Potomac Officers Club 2024 Space Summit

Potomac Officers Club Space Summit

05 March 2024

POC 2024 Space Summit, which featured discussions with leaders in national security space, including Gen Stephen Whiting, Lt Gen Shawn Bratton, Lt Gen Heath Collins, Col Rich Kniseley, Dr. Derek Tournear, and more.

Key Takeaways

-They’re making massive strides. They’ve placed increased emphasis on the space domain.

-PRC has launched robust and capable space services including ISR, global navigation, comms, and more. 

-They’re both making rapid advancements in counterspace systems.

-Since 2018 PRC has more than doubled launch attempts per year.

-PRC is accelerating the development of key capabilities that it believes it needs to confront the US in a large-scale conflict. PLA is fielding electronic warfare systems, lasers, missiles, intended to disrupt space-based targets. 

-Russia remains a space competitor but their capabilities are strained. Moscow believes counterspace capabilities will deter aggression. They believe counterspace and selective targeting will deter. 

-Moscow will remain a formidable and less predictable challenge in space. Russia will become more reliant on nuclear, cyber, and space activities.

-Our AOR has vast geography but it is the smallest in population density. It’s important to note USSPACECOM is supporting in space capabilities and we’re supported when we’re operating in our AOR.

-We’re focused on Title 10 obligations. We have five unique responsibilities, space ops, global sensor manager, global satcom ops manager, missile defense, and space joint force provider.

-Space demands a team approach. No country can defend all activities. We must be a good teammate with all stakeholders. 

-Our competitive advantage is our jointness. Our vision for USSPACECOM is a joint command. 

-NRO, NASA, DOC, our partnerships are all strong.

-STM, DOC is taking on civil. This will allow us to focus our efforts on the military unique tasks while allowing another agency to focus on civilian. We’re ensuring alignment. 

-We have numerous SSA agreements. These are critical to maintaining our tactical edge. 

-US industry provides the US an asymmetric advantage. American industry is widening its lead. We must move as quickly as our commercial partners. Our commercial partners are a significant force multiplier. 

-Intelligence will underpin all of our operations

-Campaigning is a multiyear effort that requires forethought and planning. We’ll work to deliberately decide what to let our competitors see and what should be left invisible. 

-As we think about cislunar SSA or xGEO, that’s becoming an interest area. We see NASA and commercial going out there and beyond. We’re thinking about this.

-We’re interested in improving SSA capabilities so we know what’s going on out there. We have a unit in Virginia focused on this problem. It’s a tough physics issue and they’re helping us determine requirements. We’re laying the groundwork today.

-We’re partnered with USSF and SSC on responsive demonstrations. We can’t just think of the launch which is necessary but we have to think beyond it as well.

-I could list out missions but what’s more interesting is in specific situations, what capabilities will we need and how can we line it up. It’s a whole system we can see continue to mature so we can continue to replenish.

-T0 is all on orbit now. Software test bed. Transport sats were built by Lockheed and York. They’re doing well. Tracking was built by SpaceX and L3Harris. Ground is being provided by NRL. All three launches provided by SpaceX. 

-27 sats. We’ve demonstrated Link16 from space which is a big deal. This is what we make sure we can all talk to each other. We can only do that with line of sight however. PWSA transport will deliver beyond-line-of-sight.

-PWSA, the backbone, we’re not requiring any of the combatant commands or services to get new terminals. 

-We have MOAs with the services, working with others to get plugged in. We’re working directly with combatant commands to plug directly in.

-We have a warfighter council to bless requirements and we do that every six months. There’s representation of all the services and combatant commands. At those levels all of the services are aware.

-We’re going to do all C2 out of the two ops centers. We’ll fly PWSA independent of the rest of USSF. 

-For PNT, there’s a lot of different things USSF is looking at to make GPS more resilient. As part of PWSA, we can do two way timing transfers. We can calculate positions and time. We can tie that in through ground stations. We’re looking at how you would broadcast that out. We’re going to embed position and timing.

-Not about owning every contract but getting capabilities on orbit quickly.

-Exploit, buy, build, we’re really about the buy. 

-SRT, looking at commercial capabilities specifically analytical. We’ve been helping out with illegal resource extraction, earthquakes, and integrating space components in the combatant commands. SRT Cell has already delivered over 37 planning products.

-SSC, we’re seeing technology being able to fit different bills. We’re looking to get after alternate PNT. 

-We are going to be awarding $40M to get solutions that came out of the industry days.

-We’ll have a SPACEWEX Challenge, awarding about $40M there. 

-We’re working with commercial, working to buy data, and also work across the enterprise.

-We’re working with a tremendous amount of data. We’re looking at different forms of collection and utilizing better space capabilities.

-We also need to leverage emerging capabilities. 

-JADC2 begins and ends with GEOINT. This is critical for what we’re doing.

-Commercial has allowed us to define operational approaches and the foundational level.

-We’re in a world of nontraditional GEOINT. On one side you’ll have IC but then you have the operational approach of a commander. You add in the cloud, AI, and now you can do all of this in minutes. That allows us to make decisions at the speed of access to information. It also allows us to assess outcomes. 

-One thing we’re working on in SSC through SRT is the speed at which data becomes available to the combatant command and the warfighter. Right now I’d say we’ve got speed down to 72 between inquiring and delivery. It needs to be faster.

-We need to look at what is in the art of the possible and what will help us solve these problems.

-CASR, the last thing we want to do is be in a fight and not know how to utilize it. We are looking at peacetime agreements and pre-negotiations so when there’s conflict or a national emergency, the agreements are there. This will be a way we really start to incorporate commercial. Hopefully this message is out there to show how serious we are.

-Commercial radar and where we’re going. We sent out a BAA. There is a lot of potential. We’ve seen tremendous utility. The Executive Branch is looking at if this is something we need to purchase over the long term.

-There’s a lot of discussion as things progress. We’re excited about the future and larger programs of records.

-Right now we’re all producing information. Today’s forces are much smaller than they’ve been historically. At the same time, terrain is much more massive. We need to make decisions quickly. There needs to be a discussion with industry on alignment of algorithms. 

-Space is giving decision dominance. If we can orchestrate and move data quickly, we can out decide. We really need to bring all this architecture together.

-Scalable, trusted, integrated GEOINT, what does that mean? We have a broader ecosystem. LUNO, we want to take what we’ve learned and continue to move it forward. Object detection, domain awareness, infrastructure monitoring, climate security. We want to look at this and buy the state-of-the-art technology and continue to leverage that. 

-We’re looking at the barrier of entry. Commercial Ops Center, great opportunity for commercial. When we have a tasking that comes out, it goes straight into the marketplace. My focus is to lower the barrier of entry to get commercial.

-Innovation, industry is moving at a speed that’s hard for the traditional AQ. We’re trying to make sure we aren’t putting strict requirements. We want to give you the problem and come up with the solution. Open ended contracts, flexible requirements.

-SSC Front Door, it’s a place for industry to come to so we can industry who you are, your capability, and we can go ahead and make the connections. This allows us to all share that information. I’d love to take this beyond SSC to the service level.

-16 days to identify oil fields down to two hours and 38 minutes. This is the importance of the hybrid architecture. 

-We need to bring down the firewalls. Contract vehicles aren’t always funded so those BAAs that allow us to move quickly aren’t always funded.

-There are flexible ways to get this on contract. It’s got to be done now. We can’t wait. We need to make sure we’re onboarding providers as fast as we can and execute contracts as quickly as possible.

-We need more funding in place for commercial capabilities. We need to start doing what’s smarter.

-Culture, it’s a tough nut to crack. We’re believers in commercial capability. Gen Saltzman gave praise to SRT. That’s all commercial capabilities out there working at light speed. We need to get contracts there, make sure they’re flexible, and make sure the funding is in place, and shift the culture.

-The line is getting blurred in a good way between military and commercial. The time is now especially for fight tonight.

-Gov architecture and making sure we can get requests in at light speed and get the data out at light speed as well. Architecturally there’s a lot to do. We need to make requests in a fast and right way. On the back end, making sure we can get data out as quickly as it’s requested. This gets into the libraries but also the libraries. 

-We’ve done a number of experiments to downlink in minutes. Great demonstrations, it shows what’s possible but there’s a big difference between demonstrations and actually operating.

-You have to go seek out creatives. Ops is going through a renaissance of data. How do you make your product relevant to the AQ strategies?

-Companies able to grasp the triad of space, cloud, AI. Those that can produce products in a way that’s helpful and meaningful. 

-Gov has commodities, services and who does what. Commercial can bring it all together, process it, and deliver it. These are the discussions we really have to get into. 

-Gen Saltzman, Hon Calvelli, they’re excited about it. We’re making sure it’s in line with OSD strategy to make sure it’s complementary.

-You’ll see it’s a way to show how SF sees how commercial can be employed and how SF should move out.

-Commercial will be able to see how the service is going to move out. I don’t have a schedule for this. I just hope it’s something the industry can understand how serious the service is about this.

-S/O OSD Space Policy. They’ve really been pushing the conversations from a commercial standpoint. They had an industry day on insurance before the holidays. They’ve had convos on financial protections and what it looks like. 

-Alt PNT, we think there are many ways commercial can provide that and we can integrate it into everyday life. We rely on PNT, the world revolves around GPS. We know in the event of a fight, we’ll need PNT to prosecute. 

-Weather, we think commercial can provide different capabilities in many ways and we need to explore this. We’ll have an industry day on this.

-As we have more industry engagements, we have many industry days per year and we’re doing reverse industry components. 

-AI/ML and how we’ll prosecute these. We’re looking at this. 

-Proliferation of libraries and tools so that you don’t need to know everything about the discipline. “AI is going to replace coders.” It’s not just we don’t need computer scientists, it’s more so the mechanics might not be as hard as it used to be.

-Tools can help you better understand disciplines and it can help you fill in the gaps. 

-There’s a bit of a cultural gap. AI can break easily. It’s brittle. You can get AI hallucinations. It’s a different approach from solving an equation. We’re constantly adopting. There’s an abundance of AI courses at universities so I see a great trend.

-in the space community, the market is moving to more software-based designs over hardware.

-Onboard processing, this will require AI/ML.

-Large, proliferated architectures, this will require AI. This will bring aerospace engineers and satellite builders more towards AI/ML. There will be mindset changes. 

-There are innovative small companies. On the government side I’ve seen some automation and software that helps with the loop.

-There needs to be a way to adopt processes. Innovation, how do we get started? We’re going to need buy in and show that the systems can get results. Wargaming and simulation will be key there.

-We have a ground station in Maryland that runs autonomously. We can seamlessly integrate any satellite systems into the ground station. It combines machine to machine interfaces and also uses algorithms for decision making. This is tried and true 24/7. It decreases errors, manpower, moves quickly. This is an example of using AI for mission management.

-Using AI for mitigating attacks in a GPS denied environment… True impact is in a denied environment, it can preserve navigation, ISR, comms. It’s a project we’re working on.

-We’re trying to reduce training and simulation of a battlefield. We want to throw in red and blue and get information in real time on how we need to adjust. 

-What’s the mission you’re trying to execute? You have to make fast and right decisions. ML is a bit complex. 

-You need things to happen with a concrete chain of events. You have to bridge the gaps. 

-AI Task Force, we’re looking at getting closer to e warfighter in terms of management. We’re going to have to have some type of AI operating picture with the right models being plugged in rapidly. It’s complex but these are the biggest problems near, mid, and long term.

-There are billions of dollars going into driving these investments. The obstacles of working with government systems, we need to define clear hardware and software interfaces, designs, architectures, security, management. 

-Today there are many inquiries into AI. At the end of the day Congress has no control over AI. They can pull AI funding but they have no authority over it. Government needs to work closely with industry and create rules, regulations, integrity, requirements, standards. It won’t be easy but it’s an approach.

-We’re investing in hardware and processors. Processors will significantly increase the speed of AI/ML. This is a big investment area because it greatly increases speed, reduces energy consumption. 

-Protein folding is another area of investment. Understanding how amino acids break down into shapes. Vaccines, drugs, biological warfare, this moves all of this up to faster timescales. 

-Government is trying to do a government owned system that’s open and we can add onto it. Something that’s long term and interoperable. I can see where they’d need to make sure they aren’t disincentivizing and making sure commercial can still play a role. On AQ side this has taught me to always consider partnerships, where small business plays a role, where there is duplication of effort, etc.