Although the content at AFCEA West is applicable to all of the military, the event is heavily attended and focused on those in the “sea service” branches of the military – including the Navy, Marine Corps, Military Sealift Command and Coast Guard. In fact, I would call AFCEA West the premier sea service conference on the west coast – and possibly in the country.

Although not specifically satellite communications (SATCOM) focused, I’m always excited to attend AFCEA West because SATCOM is so essential to the missions of these sea service military organizations. SATCOM is their life-line, connecting them back to decision makers at home. Based on discussions at this year’s event, its role is only becoming more essential as the nature of warfare changes.

Why satellite for the sea services?
The Navy and the other sea services have a unique challenge that the other branches of the military don’t face. At sea, they have limitations which prevent them from communicating in the same manner as their counterparts in other services.

It’s for this reason that satellite has become so essential for the sea services. Communicating mission essential data and information to and from at sea platforms means sending it via satellite.

This is especially true in regions where sea services are providing support for critically important, national level missions – in the littoral regions in Southwest Asia, Africa and the western Pacific. Some of these regions are literally on the opposite side of the globe, making satellite connectivity all the more essential.

More connected means more bandwidth
Today’s warfighter is more connected and more reliant on information technology (IT) services and capabilities than ever before. The same can be said for ships at sea. The same IT services and capabilities that are available to U.S. service personnel on land are expected at sea, and those IT services, and capabilities are increasingly hosted in the cloud and require high bandwidth connections to run effectively.

At the same time, the nature and format of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) data has changed and evolved. Today’s advanced sensors, Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) platforms and other sources of intelligence are generating higher resolution, high definition (HD), and sometimes streaming video. They’re also generating more data than the military can effectively and efficiently process, exploit and disseminate.

All told, the military is generating countless terabytes of data each day. With large files and an embarrassment of data riches being shared across the military, the need for high bandwidth connections to platforms becomes increasingly essential.

There is always the need to increase efficiency and operate more effectively. One of the ways that the sea services have identified to accomplish this is to share resources across multiple ships.

Take medical personnel as an example. Having a team of doctors aboard each ship means having one team for each ship at sea. Instead, if video teleconferencing (VTC) was utilized in telemedicine installations aboard each ship, a single team of specialists and other medical personnel could be shared – cutting costs and helping increase efficiency.

To accomplish IT implementations such as this, however, high bandwidth and low latency connections are required. Luckily, these connections are available and starting to see adoption across the military.

MEO HTS steals the show
The isolated nature of the sea services and their increasing reliance on IT capabilities and applications make satellite essential. But, traditional GEO satellite constellations could struggle to affordably deliver the throughputs necessary to run these advanced applications.

That’s why advanced Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) High Throughput Satellites (HTS) was the topic of so many of my discussions at AFCEA West this year.

The decision makers and senior leaders of the sea services understand they need higher throughputs and lower latencies to meet warfighting applications with demanding bandwidth requirements, including delivering large-file transfers, streaming HD videos, video teleconferencing, and many others. MEO HTS managed services are satellite solutions that can deliver it for them.

The conversations that I had at this year’s AFCEA West are indicative of a larger trend we’re seeing across the military – a reliance on higher throughputs, lower latency solutions provided in a cost-effective managed service.  Although we’ve not – yet – delivered this type of service to any of the U.S. sea services, their demand for greater capacity will eventually lead them to a MEO solution.  SES Space and Defense is ready to support and deliver!

To learn more about how MEO constellations can be used to enable a more connected, modern Navy and Marine Corps, download the whitepaper, “High Throughput on the High Seas,” by clicking HERE.

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At the same time, the military is actively looking to utilize new technologies, making our troops better informed and aware in the field. ISR and communications solutions in forward operating bases (FOBs) ensure the warfighter has real time situational awareness. However, when the soldier leaves the FOB, current technology does not allow for the same level of situational awareness to go with them.

These challenges – and the steps the military is taking to overcome them – were expertly detailed in a recent article in National Defense. Perhaps the most notable step detailed in the article is to achieve Group 4 UAS capability on a Group 3 size platform.

According to Mike Fieldson, airborne ISR division chief at SOCOM’s program executive office fixed wing, this means a move away from Group 4 and Group 5 drones, which weigh more than 1,320 pounds, and towards a smaller and lighter UAS in Group 1 through Group 3. As Mr. Fieldson put it, “The intent…is to take Group 4 and Group 5-type capabilities and push that down into a Group 1, Group 2, Group 3-type configuration.”

Shrinking America’s fleet of UAS resources can have multiple benefits for the military. Most Group 3 UAS don’t require a runway, lowering their signature in a given area. They require less power to operate. They’re significantly less expensive. In addition to this, their low cost and small size makes it more feasible to utilize multiple assets for each mission, greatly increasing resiliency through redundancy.

This plan to go smaller and proliferate UAS resources was shared in the article by Lieutenant General Kenneth Tovo, commander of Army Special Operations Command, who said, “The large [UAVs] that we’re relying on now perhaps could be replaced by a multitude of essentially throwaway swarms of UAVs.”

This concept of creating swarms of smaller UAVs seems plausible enough, but there are challenges. While moving to a smaller UAS isn’t limited by the platform, the biggest challenge to a Group 3 UAS is often overlooked – the antenna required for beyond line of sight operations.

The incredible shrinking antenna
For UAS fleet resources to shrink in both size and weight, they’ll need all components to shrink as well. This includes sensors and the antenna used to transmit data back to the personnel aggregating, analyzing and drawing actionable intelligence from the data.

To accomplish this, satellite hardware manufacturers – such as GetSat – are working feverishly on a new generation of advanced antennas. These antennas can sit flatter on surfaces to reduce drag and are more aerodynamic, and are smaller. The most exciting new antenna technologies are flat panel arrays and the “Holy Grail,” electronically steered aperture (ESA) antennas.

Hardware manufacturers are also working to develop a new generation of software-defined modems which are smaller and can be paired with new antenna designs to make the entire apparatus responsible for sending and receiving data more compact.

But smaller antennas aren’t always the panacea. Yes, they cut down on size and weight, and can help the military usher in an era of smaller UAS resources. But they give SATCOM providers nightmares and leave users wanting higher throughput.

Shrinking from the spotlight
Small antennas mean problems for satellites, regardless of how sophisticated and advanced they are. The smaller an antenna is, the greater the opportunity for adjacent satellite interference to occur.

Although emerging commercial GEO SATCOM solutions are designed to be used with smaller antennas – such as those found on commercial aircraft – the military has been reticent to utilize them mostly because commercial practices for these new technologies run counter to their critical requirements. This means as the COMSATCOM industry focuses investments on technologies necessary to meet the demands of the always connected commercial world, it does little to address the ISR requirements for smaller antennas required for the next, highly-coveted Group 3 UAS class.

Luckily, two solutions could already be in space – MEO satellite constellations and GEO High throughput satellites (HTS). Unlike traditional wideband GEO satellites, these satellites utilize high-powered, concentrated spot beams that are easier for smaller antennas to access.

To learn more about advanced MEO and HTS satellite solutions and their use cases within the military and federal government, click on the following resources: 

GEO & MEO: Proven. Efficient. Scalable.
The Big Beam Boom (High Throughput Satellites White Paper)
O3b “Fiber Like” Satellite Communications for U.S. Government Applications
High Throughput Satellites for U.S. Government Applications

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Based on his remarks at SOFIC, it’s apparent that Gen. Thomas is focused on changing the reactive nature of our special forces and making these elite groups more proactive.  He appears committed to strategically placing personnel and capability in locations that will allow them to impact situations before the shooting starts, “left of boom”, if you will.

According to the General, “…being there ahead of time, having relationships there ahead of time, identifying problems before they become crises, developing that partner capacity, prior, not after, a response. We are too often on the other side of that.”

To become more proactive, the way in which the Special Operations Command operates will have to change at the fundamental level. Instead of being kinetic and dispatching to areas of conflict when needed, they would – instead – have smaller groups of special forces soldiers deployed in more locations and for longer durations.

Also, to become less reactionary and move “left of boom,” they’ll require an incredible amount of intelligence and information. Only through the aggregation, sharing and analysis of intelligence can the Special Operations Command truly identify crises before they occur and put plans in place to avoid them.

Luckily, this increased amount of intelligence is increasingly becoming available. The military has worked exhaustingly on the creation of new sensors that can gather the intelligence needed to identify trends and relationships and identify issues before they occur. This intelligence comes from many different places, some of which include HD video and photos from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unstructured data gleamed from social networks and data from cellular and wireless networks.

However, data is useless if it can’t be analyzed, and the more data that’s available, the larger the task of analyzing it. With smaller teams in the field, distributed more widely across the globe, special forces simply won’t have the manpower in theater to aggregate and analyze the mountains of data that they’re generating. It’s going to have to be aggregated in theater, and then moved to another location where large teams of analysts and leaders can analyze, process and use it to impact decision making.  This is where the military has a challenge to overcome.

The sheer amount of data, the large number of sensors and the size of the HD video and photos being aggregated and sent for analysis creates an immense bandwidth demand for transmitting information and data to and from theater. And, in many cases, SATCOM networks are the only way to deliver information since terrestrial networks simply aren’t available.

New advances in COMSATCOM are ground-breaking, with today’s solutions offering low latency, high-throughput connectivity that the military needs to deliver this intelligence from the field to the places where it can be shared, analyzed and used to make informed military decisions.  One of these new advances in COMSATCOM is the emergence of Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellite constellations. These satellites are approximately half the distance from the Earth as traditional geosynchronous (GEO) satellites, which dramatically reduces latency and enables fiber-like connectivity This is exceedingly important to the military user that wants to aggregate, share and analyze the kind of data that can truly improve situational awareness, impact decision making and enable it to become more proactive – especially today’s HD and UHD video.

As General Thomas discussed, the future of America’s special forces is more proactive – operating “left of the boom” and responding to crises before they even become crises. But to do that, the military needs actionable intelligence – and lots of it – to give them the foresight to identify and characterize issues before they arise. MEO satellite constellations like O3b offer a solution to the “Big Data” dilemma facing the military today.

Additional Resources on MEO & GEO constellations:

• GEO & MEO White Paper
• White Paper on “Fiber Like” Satellite Communications for U.S. Government Applications
• Video: Fiber in the Sky

*Photo courtesy of the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA).

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