The Pentagon is running out of time to fully integrate commercial space capabilities into its architecture, as it announced in its April strategy, former officials told Air & Space Forces Magazine.
U.S. officials, including CIA Director William Burns, have repeatedly warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered his military to be ready by 2027 for an invasion of Taiwan, a breakaway, self-governing democratic island 100 miles off China’s coast.
But the next generation of weapons systems that the U.S. military relies on to prevent and gain the upper hand in a possible war over Taiwan will not be in use by then, says Kari Bingen, director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former senior intelligence official in the Defense Department under President Donald Trump.
Instead, the U.S. must trust that it can use its existing capabilities better than the adversary to deter and ultimately win a conflict, Bingen told Air & Space Forces Magazine on the sidelines of the INSA/AFCEA Intelligence and National Security Summit on Aug. 27. “We need to maximize the value we get from this by better integrating the capabilities we have today,” she said. “These next-generation systems won’t be online until 2027.”
China is not the only concern. Other U.S. adversaries could also benefit from the global revolution in commercial remote sensing and Earth observation that the U.S. has sparked, Bingen said. “Other countries around the world can access the same commercial technology. We’re seeing this proliferation overall and a much more competitive environment.”
The Pentagon said in its commercial space integration strategy released in April that it would “benefit from making commercial solutions an integral part – not just a complement – of national security space architectures.”
The United States, with its government and commercial systems, continues to have a lead over its opponents in space capabilities, says David Gauthier, a veteran of NGA, the U.S. agency that collects and interprets remote sensing information such as Earth observation images.
But Gauthier, now chief strategy officer at CXO, a management consultancy that helps startups win government contracts, says this trend is in danger and the United States is losing its lead.
“I guess there are stagnant elements of our bureaucracy that are slowing progress, and our lead in commercial remote sensing is disappearing,” Gauthier said.
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second best time to plant a tree is today,” he told Air & Space Forces Magazine after the panel where he and Bingen spoke. “Today is the deadline. It’s urgent.”
Gauthier said the Defense Department’s intelligence activities in space are “totally unbalanced” between “building” and “buying.” “Right now, we’re 99 percent building it and 1 percent buying it,” he said. “And we’re regressing.”
This imbalance is costly.
“Unfortunately, the type of integration that the U.S. system has favored in the past,” Gauthier explained, involved government-developed proprietary technology that then has to be integrated. “That’s why we pay huge sums to system integrators” to later add commercial features such as managed services.
A better model for integration would be “more of an open system where everyone uses standards and APIs and we can make managed services (from different vendors) work with each other,” he said. “That would turn the system on its head.”
Bingen said the challenge is not just acquiring the right skills, but also figuring out how to get them into soldiers’ hands in a timely manner.
“You need all this infrastructure to get the data to the edge,” she said.
In computer language, the edge usually refers to the farthest reaches of the network: the devices (phones, laptops, desktop computers) in the hands of end users.
In a military context, “edge” also means the front line. It is the outermost extension of the military network. In her remarks on the podium, Bingen recalled her frustration as a political appointee at the Pentagon with the resistance of the Defense Department and military authorities to the introduction of common data standards. There is no one, she said, whose “core job is to make sure that all these systems talk to each other.”
Rick Freeman, president of government business for Amazon’s Kuiper-LEO constellation, said Amazon’s vision for the satellites, which are scheduled to come online next year as the first real competition to Elon Musk’s Starlink, is to turn its constellations into a marketplace for government capacity providers, much like smartphones have created an ecosystem of apps.
An Android or iPhone device “is just the platform for all the applications that add value. … On a marketplace like amazon.com or wherever you shop, every time you buy something, you’re not buying an Amazon product, you’re buying something from someone else who is using their platform to create an ecosystem of products and applications that you need. We need to think about space the same way, as a platform,” like the Kuiper constellation, he said.
