Theresa Hitchens is the Senior reporter, Space at Breaking Defense. The former Defense News editor was a senior research associate at the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM). Before that, she spent six years in Geneva, Switzerland as director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR).
A sci-fi geek, voracious reader, enthusiastic cook, dabbler in poetry, Theresa is also the proud mom of a wonderful young man by the name of Nicholas.
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Gen. Gregory Guillot told the annual SMD Symposium that he also believes the US military needs to increase its effort to field directed-energy weapons to counter not only uncrewed aircraft systems but also cruise and hypersonic missiles.
The request for information also asks industry to comment on the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve program’s clauses allowing the Space Force to prohibit a participating firm from selling products/services to other customers during times of crisis and war.
Gen. Stephen Whiting revealed that the command has just submitted to the Joint Force its FY27 “integrated priorities list” — an annual compendium of requirements put together by each combatant command to “inform the services and defense agencies of our warfighting needs as they prepare their budget and acquisition plans.”
“There’s an awful lot of security concern about what we can see now, what the planet can see now,” said Barbara Golf, executive agent for space domain awareness at Space Systems Command.
Perhaps most intriguing is legislative language that calls into question Pentagon and IC plans to declassify data from classified remote sensing satellites that are part of a newly developed joint architecture called the “High-Capacity, Find, Fix, Track, Target and Engage and Assess Constellation,” or “HCF” for short.
Vipin Narang, DoD’s top nuclear policy official, explained that while current modernization plans — estimated by the Government Accountability Office last October to cost at least $350 billion over the next two decades — are “necessary,” they “may well be insufficient” to meet current and future threats.
Tim Grayson, who is in charge of standing up the new ICO, said one of the outgrowths of any such study could be the establishment of a new, informal group modeled on the lines of the current Joint Long-Range Kill Chain Organization.
The language in the SASC version of FY25 NDAA demands that DoD detail what military systems have previously and currently have operated in, or in those adjacent to, “the 1525-1559 megahertz and the 1626.5-1660.5 megahertz” radio frequency bands at the center of the long-running DoD-Ligado dispute.
Orbital Insight’s contract, worth up to $2 million, is focused on providing data and analysis about potentially threatening maritime activity in the Indo-Pacific.
Col. Robert Davis, program executive officer for SSC’s Space Sensing Directorate, told the National Security Space Association today that the SWAC study might affect how follow-on satellites are designed and, perhaps, hardened to radiation.
While author Andrew Berglund gives SDA full kudos for its “impressive speed” so far in concluding development contracts and fielding its first satellites, he also warns that those advocating the agency’s approach as the way for all DoD acquisitions in the future may want to curb their enthusiasm given the early stage of the agency’s work.
“I’ve always been a fan of balloons that can provide over the horizon support in a missile defense perspective,” Lt. Gen. Sean Gainey, head of Army Space and Missile Defense Command, told the Hudson Institute today.
“As we look out into 2030, we know from all the Army warfighting concepts that we have to grow space capability, and we have to grow air defense missiles,” SMD Commander Lt. Gen. Sean Gainey said.
The new office, led by Claire Leon, will work to integrate acquisition programs across Space Systems Command, the Space Development Agency and the Space Rapid Capabilities Office, Breaking Defense has learned.
