ULA’s Delta IV GPS III Magellan mission launch. How the Space Force views commercial launch should be reconsidered, Doug Loverro says. (File)

Doug Loverro, president of Loverro Consulting, is the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy and a former NASA associate administrator for human exploration. As one of the key voices leading to the standup of the Space Force, Loverro has a deep understanding of the issues surrounding space doctrine and concepts of operation. Here, he presents an argument explaining how Air Force doctrine drove decisions on creating the Civil Reserve Air Fleet and how similar doctrinal understanding can help inform the Pentagon’s use of commercial space.

Many Americans awoke this past Sunday morning to an unfamiliar headline, “Pentagon Orders Airlines to Help with Afghan Evacuees.” Despite the fact that the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF) has existed in some form since the 1950s, and been activated at least twice since its inception, most did not know that airlines could be “ordered” to work for the Department of Defense — nor how the origins of the CRAF are relevant to space today.

Beginning just shortly after the end of World War II, the US military began to clearly understand they would never be able to simultaneously afford the number and types of aircraft or aviation personnel required during peace, plus be able to meet their most demanding needs during war — and so CRAF was born. CRAF was clearly seen then as a necessary component of US war planning and has remained part of that planning for over half a century in a program managed by the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command (AMC).

Why, then, do we still struggle with figuring out similar approaches for commercial space?

To be fair, the recent draft request for proposal from the NRO includes a clause that looks suspiciously like the ones you would find in an AMC CRAF contract (see the July 30th story in Breaking Defense). And that’s good. But we still don’t have similar mechanisms for satellite communications (SATCOM), nor for launch — the two most heavily commercialized space services — never mind other commercial space services.

And the Space Force is still uncertain exactly which space services could or should be commercialized, or even what that really means. The CRAF model might work well for some space services (the aforementioned SATCOM and imagery, for example) but be entirely wrong for others (such as launch). By all appearances, those ambiguities are the largest impediments to truly integrating commercial space.

It’s interesting to note that in the formative years of CRAF, there were similarly many arguments about how it should work: whether the pilots who would fly those CRAF mission need to be military members or if we could rely on civilian airline pilots to fill the role, and how the financing and contracting approach for CRAF should be structured. It took over a decade to get these things settled, and in fact they were still evolving less than five years before the CRAF was activated for Desert Storm. But the need to find those solutions was clear from the beginning, because the early Air Force understood doctrinally where air transport fell and therefore where it needed to look outside its own walls.

Back in the late 1940s, the Air Transport Command (ATC, today’s AMC) had no confusion about its mission or where that mission stood in the lexicon of military doctrine. In classic military parlance, air transport, especially long-range air transport, was a Combat Service Support activity and, as such, appropriate and in fact desirable, to be highly supplemented by non-military owned capabilities. Such an approach still provided for military ownership of minimal critical combat services, but allowed for a far higher reliance on non-military owned capabilities during times of emergencies. Plus, it freed limited DoD resources to concentrate on mission areas that required a greater degree of military ownership such as Combat Support, and purely military endeavors such as Combat Arms.

Doctrinal Definitions

While the terms “Combat Arms,” “Combat Support,” and “Combat Service Support” are no longer universally used across all military branches, they do create a good foundation for making decisions about space mission areas.

For Space, Combat Arms includes such functions as Space Offense and Defense, Electronic Warfare, and other activities that bring destructive force to or from space. While some have hypothesized the use of commercial capabilities for these functions (such as using a commercial satellite servicing spacecraft to perform an in-space attack) the reality is that, in both law and custom, missions that fall under Combat Arms need to be owned and operated by uniformed military space forces.

Greater commercial integration is needed for space, says Doug Loverro. (Air Force)

On the other hand, space capabilities such as scheduled launch, routine telemetry, tracking and command, rear echelon communications, most weather support services, space traffic management, baseline imagery, and launch range support, amongst others, clearly fall in the category of Combat Service Support and thus can either be wholly or partially turned over to non-military or commercial concerns.

In between those two areas comes Combat Support, which includes those services providing direct support to combat operations. These might include front-line protected communications to both troops or UAVs; PNT, imagery, and space surveillance capabilities used for targeting; responsive launch operations; and missile tracking, to name a few. While Combat Support functions can include non-military owned components (as a terrestrial example, think contracted security services in war zones), in general, a large share of these services are normally government owned and operated

What becomes interesting as we think about these distinctions is how some mission areas that may have previously seemed singular in nature, such as launch, now become two distinct mission areas: scheduled launch, which is a Combat Service Support, and responsive launch, which fits in the Combat Support bucket. Similarly, Earth observation and space surveillance can each be broken into at least two categories: baseline foundational imagery and space traffic management, versus imagery and space surveillance used for targeting.

Once these doctrinal distinctions are clear, the calculus in understanding the risk of some of these becoming mostly or wholly commercialized, versus those that can be shared and those that must be fully owned by DoD, becomes a lot simpler. These distinctions also point out why things like the commercialization of Space Launch Ranges would be an appropriate future direction to pursue and why the movement of Space Traffic Management activities to civil agencies should stay on track.

Beyond the individual missions, a doctrinal understanding of various space functions should inform not only which services can be commercialized, but can also be used to inform decisions on where the Space Force needs to focus its uniformed personnel versus relying on government civilian or contractor personnel.

If providing secure PNT from space to be used for targeting is a Combat Support function, we can further tweeze apart the understanding that the act of manning the control station to fly those satellites might be a Combat Service Support activity — and therefore alleviate the need for uniformed military personnel performing that function, while still leaving the entire service under DoD control. The Army has effectively done that for decades in their Regional SatCom Support Centers which feature mostly civilian and contractor operators under military command.

The Space Force is our smallest service. From the Chief of Space Operation on down, we’ve heard that this needs to remain a lean force focused on the critical role of first providing and then defending US space capabilities. As such, Space Force leaders need to adopt a clear-eyed view of which functions they unambiguously need to own and operate, and which functions are shareable or fully outsource-able to non-DoD owned civil or commercial providers.

A refined view of space doctrine informs those choices. By laying this out clearly, commercial space will stop looking like an uncertain risk to our defense space enterprise and should instead be viewed as a clear opportunity to further expand the value and range of space services for the joint team. It’s time to set sail.