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Moderator: I’d now like to introduce our next speaker who is the Commander of the 14th Air Force Flying Tigers and serves as the Commander of the Joint Functional Component Command for Space at US STRATCOM. His headquarters are at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. In his position he’s responsible for all the US Air Force space forces including missile warning, space control, space-based surveillance, navigation and communications, satellite control, space launch and assigned and attached to US STRATCOM Space Forces.

Prior to assuming his current position he was the Director of Plans and Policy, the J5, for US STRATCOM at Offutt. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Major General William Shelton.

[Applause].

General Shelton: Thank you, General Peterson, for that kind introduction.

We had the privilege of having General Peterson up at our place here about three weeks ago for the DMSB launch and had a great time with him there on console, but as a pilot he kept trying to run the engine “start checklist” on us. [Laughter]. We said not yet, not yet, not yet. Almost got it? Yeah. It was a great launch. It was good to have him there. It was a lot of fun.

Thank you for giving me the chance to speak to you today. I want to take a little bit of a departure here. I want to use some slides for two reasons. One, to help kind of cement some concepts for you and you can see graphically maybe what we’re talking about, but also the advantage to you is you don’t have to look at the speaker all the time, so I think that’s good for you.

Next slide.

I want to talk about three main areas. I want to talk about the importance of space effects. I want to talk about where I believe we are in joint space operations today. And then finally, I want to get you entered with me in a dialogue on what I believe is a mandate for space protection.

Choir audience. I don’t have to spend a whole lot of time on this, but of the four space sectors, the way we talk about space typically, we divide it up into four sectors. Talk about military space, and we’ll talk a lot about military space today, but we also need to talk about the intelligence aspects of space and that particular sector and how important that is to everything we do, tracking things from weapons of mass destruction to imagery products, to other kinds of products we get from intelligence assets in space. Tremendous capabilities, we just flat couldn’t live without them. It’s that straightforward.

On the civil side, lots of exploration, scientific kinds of things, some navigation capabilities, wonderful capabilities in our civil side. Finally the biggest sector of all, believe it or not, the biggest sector of all in our country is the commercial sector if you’re just talking about how much investment there is in a particular area. Also the revenue stream that comes from that.

So four different sectors, all critically important to our way of life, and I think we need to think about it in that context as we’re going to think through some things here in just a little bit.

To the military, the kinds of effects that we’re talking about. Communication and navigation. You’ve heard a lot about that this morning. By the way, I feel like I’m the number three hitter here. The first two hitters got home runs so I’m just hoping for a drag bunt single, that would be good enough for me. [Laughter].

You’ve heard this teed up really well, that we’ve got a lot of dependencies here. It really is true. I think that little blue bumper sticker there that space is critical to our military operations, in fact if you want to put it in context this way you can say that if we didn’t have our space capabilities today you would almost drive yourselves back to industrial kind of warfare, force on force kinds of things. Instead of being able to fight in the smart way that we fight today.

Let me talk about deterrence just a little bit. Here we show an ICBM launch, and we certainly think of ICBMs in deterrence, but you also ought to think about what kind of deterrent capability space brings for us. If adversaries know that we’re watching, and they do know that we’re watching, it certainly constraints their activities on the ground. As a minimum it constrains their activities on the ground. If they decide that they’re going to continue activities, and I’m talking about things that would take a long time between passes of our satellites overhead, then that drives them to concealment and deception sorts of things which makes it more expensive which is a deterrent quality all its own. So as you think through this, I think you have to give a lot of credit to space assets for deterrent quality, as well as just being in space, operating in space. There’s certainly a deterrent value there.

The rest of these, I don’t need to belabor the point with this crowd, but it is fundamental. Space I believe is fundamental to how we do business in the United States military today. So let’s talk about where we are in joint space operations.

As has been covered already, my joint hat in addition to 14th Air Force is I’m the Commander of the Joint Functional Component Command for Space for STRATCOM. The Commander of STRATCOM sent us this implementation directive and said I want you to optimize planning, execution and force management, and oh by the way, coordinate, plan and conduct space operations. He also said I want you to serve as the single point of contact for military space operational matters. Some pretty tall orders, but we’re moving out on those.

Our mission statement that we derived from that, we’re going to coordinate, plan – we do coordinate, plan, integrate, synchronize and execute space operations. Responsive space effects, providing that. And then the big tallest order part of this is denying the enemy the same.

Those of us that have been in this business for a while know that the accusation over the years has been all too frequently, and I think inappropriately, but all too frequently that we did space for space sake. Not true any more. Not true by a long stretch any more. We do it in support of national objectives and we do it in support of combatant commanders and it’s important that we keep that in mind.

So the end state that we’re looking for is unity of command, unity of effort, full spectrum joint space effects. What that means is everything we can bring to bear we’re going to bring to bear in support of those commanders out in the field. Finally, in a supported manner, the supported commander for denying the benefits of the space medium.

We aren’t very good at that yet as a country, and I’m going to talk quite a bit about that later on in the talk here, but if there’s any area that we need help on from industry, this is it. Thinking through this problem on denying the benefits of the space medium to our adversaries.

Just one wiring diagram, and I promised Jim Armor I wouldn’t use many charts that I’ve used before because I think this is his sixth oak leaf cluster now for seeing some of these charts. But my administrative control relationships, my 14th Air Force hat, goes back to General Chilton. He’s my boss as the 14th Air Force Commander, and we have organized, trained and equipped the 14th Air Force AOC. That’s just an organize, train and equip function, and then that goes down to the operational units, the five space wings that are out there across the United States that do space operations for the Air Force.

Let’s build this, and the Commander of STRATCOM

And you’ll watch the 14th Air Force AOC slide across because day to day, even though it’s organize, train and equip as the 14th Air Force AOC it operates daily as the Joint Space Operation Center. So again, my joint hat and authorities that derive from STRATCOM, global space coordinating authority as well as OpCon and TacCon – operational control, tactical control of those space forces, and you’ll note at the bottom that we’ve now added in the Army and the Navy space units.

So as General Kehler said to you, all of the DoD space operations units are now under a single component commander, STRATCOM’s authorities as the combatant commander, and you saw the mission statement, our responsibility is to pull all this together on his behalf.

How do we interface with the theaters out there? Well, your typical combatant commander’s going to appoint a Joint Force Commander to go fight the fight. That Joint Force Commander normally delegates space coordinating authority down to the Joint Force Air Component Commander. We send a senior colonel over called the Director of Space Forces to be with that Joint Force Air Component Commander and pull all the space capability together.

So between the JSPOC and the Theater AOC, the DIRSPACEFOR and my staff, this all gets put together and we provide space effects forward to that combatant commander through the JFACC on the timing and tempo of their choosing.

So what we’re about, really, out of the JSPOC is two things – global space mission as well as the regional space mission, providing that capability that’s needed for those regional combatant commanders. And as the slide says, direct support relationships normally formed between us and the JFACC, and then lots of horizontal and vertical integration goes on between the Director of Space Forces and back to the JSPOC.

The Joint Space Operation Center. If you’re familiar with AOC’s air operation centers around the world, this operates very similar. The same kinds of principles, the same kind of organizational structure. The only thing that you won’t see here that you would see in a typical AOC is the mobility division. We just don’t have a mobility mission so no need for one, but everything else works as you would expect an AOC to work. Coordination, direct support, going back and forth to the theater, and again, that global responsibility for the Commander of STRATCOM.

Our bottom line to all this is that bullet down there on the bottom, producing that space tasking order is what this whole process is all about, so providing that direction at the operational level of war, providing that direction to the tactical units to execute, to provide those space effects forward.

Let me tell you how I see us doing in space operations right now. I get a little defensive when I hear that things just aren’t going well in space. Normally that’s kind of directed at past problems in the acquisition business, and I say past problems because I really do believe we’re past them, but still, it’s kind of a popular thing to write about and a popular thing to report, so let me tell you what I think is going extremely well.

GPS. World standard in position, navigation and timing. We’ve got 30 satellites on orbit, doing great, a lot of application of GPS across the business. It’s not just about operating the satellites, it’s providing those effects forward. We all know there’s a lot of GPS effects both on the military side and on the civil and commercial side as well.

DSP. We keep ringing more signal out of the noise of DSP. That satellite, of course, was designed for a very strategic mission. We keep driving it down farther and farther and farther into the tactical level so that the effects we’re seeing out of DSP just continue to get better and better. There are some other software applications that are being posited that will drive even more signal to noise ratio out of there.

MilSatCom. I don’t think we’ll ever have enough bandwidth. There are some that said TSAT is going to take away bandwidth as a constraint. I don’t think that will ever be true. When you’re talking about all of the reach-back dependencies, when you’re talking about a single Global Hawk taking 250 megabytes of link just to fly it and get the data back, there’s just not ever going to be enough bandwidth. But what we’ve got on orbit right now is performing extremely well. From the old Discus satellites to the MilStar satellites to the UHF follow-on satellites providing that UHF capability, and by the way those guys up at Point Magoo in the Navy that are working for me under a tactical control relationship do just wonderful work every day providing UHF around the world. Then finally the Global Broadcast System that’s turned out to be just a great capability for all of us. And the weather satellite DMSP’s providing great data.

Space surveillance network, as it says, is the workhorse for us. We’re not as good as we need to be, as General Chilton told you. We are not nearly as good as we need to be in space surveillance, and we’re not as good as we need to be, by a long shot, in space situational awareness. I’m not going to belabor that point, you’ve heard that. But if there’s anything that’s kind of job one for us right now at the operational level, it’s to get a lot better at space situational awareness. But we’ve got radar and optical sensors that are doing the job every day and doing it in a great way, and we’ve got a space-based sensor that was originally designed to be an experiment for the missile defense business and it has turned into just a great sensor for us providing lots of data on space surveillance.

Missile warning radars continue to work not only missile warning but also support to missile defense and certainly the test launches that have been such a big part of our past year here. Those missile warning radars have performed wonderfully.

JTAGs. One of the Army units that supports us in joint space operations, doing a great job of providing the theater missile warning capability and those combatant commanders love this capability. Even though you’ve got the DSP satellites and then the SBIRS ground station providing that data over to theater, they like having the in-theater capability that JTAGs represents.

Then finally, I give us about a B+ right now, I would say, in the JSPOC, providing that integration and direction to pull all this together. I’d give us a better grade, but I don’t think we’re quite there yet in automation. We’re not quite there yet in kind of across the board ensuring that the theaters have absolutely everything they need on their timing and tempo, but we continue to work this every day.

Let’s move into this last part. I really hope that this audience, and I know there’s a lot of long-experienced space folks in the audience and you can help us refine these arguments. Let me just kind of set the stage for this.

I think there's probably four different areas we need to think about as we think about space protection. I think there are four different cases to be made. There’s a national security case, an economic case, there’s what I would call just kind of a logical historical case, and then finally there’s a policy case to be made and I’m going to walk you through each one of those.

Those of you in the audience, I think you’re going to say well, duh, that’s pretty simplistic, and it is. But that’s exactly what I’m striving for here, to make it simple so that the nay-sayers that are still out there would say okay, we understand where you’re trying to go with this and we understand the logic and we understand the rationale and we understand the need for space protection. So here we go.

Let me make this assertion. Regrettably, history teaches us that in every place we’ve gone, every medium of human activity, it eventually becomes a medium of conflict. We might wish that to be different, and probably all of us do wish that space would be preserved as this ethereal medium where it’s just for peaceful pursuits and nobody uses it for anything else, and certainly we would all support that I think. We might wish it to be different, but as you’ve already heard today, it is different. That is not the reality that we’ve got today. I think there’s also a historical perspective here.

So look at these other mediums for land, sea, air, and even cyberspace. I’ve listed some things that have caused conflicts. First, it started out in the early days of conflict with just boundaries. Ownership of land. That was a cause for conflict. State borders. Natural resources that I envy that you might have. Manmade resources, things you have built that I might want.

On the sea, shipping. The ships themselves, just the vessels themselves. I like your vessel, I’m going to take it from you. Piracy. Territorial waters. Fishing rights. We see challenges in fishing rights all the time.

In the air, counter-observation. I don’t want you to look at what I’ve got down here on the ground so I’m going to challenge it, challenge your ability to observe me. State airspace. We directed airspace over all of our states and we’ve said you don’t fly over that airspace, land without permission anyway. Land attack. We want to counter land attack. We want to conduct land attack from the air.

Then finally the newest medium, cyberspace. We’ve unfortunately seen lots of conflict in cyberspace already. Hackers, both state and non-state sponsored hackers, computer crime, espionage, denial of service kinds of attacks, just flooding the internet with, pounding your servers so that you can’t use those servers. We’ve seen this happen.

The question is, should we believe that space is going to deviate from this historical pattern?

I’ve also underlined some things that I think are maybe analogous challenges for us in space. People are going to envy the things we’ve built and taken to space. We’ve already seen piracy in space. Piracy in the UHF spectrum happens all the time. Counter-observation. People aren’t going to want us to observe them from above.

Finally, denial of service. Maybe not flooding the server, but jamming that we’ve already seen will continue to occur.

So I ask the question. Obviously I’ve got a bias on what I think the answer is, but let’s just put that out there.

The next case we want to talk about is the economic case. Look at the investment that we’ve made. There are over 430 satellites on orbit that are owned or operated by the US or US entities. Sixty-seven percent of these are commercial. I said that’s our biggest sector and it truly is. Nineteen percent military, 14 percent civil agencies. Significant national investment. And these are just representative national investments, but if you total it all up it would be well into the many billions of dollars that we’ve got invested in space. And you see what the revenue stream is too. GPS revenues, SATCOM revenues.

So if you don’t take the historical case maybe at face value then look at just from an economic point of view. We have to protect our economic investment that’s there, if you don’t accept any other part of this.

From a national security perspective. Look at this quote from National Space Policy – “United States national security is critically dependent on space capabilities and this dependence will continue to grow.”

So in a simple cartoon form, we’ve already talked throughout the morning how important space is to national security. So if you believe that we’re dependent, and I do, that creates a vulnerability that adversaries, we know, are going to try to exploit, which in my mind certainly demands that we protect our assets.

A very simple, very logical case on national security.

And let’s talk about the threat for just a second. General Chilton mentioned this, General Kehler mentioned this, but just, not to talk about any of these individually, but just to show you how many nations now from the two in the Cold War to how many nations are now operating in space in some form or fashion. Some of these are just credit card, some of these really have spacecraft there, some of these have launch capability. But nevertheless, the skies are crowded now with players in the space community. Some of them are certainly peaceful pursuits, scientific pursuits. What will they do in the future? Some of them are already adversaries. Some of them will become adversaries. It’s something to consider.

I’m not here to confirm or deny any of this. These are simply newspaper reports on what has happened in the past. The most problematic one is the one down on the bottom. The question was asked before, and again, I’m not confirming or denying whether or not that did occur. It’s certainly been reported that it occurred.

That’s the future I believe that we’re looking at, from simple jamming today to much more lethal threats and permanent threats.

Jamming’s totally reversible and you can deal with a jammer and turn it off. Things that are more permanent damage, it’s much harder to deal with and in many cases it’s too late by the time you have a chance to deal with the threat.

So the question is, are we going to be prepared for the threat or are we going to be reactive to the threat?

Let’s talk about the policy aspects of this. The recent National Space Policy had these statements. Freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power. That’s a pretty bold statement when you think about it. The United States rejects any limitations and the fundamental right of the United States to operate in and acquire data from space. The United States considers space systems to have the rights of passage through and operations in space without interference. And the final one, the direction to the Secretary of Defense, to develop capabilities, plans and options to ensure freedom of action in space.

So we’ve got history that teaches us. At least I hope it does. We’ve got an economic case to be made here for why it’s important to protect our space assets. We’ve got a national security issue certainly involved. Now we’ve got the policy to go with it.

So here’s the equation. You probably all remember your geometry classes in high school and when you finished your proof you wrote three little dots and qed. To me, this is qed. We’re there. The logic is there. It’s compelling. It’s overwhelming. I would say it’s a slam dunk, but you don’t use slam dunk any more. That’s been used and that didn’t turn out so well. But the debate continues for some reason. The debate continues.

I think we as a nation need to have this debate. We certainly need to continue to have this debate. I would almost call it an unfortunate, I would use the word naiveté, but I don’t want to be quoted. But that’s kind of the way I see this.

You’ve got a choice here. You can wait until there’s a galvanizing event, you can wait until something happens. The Space Commission called it a potential space Pearl Harbor. Or you can be prepared for it. I would prefer that we get prepared for the future.

So what are we going to do? We talk about space superiority, and just those words alone raise lots of hackles. If I talk about air superiority, nobody bats an eye. If I talk about maritime superiority, nobody bats an eye. But as soon as you start talking about space superiority, suddenly the whole bugaboo on weapons in space and everything comes to the fore.

The first thing we’ve got to do foundationally is produce better space situational awareness. Those are the components of space situational awareness. But again, anything we’re going to do in space starts with good, robust space situational awareness, and that’s where we’re headed in the future. We’re going to spend quite a bit of money here in the future driving toward space situation awareness, moving away from just mere space surveillance to combining reconnaissance and intelligence, environment information. That will all come together in the JSPOC and it will be available out there for anybody that cares to use it in a netcentric fashion.

So that allows us to do offensive and defensive counter space with a focus, and I’m telling you, it is a much bigger focus on the defensive side of this. So the space protection piece of this is where all of our energy and efforts and everything else are going for now. On the offensive side we’re saying okay, let’s do the research, let’s do the things we need to do to stay lead time away from being able to field a capability to deal with the threat as that threat matures.

So that’s what we’re about, but focusing on the defensive side for sure for now.

That all comes together to produce space superiority, which we just merely say is uninterrupted access to and use of space. Even though it’s not doctrinal, we put space operations in the middle there, because I believe there’s certainly an element of space superiority that’s just about operating in space. Being there and engaged and providing those space operations that are important.

That’s kind of the long and short of it, what we’re talking about for the future. We would definitely invite your comments and your participation in this dialogue.

In summary, I think we’re on track with space operations. I think that really is a good news story, executing both our global and theater responsibilities. I will tell you that I believe space is critical today, but I think it’s increasingly so in the future. It’s going to be even more important. Which leads us to an absolute mandate, in my opinion, that we protect our investment, our ability, and our national security in space.

I invite your questions. Thanks for your attention.

[Applause].Moderator: What metrics do you use to kind of judge the quality of your support to your joint forces combatant commands?

General Shelton: We have ongoing dialogues with those folks and we meet with them on a very frequent basis. But certainly as we go into major exercises we have planning conferences that we meet with them and then at the conclusion of those major exercises we really get a pretty good grade card of how we’ve done in those.

Unfortunately, there’s a good news and bad news thing of being the single point of contact for this business. That means that every theater that wants to play, every major exercise, we’re involved in it. So that’s kind of a bad news story. That means almost every month we’re in the middle of some major exercise with somebody. Then all the planning conferences that lead up to those. But we get very good feedback, good or bad, coming from those hot washes that come after those exercises. So I would say that’s our best feedback for CENTCOM in particular, that’s engaged every day. It’s no holds barred. It is brutal feedback. If you stub your toe just a little bit with an engaged combatant commander, you hear about it pretty quick. So I would say that feedback’s darn near instantaneous.

Moderator: If space is to become more responsive, how can we accelerate the OT&E phase, which is usually serial, in order to deploy more rapidly?

General Shelton: That’s not really my area, but – In fact, let me punt on that one. I’m going to let you guys handle that in your industry panel if you don’t mind, General Hamil. I don’t do OT&E so I’m going to leave that to the experts, if you don’t mind.

Moderator: Okay, we’ll hold that question.

Traditionally limited to mostly CONUS assignments, what type of deployment opportunities will there be for Space Command personnel? I know you have folks deployed already, but if you could talk a little bit about that.

General Shelton: We actually are sending a lot of people forward these days. I talked about deploying a DIRSPACEFOR, a Director of Space Forces into each theater, and that occurs – We’ve got a standing DIRSPACEFOR commitment certainly in CENTCOM, but we also deploy a DIRSPACEFOR for every major exercise. With that DIRSPACEFOR goes a pretty good contingent of space operators that meld into each one of those divisions within an AOC.

If you went over to the CAOC, I was lucky enough to be over there about three weeks ago, if you went to the CAOC at al Udaid you’d see a DIRSPACEFOR and a small staff that supports the DIRSPACEFOR, but if you said show me all the space operators you would find them in the strategy division, you’d find them in the plans division, you’d find them in the combat ops division, and you would find them in – what did I miss? Strategy, plans, ops, ISR. The ISR division, we’ve got one space operator in the ISR division right now.

They are doing much more than space. That’s the really good news about this. You would find in the strategy division a space operator briefing the strategy for the CAOC. Not just the space strategy, soup to nuts the entire strategy for the CFACC. So it’s providing our people tremendous experience. It’s enriching their backgrounds. It’s allowing them to pull space as well as push space into the fight. It’s just a rich, rich time for a space operator.

I had to smile when General Chilton said if he could back up and be a second lieutenant, it would be a lot of fun. I agree with him. Boy, what a tremendous time. We’ve all kind of grown up through an era here where you really had to kind of push space into the fight. You really had to convince people that space could contribute. You don’t have to do that any more, and our operators are involved in a way that’s certainly making that come true. So I would say we’re into all sorts of things and I would say the space operators are finding themselves in places they never thought they’d be.

Moderator: With the advances in modern satellite command and control do you see the Air Force going to more contractors for day to day operations?

General Shelton: This has been the big debate for a long time. Could we contract out satellite operations? Absolutely. You go look at a commercial satellite operation and they’re doing it very effectively, very efficiently. The question is, if you look at the future, if you anticipate a future where space control, space superiority, however you want to phrase this, we’re going to have to fight in space. That’s the future I believe is coming. Where do you develop that expertise, that foundational knowledge on how to operate in space, and then by extension, the next level, how do you fight in space? If you contract all that out, it’s very difficult to develop that kind of expertise. So I believe we’re still going to have to preserve, maybe not across the board in every constellation, maybe we will across every constellation, but we certainly are going to have to maintain some foundation of people with the expertise to operate in space to prepare us for that future that I think’s coming.

Moderator: What are the top three practical capabilities you want to improve in the JSPOC?

General Shelton: First is, and we’ve covered it very widely, is SSA. We’ve got all kinds of information out there that’s available. It’s a matter of fusing it and integrating it, so SSA is first.

The second thing is command and control. Being able to command and control in a, not a Power Point fashion, not a Word document fashion, but in an automated fashion, command and control to space forces. It works okay right now because frankly the constellations we fly right now aren’t that dynamic. We’re coming to an era here where dynamically taskable sensors are going to be part of our every day business, and you can’t do that hand jamming into some Word document. You’re going to need some help producing that space tasking order so we’re going to need help there.

The third thing I think is, even though we’re interfacing with the theaters very effectively right now, it’s mostly phone calls and merc chat and those sorts of things. We’re going to need to get on an interoperable command and control capability with the theater AOCs out there so that we can collaborate and be involved as the strategy’s being developed, as the plan’s being developed, as the ATO’s being developed. It’s not good enough to just look at the product and say well, we could add in here. No, we want to be involved from the outset, and they want us to be involved. So I think that’s all good.

Moderator: Our ICBM launch crews have been looking at three people working in 72 hour shifts. Are there any other changes expected in this area operationally?

General Shelton: Deppy needs to be here to answer those questions. Tom Deppy, my counterpart in 20th Air Force would be able to best answer that question. I have seen his brief. He’s really doing some pretty fundamental transformation in how we do the ICBM business, and God bless him. He’s the right guy at the right time with the right credibility to be able to do that. He’s wearing Teflon to deflect all the spears and arrows, but he’s doing a great job. I’m not going to get in his business, sir, but I’ll just say what I know about it and that is that he’s really making some pretty fundamental changes.

Moderator: In the absence of defense or denial of space attack, and given our obvious vulnerabilities, do you have contingency plans for reduced services when we come under attack?

General Shelton: I’m going to have to deflect that a little bit. We have thought about this a lot, let me just leave it at that. We’ve thought about this a lot.

Moderator: Thank you very much, General Shelton, and for all your team. You’ve taken on a massive job but you can see it all over our Air Force, all over our joint services coming to fruition and it’s evidenced by what we’re seeing out there in the field as they operate day to day. So thank you again for that leadership.

General Shelton: My pleasure.

[Applause].

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