WASHINGTON: The leader of the Space Warfighting Analysis Center wants to be able to open up his team’s upcoming force design for an overarching “space data transport” network to a wide swath of US commercial industry, as well as to allied government and industry representatives. It won’t be easy, as it involves cutting the Gordian knot of secrecy tying up national security space.
SWAC is working to figure out “how to involve industry further upstream in the ideas,” Director Andrew Cox told Breaking Defense in an exclusive interview on Tuesday.
“Typically you’d involve industry at a point when you’ve gone down in a little dark hole and you’ve come up with your requirement, then you get the requirement validated by the JROC [Joint Requirements Oversight Council],” he said. That requirement then “gets handed over to the acquisition community” and a request for proposals (RFP) is generated. Finally, “industry pours through sections … of the RFP and tries to figure out what the government’s thinking.”
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Further, he added, that RFP limits any industry efforts at innovation to “inside a tiny little box” of the requirements. “And I know industry gets frustrated,” Cox said.
Instead, Cox said he wants SWAC to be able to freely share its understanding of the issues involved right up front. “Here’s the operational problem we’re trying to tackle. Here’s the threats that we need to operate through. And here are the ideas we came up with that would serve as the genesis of a requirement,” he said. Then SWAC could simply ask industry “to harness their creative thoughts to give us better ideas of how to tackle this problem.”
So besides burrowing down into its own highly-detailed analysis of the problems, Cox said, “that’s the other exciting thing that we’re trying to do is figure out how to do that In an orderly but creative way.”
Space Force chief Gen. Jay Raymond on Wednesday explained that SWAC is using digital modeling as one lever for gathering early industry input — something that was tested out with its first force design on missile warning and tracking.
“What you will see going forward is a very open dialogue with industry on what we’ve come up with, seeking their inputs to make it better,” he told the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
In answer to the question of whether SWAC’s force designs would thus be declassified, starting with the already completed missile warning and tracking one, Cox said: “I don’t know the answer to that question. I think our goal is to make them as widely available as we can while protecting the critical elements of the system design so that we don’t expose vulnerabilities too.”
Traditionally, Defense Department and Intelligence Community space capabilities have been hidden away under astronomical space-related classification levels. And while senior DoD leaders have for more than a year carrying on a public campaign to change that, so far they have not been successful.
“So, that’ll be the hat trick, right? Can we figure out how to do that ‘reveal’ — to provide as much of that fidelity as we can that encourages the widest amount of participation — without revealing too much that might give the adversary an upper hand,” Cox said. “I think we’ll have the opportunity with space data transport to think creatively about how to do that.”
Cox noted that SWAC’s first force design industry day on missile warning and tracking in October brought in some 180 companies, and “quite a few of them” were non-traditional defense firms — “you know, your New Space-type folks” — despite the session being classified. But, he recognized that many commercial space firms normally don’t have highly-cleared personnel because they don’t need them for 99.9% of their work.
Indeed, some industry reps have been grumbling about the fact that there still isn’t a good way for purely commercial players, or companies with special skills but founded in an allied country, to engage with SWAC. This, they say, flies in the face of Space Force’s articulated interest in developing new “hybrid” military-commercial satellite networks, especially for communications writ large.
As for allies, one of the key tenets of the just-released NATO Space Policy is “facilitating the development of compatibility and interoperability between Allies’ space services, products and capabilities.” Thus, sharing of information about planned changes in US military space architecture will be vital to making that happen.
Cox said he is acutely aware that allies don’t simply want to be told to buy US kit after the fact to achieve interoperability. “They want to participate, but in a way that benefits their own requirements,” he said.
SWAC has had “three big engagements” already with allied government officials, he said. He and his team briefed the missile warning/tracking force design to air chiefs from the Five Eyes nations (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom as well as the US) who met with Raymond during last year’s Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.
“Since then, we’ve had an engagement with the Brits, we’ve had an engagement with the French, and I think we’ve got another engagement coming up with the Australians this coming week,” Cox said, noting that it is his deputy, Air Force Brig. Gen. Christopher Povak, leading those dialogues.
“We’ve had a lot of interest by our allies in not just the force design, but the way we came up with it,” he added. “And there’s been some interest in potentially partnering with the SWAC and sharing analytical approaches, etc.”