WASHINGTON: Gen. Jim Dickinson, Space Command head, is pressing to ensure that space operations are inextricably linked to both air and missile defense operations via multifunctional sensor networks.
“Can we use missile warning radars … to meet space domain awareness requirements, too? Can we find the best balance and using those assets for both missile warning and space domain awareness? I think we have to,” Dickinson, who formerly commanded Army Space and Missile Defense Command, told the annual Space and Missile Defense Conference in Huntsville, Ala. last night. (The dinner speech was not formally broadcast, but Breaking Defense obtained an unofficial transcript of the remarks.)
“Space domain awareness is critical not just to our understanding of what is happening in space, but why it’s happening,” he stressed. “It’s critical to helping us discern adversary intent.”
Dickinson explained that his goal is to integrate space support operations into air and missile defense operations, and, crucially vice versa, as he sees air and missile defense support as critical to being able to protect US space assets.
The Joint Force, he said, “should,” and “will” in the future “use space strategic warning assets to meet tactical level ground requirements.
“SCUD hunting in the first Gulf War taught us about those opportunities, and so did last January’s attack on the Al Saud airbase in Iraq,” he elaborated. “That’s where we start to achieve greater synergy, greater integration between the space and air and missile defense mission sets.”
The end goal, Dickinson said, isn’t just integration, but using that as a tool to revamp the US military’s approach to warfare to face peer adversaries China and Russia.
“I want to emphasize the point of integration, both technologically, as well as also philosophically, amongst military units, and that point is to promote agility in warfighting operations by creating and expanding decision space so that we can best posture the joint and combined force for the new strategic environment,” he said.
“Understanding integration in the context of strategic relevance will help us close seams and narrow gaps, eliminate stovepipes and maximize resources,” he went on. “Sustained space integration with integrated air and missile defense, in particular, will make US Space Command more efficient, more combat effective and more capable of providing viable options to the National Command Authority.”
Dickinson’s remarks echo those made by Gen. John Hyten, vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, yesterday morning at the same conference. Hyten announced plans for the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, which he chairs, to analyze gaps in integrated air and missile defense capabilities, to be followed by a strategic directive setting high-level requirements for the services to follow in weapons development. That analysis, in turn, will help inform the Pentagon’s ongoing Missile Defense Review.
One key to making such tightly linked networks feasible, Dickinson said, will be ensuring cybersecurity, and he used his speech to call upon industry to help figure out how to do so.
“If you want to know how best to address your Space Command’s warfighting requirements in your planning, factor in integrated air and missile defense into those discussions, and vice versa, and cybersecurity is extremely important to include as well,” he said.
This includes, for example, protecting ground stations for crucial satellite systems such as the forthcoming Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared missile warning constellation and GPS satellites, Dickinson said. It also includes countering threats to “critical space centers of gravity, like Buckley, Schriever, Vandenberg or Fylingdales” bases, he added.