Satellite interference has always been a part of SATCOM environments during military operations, with interference stemming from both accidental and adversarial sources. But resolving the threat from satellite interference has evolved from simple mitigation to something much more complex, as conflicts like the war in Ukraine have proven. In today’s warfighting environments, mitigating interference and maintaining resilient SATCOM capabilities are increasingly challenging and require satellite operators to approach mitigation in new ways.
During a recent panel discussion at the 2025 Defense in Space Conference, experts from GovSat, ST Engineering iDirect, and Kratos discussed the threats interference poses to military operations and how satellite operators are working with global militaries to address them.
Shahida Barick, moderator of the DiSC panel, opened the discussion by asking the panelists how industry can help governments and militaries mitigate interference. Josef Nemec, Technology Director at GovSat, noted that interference mitigation involves detection, monitoring, and the proactive hardening of spacecraft against intentional or unintentional interference.
“What we do is detect, monitor, geolocate, analyze, characterize, and report almost every interference event in all frequency bands that we have on our spacecraft,” said Nemec. “This provides not only situational awareness to our customers, but we can provide initial actionable intelligence that helps our customers develop countermeasures and a deterrence posture towards such events. We also go the extra mile to deliver a system that is resistant and resilient towards interference in itself. We have anti-jamming, adaptive beam forming, and geolocation features that we can use.”
According to Nemec, the volume of satellite interference events has been increasing at an alarming rate, from both accidental and adversarial sources. This spike in satellite interference is forcing satellite operators and global militaries to rethink how they collaborate on interference mitigation.
“In earlier years, interference was relatively easy to mitigate, and it was occurring at a relatively low pace,” Nemec said. “But [the pace] has changed. We do not have the time to manually investigate every event. We need to automate [interference mitigation]. In an accidental interference scenario, there usually is a point of contact on the other side that you could go to and resolve the matter . But since [the start of the Ukraine war in] February 2022, this has changed.”
Dave Davis, Senior Technical Director at ST Engineering iDirect, agreed with Nemec that the volume of interference has grown tremendously since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine.
“What we’ve been seeing in the last three to four years has been an increase in interference from many sources,” explained Davis. “Some include adversaries deliberately trying to take down systems and cause interference. But we’ve also seen a massive increase in interference from unintentional sources, like LEOs interfering with GEO technology, or radar interference, or interference from 5G technologies.”
Nemec added that the volume of interference present in today’s warfighting environments requires new approaches from satellite operators to strengthen the resilience and transmission security (transec) of a military satellite’s transmissions. This approach includes satellite operators working in tandem with military customers.
“Let’s try to imagine [an approach where] customers delegate their mission planning and comms processes to a trusted operator that will become a copilot during their ISR mission,” Nemec explained. “The copilot would ensure that the customer stays connected, switching from satellite to satellite, capacity to capacity, etc., at all times. The question is no longer if we will face interference during a mission but when and what to do about it. Customers will face interference for sure.
For Mark Lambert, President of Kratos Communications, his company is one of those copilots working alongside global militaries to analyze the type of interference occurring and geolocate its sources. “We’re in the RF domain, looking at the transmissions that are both being received and transmitted by satellites,” said Lambert. “We use that to understand what’s happening in the spectrum, if there is somebody transmitting from the ground, and geolocate where on the ground they are, as well as understand the type of interference that is happening.”
In a follow-up question from an audience member, Lambert was asked what the response is after a source of interference is identified.
“We have the technology to geolocate and understand where interference is coming from, whether deliberate or accidental,” Lambert answered. “Once you’ve identified the source and the ownership of that transmitter, there’s a choice as to what you do about it. If you think it’s just a commercial VSAT terminal that’s mispointed, then potentially you can ring up the network operator to send an engineer to fix it before the interference really begins to have a dramatic effect on your systems. If it’s a more malicious actor, then I guess we need to get our friends on the ground involved to take some more serious action.”
One theme that popped up throughout the panel discussion was the role of automation in interference mitigation. Barick asked Davis whether interference mitigation should be fully automated or require a human-in-the-loop. “I think automation is important,” replied Davis. “You want to make it as easy as possible for the end users. The more automated it is, the better it’s going to be, and the quicker it’s going to react. But you absolutely need to have the human in the loop there as well.”
Davis explained that there may be instances where military customers want to be seen and affected by interference to gather information about an adversary. In those cases, a human would be needed in the loop. Echoing Davis, when asked what the future of interference mitigation looks like, Nemec replied with three words, “Automation, automation, automation.”
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