USSPACECOM Change of Command

GEN James Dickinson, newly appointed commander U.S. Space Command addresses the attendees of the USSPACECOM Change of Command ceremony on August 20th, 2020. (Department of Defense photo by Lewis Carlyle)

SPACE SYMPOSIUM 2022: Space Command this week intends to provide a first look at its new strategy for integrating commercial industry into its operations, although details of the strategy itself will remain classified, officials said.

Development of the new “commercial integration strategy” has been led by Rear Adm. Mike Bernacchi, who heads SPACECOM’s J5 Strategy, Plans and Policy Directorate, a SPACECOM spokesperson said. The plan is to release an unclassified fact sheet outlining the new strategy during this week’s Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo., sponsored by the Space Foundation.

Gen. Jim Dickinson, SPACECOM head, first revealed the effort to revamp the command’s relationship with commercial partners last month, during a hearing of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee.

“Our relationship with a commercial industry is advancing, and developing and maturing very quickly,” he said during the March 1 hearing. “So much so that we are developing a new framework for our integration with the commercial industry. And we’re doing that right now in the US Space Command, because we’re finding that our commercial partners can bring a lot of capability very quickly to what we do each and every day.”

Dickinson added that “the integration of commercial capabilities within US Space Command helps us with … providing resiliency, as well as redundancy in some of the things that we need and capabilities we provide.”

A few days later on March 4, he told the Mitchell Institute that SPACECOM has been inundated with an “overwhelming outpouring” of interest from commercial firms across its mission sets. “So much so, that we’ve had to step back for a second and create a new commercial integration framework and a new commercial strategy within the command to address that commercial interest in being part of the team here,” he said.

The Pentagon for decades has been a customer of the commercial satellite communications (SATCOM) industry — with commercial SATCOM networks supplying the bulk of the communications for military operators around the world. And for almost as long, the Defense Department has been struggling to find the most efficient and effective acquisition model for both sides.

Currently, the Space Force’s Commercial Satellite Communications Office (CSCO) serves as a middleman between commercial satellite operators and the needs of various operational commands and other DoD customers to a provider, helping manage the contracting process. CSCO is now exploring how to move to a “fee for service” model for SATCOM — a purchasing model similar to how individuals buy cell phones plans — as well as to expand its remit to other commercial space sectors. This includes providers of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data/analysis and companies specializing in space situational awareness capabilities.

Dickinson has repeatedly said that the ability to detect, identify and keep tabs on space objects in order to assess potential threats, what the military now calls space domain awareness, is a top priority for SPACECOM.

SPACECOM also already works directly with a small group of commercial firms that are part of the Commercial Integration Cell (CIC), which falls under the Combined Space Operations Center (CSpOC) located at Vandenberg SFB in California. The CIC is a forum for sharing information about potential threats on-orbit, including from deliberate interference or jamming during conflict  — an issue that has been in the news due to the conflict in Ukraine, where Russia has been accused of hacking into Viasat’s KA-Sat that provides Internet services over the embattled country.

According to SPACECOM’s most recent fact sheet, CIC members include: Eutelsat America Corp., Hughes Network Systems, Inmarsat, Intelsat General Communications, Iridium Communications, Maxar Technologies, SES Government Solutions, Viasat, and XTAR.

Pete Hoene, CEO of SES Government Solutions, told a March 23 panel at the SATELLITE 2022 conference that his firm’s CIC representative participates at the top secret/sensitive compartmentalized information level to observe electro-magnetic and radio-frequency interference disruptions, “trying to geolocate those and then trying to make sense of those.”

He said that while threat information “is shared to a certain degree,” and processes for doing so have improvement, but nonetheless “there is some sensitivity there.”