SpaceX’s Starlink satellites

UPDATED To Include NORTHCOM statement. WASHINGTON: Northern Command is working with Air Force Research Laboratory to test commercial SATCOM capabilities in the Arctic, Air Force officials say — a key part of NORTHCOM head Gen. Glen VanHerck’s new strategy for beefing up joint operations in the ever-more contested far north.

“Communications is incredibly challenging north of 65 [i.e., the 65th parallel] in the Arctic. We’re working with Congress and Space Command and others. I’m encouraged by where we’re going,” VanHerck told the Air Force Association’s winter meeting Friday. “We’ll have communications capability up there within the next year or so — not only communications capability that that benefits the military, it’ll benefit industry and the civilian partners as well as the Navy in the Alaskan region and across Canada.

“The Air Force plans to prototype and test Arctic Communications capability north of 55-degrees latitude, where many current SATCOM options lose coverage. This effort, which leverages the emerging commercial space internet, will include ground terminal deployments to various DoD Arctic sites, and the funding of limited service capability for the purpose of DoD experimentation,” explained Brian Beal, a scientist at AFRL’s Strategic Development Planning & Experimentation (SDPE) office, in an email yesterday.

The experiments are part of AFRL’s larger Defense Experimentation Using the Commercial Space Internet (DEUCSI) program, nicknamed ‘Global Lightning,’ managed by SDPE, Air Force officials told Breaking D. Global Lightning is testing the reliability of space-based Internet networks to provide high-speed, data-rich communications to aircraft and ground stations, as well as prototyping mobile terminals and  modern, open systems software to use with those networks.

The end goal of the Arctic experiments is to “prototype the initial capability” for space-based Internet service to work in the harsh conditions of the far north, and thus “accelerate the transition to operations” of selected commercial providers via Space Force’s Commercial SATCOM Office (CSCO), said Greg Spanjers, SPDE chief scientist in an email.

CSCO, headed by Clare Grayson, serves as a kind of broker between military users and commercial SATCOM providers for use of commercial bandwidth to augment military SATCOM availability. It relies of what are known as “service contracts” with individual commercial firms, and matches the needs of its military ‘customers’ with the those providers who can best meet those needs.

“The NORTHCOM commander has been working with AFRL/SDPE for the last 1-2 years to prototype solutions to their capability gaps, including Arctic Comm,” he elaborated. NORTHCOM, in some cases also working with Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC), has asked for funds to support the effort, he said. “These funding requests have recommended using AFRL/SDPE to prototype the initial capability, and thereby accelerate the transition to operations under USSF/CSCO.”

Spanjers demurred comment on the exact amount of funding being pumped into Global Lightning for the Arctic experiments; or the overarching project.

The 2021 National Defense Authorization Act authorized $46 million for the Space Force to begin developing an initial satellite capability for the region, focused on “low- and medium-earth orbit communications that could support additional satellite capability to begin to establish more robust communications at these northern latitudes.” Congressional appropriators bumped that sum up to $50 million in the 2021 defense appropriations bill.

Congress, like senior DoD leaders, has been increasingly concerned that as global climate change causes the Arctic region to thaw the US may be left behind as world powers — including Russia and even China —  jockey for primacy there. DoD provided Congress its Arctic Strategy in 2019.

UPDATE BEGINS. VanHerck teased the AFA audience by noting in passing that he has “just released” a classified strategy for NORTHCOM to implement DoD’s strategic goals. “And we’ll have an unclassified version coming out as well,” VanHerck said, adding that he has been working closely with the services as they implement their own follow-on strategies.

The classified strategy was published in January, a NORTHCOM spokesperson clarified today. The unclassified version is expected to be released this month. “The NORAD and USNORTHCOM Strategy is a combined strategy that aligns with objectives identified in the National Defense Strategy and Canada’s Strong, Secure, Engaged strategy. The unclassified strategy conveys strategic guidance to staffs, subordinate commands, and mission partners as well as others,” the spokesperson elaborated. UPDATE ENDS.

The Navy’s new Arctic strategy includes more frequent naval operations near the Russian bases in the region. The Air Force put forward its strategy this past July, and is eyeing recapitalization of Lockheed Martin’s venerable C-130 to equip some aircraft with skis for Arctic operations. And as colleague Jed Judson reported, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville told the Association of the US Army on Jan. 19 that the Army, too, has completed a new strategy but provided little detail.

Specifically, Beal said that the AFRL/NORTHCOM experiments “will explore performance capabilities such as data rates, latency, impact of potential coverage gaps (both spatially and temporally), survivability in the Arctic environment, and the operational utility of the new capability when used in various DoD missions.”

For example, one of the issues will be providing terminals that can withstand the below-freezing cold temperatures in the Arctic.

AFRL has made awards to multiple commercial vendors under the  Global Lightning program, Beal added, including  SpaceX, Iridium, L3Harris, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, SES-GS, Ball Aerospace, O3B and Telesat. However, he sad, “We have not yet announced the contractors for the Arctic portions of Global Lightning, but will do so when able.”

Indeed, AFRL already has tested connecting AC-130s and KC-135s to SpaceX’s Starlink megaconstellation in Low Earth Orbit (LEO, between about 100 and 2,000 kilometers in altitude.) SpaceX was awarded a $28 million contract last year for Global Lightning experiments.

Iridium, with 66 voice and data satellites in LEO as well as a new CloudConnect service to link products to the Internet of Things (IoT), also has a contract worth $2.5 million for experiments using its satellites.

Further, Ball Aerospace in September was contracted for testing of ground mobile antennas, with a $2.3 million award. Lockheed Martin was awarded $3.6 million to build an airborne terminal that can dynamically shift connections between different SATCOM vendors — a capability that allows a user to overcome jamming and interference to any one specific network.