For those unfamiliar with SOFIC, it’s one of the largest and more widely attended conferences for decision makers and senior leaders in the Special Operations community. It gives these military leaders an opportunity to collaborate, share best practices, and interact and engage with industry leaders to learn about new technologies that can increase the capability and effectiveness of America’s special forces.

During the conference, members of SOFIC TV approached Randy and Chris to discuss how SES’s constellations of 56 GEO satellites and 16 MEO satellites can be utilized within the Special Forces community, and to explain some of the different use cases for commercial SATCOM in the military.

During their conversation, they discussed the differences between MEO and GEO satellites, the disparate ways satellite is enabling the warfighter and even delved into a new public/private partnership between SES and the Government of Luxemburg.

Here is a look at what Chris and Randy had to say:

To learn more about the ways that commercial satellite services are being used within the military, click on the following resources:

• GovSat: A new concept in secure communications
• High Throughput on the High Seas
• High Throughput Satellites for U.S. Government Applications

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The event, which featured the theme, “Network Readiness in a Complex World,” brought together senior ranking members of the Army and other branches of the military responsible for identifying and implementing military IT strategies and industry leaders that work directly with the military to deliver the technologies and services necessary to empower America’s warfighter. The panel discussions and side sessions at the event were a veritable “who’s who” of military IT leaders – both active duty and retired – including the CIO of the Army, LTG Robert S. Ferrell.

With a theme that encompassed network readiness, it’s no surprise that much of the discussion centered around cybersecurity and the new IT solutions and technologies that are helping to make IT services more agile, mobile and secure, while enabling advanced capabilities and services to the warfighter in the field.

Technologies of focus for all of the senior IT decision makers in attendance included those that could make their networks more secure against cyberattacks, cloud solutions that deliver more resiliency, flexibility and scalability to networks and even Unified Communications solutions that can better connect warfighters and civilian employees regardless of their location.

Another necessary technology when it comes to network readiness and ensuring that IT capabilities are available to the warfighter in any location and at any time is COMSATCOM. Although it wasn’t mentioned extensively during the day, SATCOM – particularly commercial SATCOM – is the bridge that extends Army and other DoD networks from CONUS and other locations to the very tip of the spear. It carries the data and information – whether that is video from UAVs, HD telemedicine or distance learning content, or any other type of IT network data – to the places where terrestrial networks don’t extend.

Moving at the speed of innovation
There was one conversation during the event where COMSATCOM featured prominently – the discussion about the acquisition of necessary IT products and services.

Acquisition was the topic of conversation for an entire panel discussion, entitled, “Readiness across the acquisition and industry communities,” and it featured:

• Retired Army LTG William Phillips (moderator)
• Army LTG Michael Williamson, the Principal Military Deputy to the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology and Director of Acquisition Career Management
• Douglas Wiltsie, the Executive Director of the System of Systems Engineering and Integration Directorate at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army
• Henry Muller, a Director at the Communications-Electronics Research Development and Engineering Center
• Retired COL Randy Bland, the Senior Director for Integrated Development at SES Space and Defense
• Jack White, the Director of the Infrastructure Development Directorate at the Development and Business Center at DISA.

One common theme during this panel discussion was the pace of technology and the speed of innovation. According to LTG Michael Williamson, “The pace of innovation in information technology is increasing. The pace of our combat operations and our adversary’s ability to influence our operating environment is increasing. Keeping up with this rapid evolution and exploiting it is creating challenges for the Army procurement system.”

The pace of innovation doesn’t just effect IT and consumer electronics, however. This need to keep up with innovation is one of many reasons why the DoD is looking to increase their use of COMSATCOM in the future. That sentiment was echoed by Doug Loverro, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy at the Department of Defense (DoD), during this year’s SATELLITE 2016 Conference, where he was quoted as saying, “In order to keep pace with the ever-expanding user need. And the users are incorporating new technologies – video, Internet, streaming services and more we haven’t thought of yet – as fast as the commercial world produces them on the ground. We can’t go ahead and maintain that pace of change in space. The only people that can maintain that rate of change in space is the commercial world.”

But there are challenges keeping the military from more rapid and widespread adoption of COMSATCOM.

Overcoming the acquisition conundrum
One of the major obstacles facing increased use of COMSATCOM across the military is the process and system for acquiring COMSATCOM services. As we’ve discussed in previous posts, the military has a history of purchasing COMSATCOM services on the “spot market,” when and where they’re needed. This makes it impossible to take advantage of efficiencies of scale and ultimately results in the military paying more for these services.

Unfortunately, this is an issue that is caused partly by the acquisition process, but predominantly by how we fund military programs. This was echoed by LTG Michael Williamson, who said, “We are very quick to attack the acquisition process and ask why we can’t acquire with speed. But you really have to take a whole government approach that includes how we fund for these programs.”

These acquisition and funding challenges are ultimately why programs like the Air Force’s Pathfinder program are so essential, they help identify ways around acquisition and funding issues that plague the COMSATCOM purchasing process. But they’re not the only problems with the acquisition process that came to light during the event – the protest process.

The COMSATCOM industry is very unique in that providers pay a significant amount of money to develop, launch and manage satellites on orbit. In the time that the satellite is in orbit and operational, these providers need to maximize the amount of transponder capacity they sell to recoup their investment. This means that the protest process can cause a unique amount of issues and trouble for COMSATCOM companies.

As Mr. Bland stated, “Protest is not good and we have to find a way to hold people accountable and require them to have skin in the game for protests…if it’s frivolous, it has to stop. They cost our industry a great deal of money. Let’s say we have five transponders reserved for [a military customer]…and someone protests frivolously, those five transponders cost us millions of dollars a month as they sit idle, or they are reclaimed and when they rerelease the solicitation, we don’t compete…”

The Army Networks Hot Topic event sponsored by the AUSA was an incredible window into the IT priorities and challenges facing the Army and wider military community today. COMSATCOM is essential for addressing one of the major challenges exposed at this event – the need to keep up with the speed and pace of innovation. However, to accomplish that, the military needs to reevaluate the way it acquires COMSATCOM, and eliminate some of the challenges facing the COMSATCOM industry.

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By: Mark Wiggins, Director of DoD Business Development, Juniper Networks

Late last month, AFCEA sponsored their annual Technet Asia Pacific Conference, which brings together private industry and leading technology companies with thought leaders and decision makers from the Federal Government and United States Military. It’s the largest event in the Asia Pacific region that focuses on the unique defense issues impacting the region.

I had the opportunity to attend this year’s event in Honolulu, HI, to listen to military leaders describe their challenges and technology requirements in the region, and to discuss these things directly with senior military decision makers. And there was one particular theme that resonated across the entire conference – the need to operate in a communications degraded environment.

When North Korea was first test launching missiles and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were winding down, the Asia PAC theater was the focus of significant military attention. However, that area seemed to be on the back burner in recent months, thanks in large part to the threat of ISIS and other issues in the Middle East.

However, the Asia PAC region remains a priority for the United States military – especially as tensions between NATO and Russia rise, North Korea continues missile testing, and China continues to rapidly construct new islands in the South China Sea.

It’s fair to say that the Asia PAC theater needs the same level of focus – or even more – today than it did previously. And this creates unique challenges for the United States military, especially in the area of communications.

Today’s military relies heavily on the advanced capabilities and intelligence that networks deliver. Bandwidth is essential at the tip of the spear for communications between soldiers in-theater and senior decision makers back at home. It’s also critical for operating drones, sharing data and enabling access to today’s real time intelligence – which is increasingly coming in the form of bandwidth-hogging video.

Unfortunately, getting data to the Asia PAC region is a challenge. Terrestrial networks simply can’t be run since they’d have to physically travel through regions owned and controlled by our adversaries. This leaves the United States military relying on satellite communications – often commercial satellite communications services – for its bandwidth needs.

This situation was eloquently summarized by Randy Bland of COMSATCOM provider, SES Space and Defense, in a recent article on the GovSat Report:

“..establishing the networks that have the available bandwidth for today’s advanced IT capabilities could take years to implement…[and] often require running fiber through nations that aren’t necessarily friendly to the United States and its military interests…It’s for this reason that satellite communication…is becoming as essential to the military as the bandwidth it provides and data it delivers. Commercial SATCOM services carry the signals from unmanned aircraft back to military decision makers. They empower video collaboration between deployed personnel and leaders in the field. They deliver the capabilities, applications and bandwidth that today’s military expects on base – out in the field.”

But getting the data to the region is just one concern. Protecting it from being degraded, compromised or otherwise impacted is another significant challenge – especially considering the adversaries the United States faces in this region. Both China and Russia are sophisticated adversaries with incredible technology at their disposal, making information assurance and security a distressing problem.

First, there’s the issue of jamming or compromising the satellite signal, itself. Luckily, this is something that is becoming a smaller problem thanks to the integration of COMSATCOM into the military satellite environment. Passing signals over COMSATCOM essentially creates deception, since it hides government traffic and data on a satellite that could be carrying other, commercial information. Then, there’s the emergence of High Throughput Satellites (HTS), which utilize “spot beams” that deliver tremendous bandwidth and throughput. These “spot beams” are smaller and more concentrated, which effectively makes the signal harder to jam since perpetrators would need to be physically in the beam’s coverage area.

Once the data and connection is physically in the region thanks to the satellite, it still needs to travel through established terrestrial networks to get to the individuals that need access to the information and bandwidth. And these networks create an additional vulnerability. They can be hacked by malicious actors employed by adversary states, they can be brought down by DDoS attacks, they can even be monitored and compromised thanks to malware.

One of the most interesting technologies receiving a lot of attention wasn’t specifically a security technology, per se. The technology I’m referring to is Software Defined Networking – or SDN. SDN is a new way to build and architecture the networks themselves, where the control and services plane of the network are virtualized. This essentially means that the plane that choreographs the network, understands its structure and defines what services are offered is now software. The virtualization of services also allows more flexibility and agility by eliminating individual “boxes” or pieces of hardware that service one purpose and replacing them with more general pieces of equipment that can be assigned a task or service function.

The end result of moving to a SDN enabled network is more agility. Changes to the network no longer require physical movement and interaction with pieces of hardware. The network is now more flexible and can be changed from one centralized application. This not only decreases downtime by decreasing human error, it allows the military to better respond to the cyberattacks that will invariably be coming from their adversaries.

Imagine a situation where traffic can be routed around devices or parts of the network that have been compromised or brought down by an adversary’s cyberattack. This is the level of flexibility and agility that SDN enables. SDN allows the military to “reshuffle the deck” while not compromising the network, or the services it’s delivering.

The Technet Asia PAC Conference couldn’t have come at a better time. The Asia Pacific theater is once again a major concern and consideration for both the military and the American people as a whole. This region also creates a host of unique and challenging problems when it comes to delivering and securing the data sharing, communications and IT capabilities today’s warfighter expects and relies on in the field. Thankfully, through an increasing reliance on COMSATCOM, advancements in SATCOM technologies, and the emergence of SDN and other security technologies, the military has the tools it needs to better establish and protect network connections in theater than ever before.

This article was originally published on The Modern Network by Mark Wiggins, the Director of DoD Business Development at Juniper Networks. Read the full, original article by clicking HERE.

Feature image courtesy of U.S. Pacific Command.

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