in an environment where we have the benefit of air supremacy. We have not been fighting a peer competitor, we have been fighting third world terrorists. We’ve been operating with impunity with ISR, UAVs and manned aircraft. We’re going to have to be much, much better when it comes to a peer competitor. Our peer competitors are highly adaptive — they’ve been watching what we’ve been doing and so we’re going to have to get this right. We’ve got to connect distributed sensors to shooters, we’ve got to process that data very, very quickly and then communicate that back out to the field and that’s where we come in as a SATCOM provider.We need a SATCOM architecture that can help us and do that.
As has been the norm for several of the SatNews Publishers’ events, the post-session Speakers Lounge was admirably hosted by Katherine Gizinski, the Chief Executive Officer of ManSat.
