Current SBIRS missile warning satellites (pictured) will be replaced by the Next Gen OPIR constellation. (File illustration)

WASHINGTON: As Space Force’s new Space Warfighting Analysis Center moves ahead with its two newest priority “force designs,” the center’s director is cautioning that his office is navigating uncharted waters in the race to reform America’s national security space architecture, including how it gets funded.

“A lot of this stuff hasn’t been done before, right? So, there’s no recipe and trying to come up with the analytical methods, the tools, the models,” SWAC director Andrew Cox told Breaking Defense in an exclusive interview Tuesday. “It’s just grinding work, and it just takes time. There’s a high expectation that we deliver — and we deliver fast and we deliver well — and so I think that’s just a tremendous amount of pressure on us to create something out of nothing.”

SWAC is charged with the massively complex effort to figure out how to move the US national security space architecture away from its current reliance on small numbers of highly capable, extraordinarily expensive satellites towards a more resilient posture that can absorb and bounce back from adversary attack, as Chief of Space Operations Gen. Jay Raymond explained Tuesday in a virtual interview with the Mitchell Institute.

“We have got to shift the space architecture, if you will, from a handful of exquisite capabilities that are very hard to defend to a more robust, more resilient architecture by design. That’s what this force design work is doing,” Raymond said. “And so we will began our pivot significantly to a resilient architecture this next year.”

The change is coming in initiatives known as force designs, with each focusing on a particular challenge. SWAC’s first and still-classified force design, dealing with missile warning and tracking, was completed this past fall.

The next two priorities will be blueprints for developing a space-based, ground moving target indicator (GMTI) capability and a space data transport capability, according to both Raymond and Cox. These two force designs are underway, with an eye toward informing the fiscal 2024 budget.

But for SWAC and the Space Force, the plans themselves aren’t worth much if there’s not a budgeting strategy, which is where coordination with other space agencies comes into focus. Cox joked that SWAC would be “building Pinocchios” if it can’t move its blueprints for change into real-boy programs with funding behind them.

“If you’re not moving the ball forward in the budget, you’re really just doing a force design that ends up on a shelf that nobody uses,” he said.

The Two Priorities: GMTI And Space Data Transport 

Space Force’s plan to develop GMTI is somewhat controversial, including with Congress, because of the equities the other services and the Intelligence Community (IC) have in supplying such tactical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) information to warfighters. The National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, for instance, traditionally have been the keeper of the keys on ISR, and have been moving to improve their ability to rapidly provide tactical ISR.

Raymond stressed in his Tuesday interview that the analysis of alternatives being undertaken by SWAC to formulate the GMTI force design is being done with a team that includes the IC and the budget gurus at the Defense Department’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) office. The idea, he said, is to “come up with what’s the right answer for [the program], that doesn’t duplicate capabilities that are already being done.”

Cox told Breaking Defense that SWAC has a narrower focus right now on GMTI specifically, rather than the larger question of tactical ISR, in part because of SWAC’s limited budget and bandwidth. (The SWAC has no dedicated funding unless and until congressional appropriators pass an FY22 defense spending bill, which includes a $37 million request for the office.) 

“We’re trying to do one mission at a time, or at least a couple at a time. There’s really no way for us to just come up with force designs for all the various Space Force mission areas simultaneously,” he said. “A, I don’t have a budget to do it, and B, if I had the budget, I don’t think we’ve got the expertise to try to tackle all those things simultaneously. So, we’re trying to prioritize which missions we do first, and then working with the CSO, tackle each one of those things one at a time.”

The goal of the other force design, space data transport, is to create a near-real time ability to transfer all sorts of data — essentially to create a military internet. To pull that off, Cox said his team is looking beyond traditional military satellite communications.

“Sometimes folks translate ‘space data transport’ as MILSATCOM. It is definitely not just MILSATCOM,” he said. “What we’re trying to understand is what that space data backbone needs to look like that supports a variety of users and has a variety of nodes. … There could be commercial offers that are part of that backbone.

“We want to understand if you’re trying to build, essentially, a space backbone or space internet that supports the warfighter and that includes commercial as well as your traditional acquisition elements, what does it look like?” he continued. “So it’s a big, big task.”

Preparing For The ‘Big Handoff’

Cox stressed that while SWAC is involved in advocating for funds to implement its force designs, those mission-specific blueprints don’t include recommendations for acquisition strategies.

“That’s not our job,” he said. “Our job is to try to develop the highest fidelity… understanding we can have of the the technical or the operational problem we’re trying to solve, down to the physics level.”

Instead, Cox explained, acquisition is the “big handoff” between the SWAC and space acquisitions agencies such as Space Systems Command (SSC), the Space Development Agency (SDA) and the Missile Defense Agency (MDA).

But SWAC is including cost estimates of different options for future force structure in its force designs, he stressed, in order to prove to the acquisition community the value of the designs.

“We want to make recommendations that are cost-informed, that are threat-informed, and that are mission-informed to the most detailed level we can,” Cox said. “But we don’t get into what’s the right acquisition approach, that’s only handed off — at first to the requirements community to write a good requirement, and then to the acquisition community to come up with a way to to build it and to buy it.”

Cox said his team has learned the value of working closely with not just the Space Force “requirements community” — led by Lt. Gen. Bill Liquori, deputy chief of space operations for strategy, plans, programs, requirements and analysis  — but also the “costing community” and the acquisition agencies up front from the efforts that went into the missile warning/tracking force design.

SWAC currently is working with MDA and SDA to advocate for FY23 funding to support the plan to revamp how the Defense Department uses satellites to detect and track both ballistic and maneuverable hypersonic missiles, he said.

“I think the good news is by doing a lot of this really hard work, in terms of doing some of the higher fidelity analysis — trying to think through ‘What are the targets we’re trying to detect? What are the threats we’re trying to survive through?’ — we were able to get a lot of the community together behind the data,” Cox said.

“One of our ‘lessons learned’ is by just doing all that really good homework up front, it really helps when you get inside the Pentagon and you’re trying to advocate for a change in an approach,” he said. “Because as you can imagine, anytime you’re coming in with a sort of a different way of looking at things… you got to have all your ducks in a row and really understand what it is you’re trying to advocate.”