COMMERCIAL MEANS
FILLING SHORTFALL
With commercial operators already contributing to the military’s communications
needs, the operators are ready to do
more if asked. “The TSAT program was an
example of the military wanting to put the
very latest, cutting-edge technology into
space to achieve a 110 percent solution
to its communications challenges,” says
Kay Sears, president of Intelsat General
Corp. “I think what we are seeing with
the TSAT cancellation is a total reversal of
that approach and a move toward a more
distributed architecture that will function
much like the Internet, with multiple nodes or hosted payloads spread across many different satellites around the globe. Some
of these may be commercial and some
may be military, but I think we will see a
lot more off-the-shelf solutions getting into
space more quickly with proven technology
that is delivered on time and on budget.”
Robert Demers, senior vice president,
Americom Government Services says,
“We believe that the requirement for net-centricity is key to [the Pentagon’s] overall
strategy in how they plan to conduct operations. So the requirement or the desire
for the driver to have net-centricity is a
key part of their communications and is
not, in anyway shape or form, been retired.
It is difficult to determine how DISA will
procure satellite communication or communications services in the future. It (TSAT
cancellation) does change the architecture
and allows them to be able to address the
non-protected issues for broadband and
to get it cheaper and faster through using
commercial operators such as ourselves.
Maybe there is an opportunity with TMOS
to have a better integration of commercial
satellite communications and military
satellite communications through that
architecture. … With the TSAT decision, we
believe in the commercial satellite industry
and with the operators, in particular, to
provide the [Department of Defense] an
opportunity to build on its already growing
relationship with that community and to
integrate fully the commercial aspects of
the Industry into their architecture.”
The challenge for both sides is how to
determine the amount of bandwidth and
capability the Pentagon wants own and
control versus how much it is willing to
lease from commercial providers.
Boeing transferred control of WGS-2
satellite to the Air Force in June. WGS
satellites are the highest-capacity military communications satellite, offering
a major increase in bandwidth for air-men, soldiers, sailors and Marines. The
Department of Defense eventually wants
to acquire six WGS satellites. Three could
take up to 66 percent of the commercial
satellite capacity leased by the Pentagon.
According to Diana Ball, spokeswoman
for Boeing, “There is nothing available
to the [Department of Defense] today
that provides the kind of secure ISR and
communications-on-the-move connectivity
that TSAT would have provided. In the area
of ISR, the military has historically relied
primarily on commercial Ku-band satellite
communications. With the fielding of the
WGS satellites, much of this ISR traffic will
be transitioning over to military satellite
communications. However, the proliferation
of UAVs, the need for even higher data
rates, and the need for communications
links that can operate in the presence of
interference will drive the need for TSAT-like capabilities,” she says.
“The six-satellite constellation of WGS
has the capability to perform some of that
(global operations in a secure and survivable communication bubble) mission,” says
Bennett. “WGS was designed in 2002 and
was considered revolutionary in its capabilities. Each WGS satellite has the capability to provide 20 percent of the bandwidth
of a single TSAT satellite. … WGS can fill
some of the void, but again WGS has only
20 percent of the bandwidth that a TSAT
was designed to handle and none of the
protection for the waveform or the satellite. With WGS-2 and WGS-3 coming on
line, plus a greater utilization of commercial satellite communications, most of the
risks have been mitigated.”
The three systems will help replace some
of the lost capability, and the military will
use those system and some of the technology already developed for TSAT to meet
demand, says Payton. How can we capitalize on that piece part investment and the
work we did to mature those technologies.
… What we are doing is going back to the
warfighters predominantly represented by
our Strategic Command in Omaha and the
Air Force Space Command in Colorado. We
will go to the warfighter and have them
quantify which new capability they want
first and at what priority should we field
next. Then we will figure out what will fit
on the AEHF and WGS satellites. It could
be a standalone, single mission satellite,
but we do have as our charter to capitalize on those subsystems technologies that
we proved over the last four years,” says
Bennett.
