Air Force Association Transcript Future Force Design for Counterspace Campaigning
13 February 2024
Future Force Design for Counterspace Campaigning
– Lt. Gen. Shawn N. Bratton, Deputy Chief of Space Operations, Strategy, Plans, Programs and Requirements
– Brig. Gen. Devin R. Pepper, Deputy Commanding General, Operations, and Vice Command, Space Operations Command
– Col. Charles Galbreath, USSF (Ret.), Senior Fellow for Space Studies, AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies
– Scott Forney, President, General Atomics Electromagnetics Systems
– Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, USAF (Ret.), Explorer Chair at AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies
Col (Ret.) Galbreath
Early on years ago, I was on active duty. We talked about it well, he finally had it reversible. We were afraid of talking about the classic disruption, to deny and destroy issues. That’s what I’m hearing today. It is overwhelming to execute all four of those approaches, disrupt and degrade, and I have to destroy an episode of capability to ensure spaceflight, protect them. I think we owe the joint planner all the oxygen.
Lt Gen Bratton
We have to be respectful of that domain. And the consequences of some activities in the domain but at the same time, we can’t shy away from capability to protect it. And so I think what we ought to look out there and deliver capabilities across all five of these are no new capabilities, not allowed to talk about.
I wonder if you could address some of the challenges that industry might face to effectively develop these designs. Until then, thanks. Thanks for inviting us. This is a really important panel. If you think about the 5g industry. As you’re looking at new space today, things that can really change how Thomas got into space initially in 1968. Worried about Polaris nation today is all of a sudden trying to build one or two or something that we are looking at wherever possible. Need to have those resources and as an industry. All those five days we have to be prepared to deliver what the customer wants. I counted before this panel that we have 2121 business rates. Everybody has a business. I think it’s our job to spend as much internal funding as we can, so that when the mission request changes, because of what our adversaries are, we’re ready for that. We as a company are especially very I think in the last five years, maybe four years we’ve invested a lot of money and unfortunately had to take losses to some of these fixed price contracts.
Not everything has to be fixed price I see the volume the audience know he’s a proponent of fixed price, right? Reason we agree with that. But sometimes we’ve got to do something a little bit differently. And so we’re in a position, at least in this industry, there’s so many terrestrial based airborne technologies that we can offer the warfighter and space that we’ve never been able to think about. That’s why we’re excited. Right like you ability to maneuver without regret and gentle shots and we’ve never thought about that. So it’s important. You mentioned you know, Leo I get the sense you know, we’re kind of looking at the China issue right here but with a little longer range, click the time to expand that domain. You’re going to be over there I’m going to get to protect our equity points, etc. This is going to require some new capabilities. Yeah, so I’m going to go back you don’t show us we overlap, right. There are many ways to do that. And we show our company we’re working on three different types of power energy that allow us to do that. Smart sort of delta V system that uses unconventional six degrees of freedom, propulsion, but we also have different eco outfits.
I don’t mean talking about radioisotope based thermal will take systems or very, very small Fermi onyx, I think has a future that gives you I read them today about while we can attach those propulsion system to a nation almost a printed satellite. That’s a good answer. I would agree with the future, I think one which goes to CES. We’re GA is under contract for system and application. So we’re spending a lot of time thinking about how do you do space situational awareness. How do you communicate and today let’s face it laser communication during an optically is the long term best answer. And I will read this report from STL. Wherever you’re going to be located in garage point one and two. With the greatest we have technology at both points so that we can really get a good view of what’s going on. From a company standpoint, we’re on Draper steam to go on the backside of the moon with a NASA program in 2026. It would be great if we were able to get more technology to be able to see what’s in the backside.
Lt Gen Bratton
You know from the government side, especially DOD and Salesforce, you know, clarity on those futures kind of aspects and where we’re looking. What do we think of still demo and s&t And what do we want to move into an objective force? And this is in this great power competition. Stand up of Space Force futures is really to get after this and, and work with Audible. Here’s, here’s what we’re thinking. And here’s where we need to partner with industry on things like space refueling, and cislunar, where we’re still trying to tease out the military utility to be able to develop those concepts and technologies to Wargaming them, and then teamed up with with the spark team on the operational concepts in the document where we’re transitioning something from an idea to part of the objective force that the Space Force needs to feel. That is exactly what the Space Force futures is trying to get after. But we got to communicate, we’ve got to be really open with industry want to partner with, but also to make it clear on these are capabilities we need and these are capabilities. Still, we’re not sure.
Col (Ret.) Galbreath
Just pile on a bit. So I’m very excited about space futures command. I think having an organization focusing on those activities is really important. But I want to make sure that it doesn’t always stay in the future . At some point those capabilities have to transition to operations and overcoming that transition period is classically difficult. So how can the Space Force work to overcome the valleys of death to ensure that there is not only technical maturity, but also operational pull force capabilities, so that we can actually deliver those and feel them? When we want to do demonstrations like Oracle with AFRL zoo, we’d be able to transition that to operational capability as quickly as possible. And so making the right decisions about what capabilities you need, what structure we need them to be? And then demonstrating that technology and fielding it as rapidly as possible to overcome that valley deficit especially critical.
So these are challenges that presents the department is certainly a challenge out there but I continue to over classification. Sadly, want to comment on that? Sure. Is it a problem or not? No, no, it’s not a problem. There’s a separate form going on right now. So premature to talk about what that’s going to result in. But, frankly, a lot of the things that we’re doing today, I do believe has to do it’s really too critical. And I will give huge compliments to Space Force and help support the open arbitrations for the good communication that goes on from these different organizations. When they’re in the club, we get to hear the right things. You’re working on the right things. If they’re not in the club. It’s a very difficult place to be. But I would say that, from my perspective, all of our customers do very well at making sure that we communicate very well. But the downside is that you got to get the systems and sold them ever since COVID. Pandemic has been really quite slow in getting the necessary communication and network systems. It’s been quite slow to get the certifications on sniffs or facilities that we need some help if there’s anything we could do to be better. And then I have a recent example where we do need a different way to contract is nearing a wall that you know you’re going to be supporting the warfighter you know three months later, we want to carry people through if they have billets, like as an example that a customer assured me that we would not gap our program. Our contract expired on December 31. It is a new contract. You 22 People lost their jobs, which doesn’t seem like a big number, but it is a big number based on what we’re trying to accomplish. So it’d be great if we could find out the opponent of accreta whatever it takes to make sure that we can get that I would ask for help from sometimes I forget those people have to be laid off because it’s so good that you brought up being in the club and General Pepper might switch to the terms here to that a little bit on innovation.
Scott Forney
If you’re a small company and you’re not the club, how do you get your ideas bubbled up? If you’re not kicking off? This got to be a challenge for you as we tried to bring in innovation across not just the major companies like general topic.bSome of these other smaller companies had something important want to bring to play that they don’t know how it fits.
Brig Gen Pepper
So that’s it. So basically, again, I want to call upon the USD staff just recently produces fours, being able to DCEP a lot of our space capability. Bring it out an sei level that’s gonna that’s a work that’s going to take place over. There may be some things that acquisitions just need to maintain itself challenge but from an operator’s perspective, the lower the classification level, the better I can integrate into a fight. We talked about that at the classified session yesterday. You don’t want to be that person go into a battle commander as the 11th hour with the briefcase going, Hey, sir, I got some Obinim I got something that’s going to help you with your flight. We have gone to integrate these capabilities early on into the campaign. And certainly the ops capability is gonna allow us to do that for example, get up with our spacey W capability. The one we took when def SEC they’re important declassified or DISA, spacey W that allow those integrated into the deployed support and CO counsel the global so certainly we got some work to do but we’ve got to I think the path that we’re describing a lot of the operational capability will help us integrate.
Scott Forney
So it seemed to me it’s essential to deterrence to everybody. So classify the adversary doesn’t know what you have. How can they be determined?
Brig Gen Pepper
So you have to be alternatives. If you have a good gun, you have to be able to tell you and by the way, it’s one that you’re that you’re preying on right now, in order to turn so can’t say that
Scott Forney
Let’s move on to not only protecting our DOD assets, this is the commercial assets. So for a long time, they said the civilian reserve there is contracts between the Air Force and United Airlines, Delta Airlines, commercial airlines, kind of hold them on retainer. We need to move people overseas in times of conflict or for deployment. We don’t put them on C 17. So there’s a relationship between the civilian airline industry and Air Mobility Command. Same thing I would assume that there’s something we’re interested in doing in space. There’s a tremendous commercial capability that’s in existence today that’s grown. As for that we were talking about, we talked about this earlier, we didn’t want to call it it’s called crass for the air group. So we didn’t call it crass. For a space it just wasn’t gonna float. So it’s called the civilian I’m sorry, commercial augmentation space reserved. Now, the CRA up to the airliners. We can keep them out of the threat environment, but our commercial space partners contract is going to be an arm’s length minute. How are we thinking about defending
Brig Gen Pepper
John Burke said on the last panel, we will look to to leverage commercial and again, spaceports we have a commercial strategy that that’s going to be producible OSD but certainly when it comes to being able to reconstitute many of our constellations, we’re going to be looking for the civilian companies to do that. And then as Joel Burbidge and they may become a definitive answer. So certainly, they may become the most important satellite that we have that we’re using FMO so how do we get them into the critical asset list and then auto defenders to be defended? But certainly we’re going to be looking for commercial to augment us in times of conflict and crisis as we see some of the commercial vendors being used and leveraged in
Lt Gen Bratton
I think that there’s a great contribution that are different back to the deterrence discussion, but the capacity that commercial, especially just today, communications and Earth observation really increases the resiliency and our ability to deliver that to the joint force. And so it becomes almost a deterrent effect. How would an answer try and shut that down when there’s so much there? And attacking civilian targets is a very different attack. So I think all these things work in our advantage. Thinking through this really is indebted and smart and how do we defend those capabilities to ensure we can deliver to the workforce what we need, how do we think about Christian mission risk to force we include not only commercial but also analytic capabilities that throws at us Faceman is fine, or thinking about it every day. I think they got the force design side how we think about our commercial strategy, which which we had a really good document. I think that will come out very soon, but, but we’re investing that underneath the OSD level document.
Scott Forney
And so the synchronization of this not just as a space capability across the broader department is where we’re at, on how do we how does all this contribute back to in direct competition?
Lt Gen Bratton
To develop these capabilities that we certainly need this partnership we’ve talked about between DOD and ministry, one of the challenges or reasons we hear all the time as it takes 10 years to two years to develop a system whether it’s an aircraft, or a space capability because of changing requirements, evolving requirements, and of course, the longer the program lasts, all requirements change that becomes a self with the ice cream cones sometimes, but there’s this talk now that, hey, we don’t need 100% 85% But it also the risk is assumed by the operator when you don’t deliver 100% requirement. So it seems to me there’s got to be a close relationship discussion between when you’re going to give up on a requirement to make sure you get a capability on time and may not be 100% and how you’re going to accept and analyze that risk. And candidly it is going on right now. There are great examples actually where this was happening. If you look at what they’re trying to do is done with a Space Development Agency. He puts out a spec even makes downside very quickly in your own contract, and that’s what the contract is. So I had a recent example that had been in the contract that September if you applied, the primers already downselect expect their contract next week. And I don’t expect the OSHA requirements to change unless they did and that will work very well with the taste of vomiting on those things.
Scott Forney
In addition to that, I think an 85% solution has to be understood because if you don’t have speed to the warfighter, it’s already changed. isn’t waiting 15 years or 10 years, this is too long. And so a lot of that is also helped by industry, spending some of their Iread wisely on making sure that we have the latest technology to offer. So yeah, it’s again, so you got to hold requirements as you can but if you can’t eat them, you got to let this dialogue with the customer about do you want to wait another five years? Who wants to do that? Are those dialogues happening? Is that really are those relationships informal?
Brig Gen Pepper
So I’d love to jump right into the answers. But I wouldn’t say any capability. The faster we go, the better for the operator. I think if you listen to John Miller and what he’s saying now, any capability that’s been delivered has to be delivered by December of 25. In order for us to be able to train exercise with that capability. To be ready for a potential fight with the PRC to twinset. So the faster industry can do that better. Again, if it needs 85% of my requirements. I’m okay with that. Because again, I have to be able to train operators on it and exercise with that capability.
Lt Gen Bratton
I’m walking out there this is the this transparency the industry is, I think, from the five eight from the plans of requirements See, understanding what capabilities we need to deliver that the Space Force needs to deliver, where we’re at in the programming and field in which you know, what, what are our priorities and funding. And then what things are we We’re still interested in maybe having crossed that line into the objective force. I think that’s one thing we can certainly do. I think, you know, the tennis that envoy Covelli published really getting NAFTA consistent practices within the DOD side. And so that industry is not guessing and we don’t, we don’t want that at all. We have to be side by side in this we have to have sort of a mutually beneficial relationship not adversarial in any way and I don’t think it is, and I think we’ve turned his socks dry. We beat ourselves up a lot. But then if we decide how slow we are and how long things take, but we’ve completely changed things in the past five years or so, which is tremendously faster than the Department of Defense. And so, in some ways it is, is we struggle with the valley of death and those things we’re also making tremendous strides in this area in acquisition reform really led by by SQ and acquisition community, SDA and Sparco and SSE so, you know, I’m filled with hope and in this great
Gen Chilton
I want to talk a little bit about norms of behavior. This is something that I think the US has been trying to push for a long time. This administration has pushed toward at least one norm into the UN resolution that would ban destructive direct assembly centers. Notably, neither China or Russia would sign this doesn’t surprise me because they’re irresponsible behavior, creating debris in the last decade, continuing pursuit of those capabilities How can the United States promote responsible norms of behavior and space without losing the tactical edge
Col (Ret.) Galbreath
So I’ll jump on that one. You know, even in normal warfare whatever normal warfare is, we have certain types of weapons that say we’re not going to use those chemical, biological and establish those marks. We’re not going to use those. That doesn’t mean we can’t effectively conduct military operations. It just means we do it the same way we don’t want to have indiscriminate damage to civilian territory. You want to have precision strikes. So I think in a similar way, we’re gonna develop capabilities in space to where we have very distinct effects on the adversary asset capability. We intend and we can promote the norms of not following those other potential more harmful patterns. Now, as we’ve talked before, maybe we don’t want to limit ourselves and self constrain itself the term but I think there’s a way that we can achieve the effects that we’re trying to achieve without consent, simple things, we get out as norms of behavior like how close can I maneuver my satellite next to yours in a peaceful manner, we have these norms on how ships cross, how ships behave, is the one another peacetime so I think it’s a worthy cause. When in fact to deterrence calculus, we can help prevent miscalculation. Someone taking an aggressive thinking that you’re doing something aggressive, and then striking you when, in fact you’re just observing. Yeah, no, Based systems engineering adds a lot to our confidence in systems that may be needed to complete stuff fly out in the testing, and it’s a tough dilemma for the Starcom team, for sure. I think they’re really working mainly with those kind of people.
Scott Forney
We have an effective nuclear triad today. We don’t have to. That’s it. That’s a great point. But continuing on, on how different ways of holding episodes satellites are at risk. There’s non kinetic ways to do this as well. And John, peppermint and Charles may need to talk a little bit about other vulnerabilities we would want to go after, to deny them the ability to join
Brig Gen Pepper
So certainly, there’s a partnership between US and US cyber, there’s a partnership between us and SOS Special Ops. So certainly there are ways in which we can deny the, our potential adversary with using their space capability and other ways besides destructive meanings of non kinetic, their cyber directed energy. So certainly, there’s a whole host of means that we can choose with or even from a threshold perspective. Certainly the PRC operates a lot of socio sites in Latin America and around the globe. And certainly we have an ability to get after some of those sites from a law perspective. So again, there’s other ways in which we can we can prevent a PRC from using their capability that doesn’t lead to disruptive upon.
Col (Ret.) Galbreath
I love the idea of having a lot of tools in our toolbox as long as we can afford to have all of the tools that we need to develop. Certainly there’s a right tool for the right job. And the preference would of course, be to do a non destructive non regenerating activity but I do have to wonder on these more explicit capabilities, I would suggest that intelligence required to know exactly how to achieve that effect beforehand, and the assuredness and the intelligence you need for battle damage assessment after to make sure that you actually had the effect that you that you intended, requires a little more effort. Maybe worth that effort. But I think that’s a limitation or a facet of this is non destructive means he’s not committed. And the overall time that we have to create a tough question because it stretched out, potentially nuclear weapons reminded, I think 62 The early days and 30 turns within a test starfish shot launched a single nuclear warhead into low Earth orbit in depth. There weren’t a lot of satellites up in those days, Telstar just gone up, but those that were up there with in short order and then weren’t there the last time because polls are thinking about that kind of threat and we’re putting so many of our eggs in Leo basket as we go forward. As part of a resilience strategy. We’re considering a risk of North Korea that may not have very sophisticated capability to go straight up.
Col (Ret.) Galbreath
We’re thinking about targeting new Leo constellations about this still, the threat that exists.
Lt Gen Bratton
Let’s say we’re certainly thinking about resiliency, and how to ensure that we can continue to deliver space capabilities across the spectrum. And so having all your eggs in one basket is absolutely overwhelming, do proper resiliency. And I think slack fits after that pretty well in some of their force design, capability design where they think about threats to the systems and how to mitigate that. So I think this is where the power of both the government and industry but also for our allied capabilities, and how do you look at sort of full suite of what’s available to the joint force against those threats that you’re mentioning and this particularly as we continue to deliver the specialty builders to join forces, protecting ourselves that is the mission or the Space Force to do that. So there’s a hardware piece of that there’s the non material solution. There’s the Guardians out there, what tactics of how to overcome those challenges. I think we do think about each and every one.
Brig Gen Pepper
Biden said so we do have guardians who are developing TTPs for a high altitude nuclear detonation, and that’s one of the threats that we have to be able to defend against and be able to fight. But when it comes to the actual satellite itself, that’s where we look for our force designed to be able to give us an agile way to be able to ensure we have the right deliberate legal architecture proliferate new architectures, to make sure that we still have the good hardware capability on orbit to be able to fly mission assurance to to national creditors, and also to distract them so that is still one of the threads that we actively develop TTPs against but certainly we’re looking for for job and hardware solutions.
Scott Forney
Well. Hey, there’s a classic push pull of technology that goes on time industries are waiting for a pull signal. Department sounds like we need this. Okay. There’s also a push for cyber innovation to occur in industry. Scott, can you there any things that come to mind that are ideas that the Space Force might really benefit from these technologies? Maybe not in the timeframe? We’re talking about? 2027 But it’s a fair question in industry to have something in the barn ready to go. We didn’t get painted with something in the barn, but to the point before, we have a fortunate test capability. We have to have radiator facilities that we can use to test our own hardening, which obviously is a big concern. And the requirements are not always specified for the worst case scenario. So you have to think ahead of what those requirements are. Because of our long history of being very transformational. We spend a lot of time thinking about what the next thing that the customer means? What’s just to communicate or share a better use of that. So we’re trying to think of a strong advantage, or making sure that our engineers and scientists are working on the next generation, and that we freely talk about it’s not proprietary anymore. It’s about what is a warfighter with join forces doesn’t have knowledge, when I got go down that path, so we spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to make sure that within about five years, 10 years from now, if if we were to be fair to ourselves, we’re probably within our 50 years in some cases, technology and what is the manufacturing capability needed to go fast as associate with additive manufacturing is going to be all kinds of new opportunities. New use capabilities would propose or present that challenge to offensive operations in space. So an adversary fields a satellite and says it’s just for disposing to graveyard orbits, a dead satellite because it can grapple and maneuver satellite can also be used as an offensive weapon. How are you all thinking about this to discriminate or decide what you’re gonna hold at risk?
Brig Gen Pepper
So I will and I know we have like, do like tinkering around the audience here but but really, that’s come from an SDA perspective, all the investments that we can put into our intelligence community to be able to discern what exactly and characterize that bond ordered asset right, to determine its purpose, and that’s what our our folks at insect do daylighting they provide that characterization for potential over threats or if it’s being used in a benign way. But certainly booting a PRC, as we heard Joe GAC dominance earlier today. They’re using a lot of their dual use capability. So we have to be able to characterize that. And that’s something our intelligence professionals do for us every day.
Lt Gen Bratton
I think Devin nailed it. I think understanding what’s going on in the domain. RC they help deal with this same sort of dilemma on dual use, and we just need to think it through in the space domain, how do we respond? How do we ensure we can continue to deliver capabilities that deny that advantage to the adversary however, there you know, we got smart folks who know how to do this. You know, they they live in Spock and the delta is in the squadrons and they’re killing it every day. So I think we know how to deal with these problems. We just need identifying and awareness. That is great, thank you. Well, we started this panel talking about deterrence the need to go beyond just defense but to include offense. I think we’ve touched on some important areas in that regard and how industry can help, what the requirements are and how quickly we can feel these things to make a difference to actually deter China from doing something rash in the western Pacific that would be against our national interests. So I want to thank you all for this wonderful panel. Great discussion about applause for our panel members. General Chairman and members of the panel Thank you very much for your participation.
