John F. Plumb, the assistant secretary of defense for space policy, recently addressed a think-tank audience in Colorado to explain a change in how the U.S. uses and protects its assets in orbit, including a new approach to how it backs up critical satellite missions.
His remarks regarding newly defined U.S. space strategy, most of which remains classified, came just three weeks ahead of the 26th annual Space and Missile Defense Symposium held Aug. 8-10 in Huntsville, which involved many of the military and industry leaders influential in creating that policy and the technological ability to back it up.
The Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command is located in Huntsville, along with NASA and robust industry infrastructure critical to American space and defense interests.
Plumb spoke at the Aspen Security Conference regarding the classified Space Strategic Review, sharing several insights.
The following report was filed by Department of Defense writer Jim Garamone and published by the DOD:
‘Every military mission’
Since the 1950s, the military has been intrigued by the benefits that space provides to defense. “Space is in our DNA for the military,” the assistant secretary said. “It’s absolutely essential to our way of war.”
DOD is focused on China as the department’s pacing challenge, Plumb said. “China is also our pacing challenge in space,” he said. “When we look at that environment, it is very different than it was 10 years ago.”
What DOD must do is “ensure that we can deter conflict in space,” he said.
Every military mission relies on space and DOD officials must ensure that U.S. service members have what they need in the domain to carry out their missions. “That means we have to protect and defend our systems and devalue adversary attacks on our systems,” Plumb said.
Building resilience into systems is standard now in the satellite world, he said. As is developing procedures, tactics and equipment to defend satellites already in orbit.
Even then, “resilience is never complete,” Plumb said. “It will be a constant back-and-forth. But we are truly investing in becoming resilient, we’re picking off certain mission sets, think missile warning missile trackers.”
DOD is moving from an architecture that has a few very large and expensive satellites, in geostationary orbits “to a proliferated architecture in low-Earth orbit,” he said.
That has a couple of advantages, the first being it makes attacking the target harder, and it means DOD can capitalize on the so-called “refresh rate.”
The large “exquisite” satellites are expensive and designed to last 20 years. The low-Earth orbit satellites last 3-5 years and “provide an ability to innovate at speed and not have to look out for my requirements 20 years from now,” Plumb said.
Planners can make a pretty good guess what they will need for 3-5 years, but it is far more complicated looking decades ahead technologically, he said.
“So, there’s a lot of advantages there from a military standpoint, and I think we are all in on getting there,” he said. “But resilience is a kind of never-ending quest.”
