Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt, the Space Force’s deputy chief of space operations for operations, cyber and nuclear, also said the service expects to complete an analysis of alternatives by this fall for a separate but related effort to track airborne targets from the heavens.
The LCD systems will “help to minimize risk to friendly forces, civilians, and infrastructure in the homeland and abroad,” DIU said in the release.
The network transport architecture for NGC2 could be a hybrid approach that combines high assurance communications with 5G, WiFi, and multi-orbit satellites.
Though US Northern Command's chief has blamed hobbyists for most incidents, a senior official told lawmakers that US adversaries have shown they're not above suspicion.
The scale of the upcoming exercise makes it "really exciting," according to Tom Rondeau from the Pentagon’s FutureG office.
“Almost all the systems that we use for homeland defense rely on that part of the spectrum that's being considered to be either sold or shared,” Gen. Gregory Guillot, commander of US Northern Command, said.
“This is putting our toe in the water a bit to understand it, to make sure that we know how to employ this force. Is the return on investment for this level of capability going to return good, fruitful utilization of it?" said Adm. Daryl Caudle, US Fleet Forces Commander.
Knowing when to build on commercial systems and when to develop something new can be the difference between parity and information dominance.