Communications satellites, both government and commercially operated, are subject to an growing array of jamming and even kinetic threats from near-peer U.S. adversaries, these officials said. In this environment, diversification promotes resiliency while complicating any adversary’s service disruption plans.

“We need diversity – we need a wide range of diversity,” said Kimberly Morris, satellite communications operations division head at the U.S. Naval Network Warfare Command.

Speaking June 26 here at the 4^th annual Milsatcom USA conference sponsored by the SMi Group, Morris said that diversity includes satellites operating in medium Earth orbit (MEO) and low Earth orbit (LEO) as well as in traditional geostationary orbits. Use of different frequencies also is critical, she said.

“What I’m trying to do is put our adversaries on the horns of a dilemma,” Morris said. “You go after our [military-owned] systems, I’ve got something else that I can get to. Historically, with a lot of the weapon systems that are brought to bear in the modern age, it’s not the primary system that has been a hero, it’s the secondary system, because the enemy puts so much effort into taking out that primary system.”

Peter Hoene, president and chief executive of Reston, Va.-based SES Space and Defense, the U.S. government services arm of satellite operator SES, said that just between SES and its top competitors, there are some 150 commercial satellites in geostationary orbit. This gives the military options in case signals from the U.S. Air Force’s workhorse Wideband Global Satcom satellites are jammed, thus complicating the targeting calculus of any adversary, he said.

Another benefit of satellite diversity is that missions vary widely, both among and even within the military services. Certain bandwidths and orbits are better suited to some of these missions than others.

“We have different sized-ships that have different-sized needs and different missions; they all require assured C2 (command and control),” Morris said. “We require diversity in pathways, diversity in orbits, diversity in spectrum, and we need it with a lot of agility because our missions change so often and so quickly.”

Charles Osborn, acting director of the infrastructure directorate at the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), said his team is designing a next-generation gateway architecture that will pull signals from satellites in all three orbits, along with terrestrial systems, into the Department of Defense Information Network. “From my perspective, those all need to be integrated together for us to have that full redundancy and resiliency that we’re looking for,” he said.

While geostationary orbit – a belt of space 36,000 kilometers above the equator – has traditionally been home to most military and commercial communications satellites, a number of companies are planning large constellations in LEO to provide fiber-quality broadband services on a global scale. While these systems are in most cases years away from full deployment, SES currently operates a 20-satellite MEO constellation dubbed O3b, with a second-generation system under construction. SES also is among the world’s largest geostationary satellite operators, with 55 satellites serving commercial and government customers.

A key advantage of LEO and MEO systems is they eliminate most of the latency, or signal lag, associated with geostationary satellites. The O3b constellation, for example, reduces latency by 75 percent, while increasing throughput, compared to geostationary satellites, supporting applications including backhaul of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data gathered by forces in the field.

SES’s next-generation O3b mPOWER MEO satellites, under construction by Boeing and scheduled to launch in 2021, will offer 5,000 reconfigurable beams per satellite along with anti-jam capabilities geared toward military requirements, Hoene noted.

SES also is working with partners to integrate flat panel, electronically steered, antennas that can switch seamlessly between MEO and geostationary satellites, addressing a longstanding concern about forces having to carry many different terminal types to fully leverage all available military and commercial satellite capabilities. The military also has been investing in multiband terminals, a trend Hoene said bodes well for the future.

Hoene said industry and government are headed down a path that could one day lead to seamless roaming between the various commercial and government-satellites for military customers. “I’m very excited about this; I think these are huge breakthroughs,” he said.

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That is one of the overarching conclusions of the DoD’s just-completed Analysis of Alternatives (AoA) for wideband satellite communications, whose findings and recommendations are expected to shape the U.S. military satellite communications (MILSATCOM) architecture in the years ahead. The long-awaited study, completed by government and industry teams over an 18-month period, was delivered to the secretary of defense near the end of June.

Although the details of the AoA have yet to be released, DoD officials offered a glimpse of its broad outlines June 27 and 28 at the MilSatCom USA conference organized by SMi Group of London.

“Hybrid rules,” said Operations Research Analyst with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Norman Yarbrough, during a presentation on the AoA June 27. “We found in the analysis … that there are needs for purpose-built [satellites] and there are opportunities to expand our use of commercial [satellites].”

Since being ordered by Congress in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2016, the AoA has loomed large over the long running debate over the future of the wideband component of the U.S. MILSATCOM architecture. At issue has been the right mix of Air Force and commercial satellites to meet the DoD’s ever-expanding appetite for connectivity.

Currently a combination of Air Force Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) and commercial satellites serve as the backbone of the DoD’s satellite communications fleet. Brig. Gen. Tim Lawson, deputy commanding general for operations at the U.S. Army’s Space and Missile Systems Center, said some 70 percent of all MILSATCOM is carried via the wideband network.

Commercial satellite operators have long argued for a larger share of the wideband pie, and some expressed heartburn with the recent decision by Congress to fund two additional WGS satellites, increasing the size of the overall Air Force fleet from 10 to 12, ahead of the release of the AoA.

Yarbrough, whose presentation focused primarily on the AoA process, said the additional WGS satellites, the first of which is slated to launch in 2022, shifted the focus of the analysis slightly. But the funding decision, driven by congressional concerns about future gaps in the MILSATCOM architecture, did not change the overall picture or the opportunities ahead for DoD to leverage the commercial sector, he said.

A major factor in the AoA, as with other debates in the military space sector, is a new threat environment in which the space domain has become, in a refrain commonly repeated by DoD officials, increasingly congested, competitive and contested. Communications satellites in particular, face any number of threats ranging from jamming – both incidental and deliberate – and cyber attacks to direct kinetic attacks.

Deanna Ryals, chief of international MILSATCOM at Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center, which is responsible for procuring military space capabilities including the WGS satellites, said the set of MILSATCOM users that do not require some degree of jamming protection is much smaller today than just five or 10 years ago. “The major growth area that we see is the protected tactical community,” she said. “Many, many, many, many users out there have to have higher levels of protection.”

Meeting that need for increased security requires a mix of military and commercially owned satellites, Ryals said.

Communications via commercial satellites will become more secure with the advent of the Protected Tactical Waveform (PTW), developed by the Air Force and now undergoing field demonstrations, Ryals said. The PTW is compatible with WGS as well as commercial satellites.

Yarbrough raised the possibility that if satellite operators field the full range of protection capabilities required by the DoD now and in the future, the military could rely almost entirely on commercial systems for its wideband needs. “But we’re not sure that’s consistent with the commercial business case,” he cautioned.

Another significant takeaway from the AoA exercise, Yarbrough said, is the degree to which the existing base of user terminals affected the various options explored and how they fared. “It’s about the terminals,” he said, noting that there are some 17,000 terminals deployed by the military today.

Typically these terminals are configured to operate with one satellite system or another, and modifying or replacing them to take advantage of emerging capabilities in the space segment is a costly and time consuming exercise. Indeed, this limitation of the existing terminal base was a major theme at the conference.

Brian Teeple, acting DoD Chief Information Officer for Command, Control, Communications and Computers, said he would like to see industry come up with a terminal able to switch seamlessly between satellite systems and frequencies with minimal to no modifications. “One terminal that I could use across multiple satellite providers in a roaming-type manner,” he said.

This capability is analogous to modern cellphones, which automatically switch to whatever network is available at a given location, Teeples and others said.

“When the iPhone came out in 2007 it had five radios on it,” said Maj. Gen. Garrett Yee, Acting Deputy Chief Information Officer, G6, in the Army. “That was 11 years ago. We ought to be able to provide something to our warfighters that in a handheld device has more than a single option.”

“Industry is working toward a solution,” said Allan Ballenger, Corporate Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer of SES Space and Defense, a subsidiary of satellite operator SES that sells services to the DoD and other government customers. “SES Space and Defense is moving from being simply a bandwidth provider to a managed solutions provider, a model that requires a holistic approach that includes terminals.”

Stay tuned for more coverage on the SMI MilSatCom Conference in the coming weeks on The Government Satellite Report.

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Far flung military forces rely heavily on remote data processing capabilities that are highly sensitive to transmission delays, or latency, associated with communications satellites in geostationary orbit, some 36,000 kilometers above the equator, these experts said. Satellites in lower orbits do not have the same latency issues, making them better suited to support certain data-intensive military operations.

Speaking at MilSatCom USA, which was organized by the SMi Group of London, U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Peter Gallagher, currently director of architecture, operations, networks and space in the office of the Army’s Chief Information Officer, served up a real-world example to illustrate the trend.

In 2016, U.S. forces operating on the ground against Islamic State fighters in Syria captured what Gallagher characterized as “treasure troves” of battlefield intelligence that would enable them to strike the enemy even harder.

“The problem was [that] the pipes were not there to get that [information] back to do the exploitation necessary to help the special operators on the ground continue to take the fight to the enemy,” Gallagher said. “So, we had to find a creative solution.”

Installing terrestrial fiber links was not an option, said Gallagher, who at the time was a senior information officer assigned to U.S. Central Command. So the Army turned to the commercial satellite sector, in particular, they leveraged a constellation of broadband satellites in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) to provide the necessary connectivity at about 60% of the cost of GEO backhaul.

“It required a lot of engineering, a tail circuit and a whole lot of creative planning but ultimately our intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance capability was enhanced by an innovative partnership between the CENTCOM team and industry,” Gallagher said. “And we solved the problem.”

Gallagher did not name the constellation, but there is only one that fits the description: SES’ O3b MEO satellites providing fiber-quality broadband links in the low to mid-latitude regions of the world. The constellation is wholly owned by SES, one of the world’s largest operators of communications satellites.

Commercial geostationary satellites are of course a critical complement to the military’s own systems in keeping the U.S. military forces connected. It is well known, for example, that in the early days of the U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, up to 80 percent of the supporting satellite bandwidth was commercially provided.

MEO satellite constellations, such as O3b – which began commercial service in 2014, represent a new capability that Gallagher said is increasingly in high demand: low-latency, high-capacity throughput. Geostationary satellites can have high capacity but are saddled with the latency issue, while current LEO systems lack the capacity to quickly move large amounts of data.

U.S. Marine Corps. Col. Curtis Carlin, of the J6 Operations Division at CENTCOM, displayed a chart during his conference presentation that said low-latency, as an attribute, is becoming almost as important as capacity for military customers. The reason is the military’s increasing reliance on what he characterized as enterprise services, an information technology term that typically refers to the integration of multiple software packages into a single platform that can be broadly applied across an organization to support its mission.

Skyrocketing data requirements among forces deployed in places like Afghanistan and Iraq that lack usable terrestrial infrastructure are driving the requirement for lower-latency systems operating in LEO and MEO, Carlin said.

This could be a boon to MEO satellite operators, as well as companies like OneWeb, which plan to deploy huge constellations of LEO broadband satellites in the coming years.

Carlin said the Marines rely heavily on intelligence information processed on servers at locations far removed from the battlefield, such as at service headquarters in Quantico, Va., or CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Fla. This processed information must be transmitted back to forces quickly enough for them to act before the situation on the ground changes, putting a premium on low latency, he explained.

Such “reachback” capabilities relieve U.S. forces of having to lug data servers into the field with them, but drive up demand for low-latency, high-throughput satellite connectivity, industry officials said. Modern web-based applications are generally intolerant of latency, one industry official said.

As Gallagher put it, in relating how MEO satellites came to the rescue in 2016, “there are a lot more of those requirements brewing.”

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