2024 Air, Space & Cyber: Space as the Supported Command

Air Marshal Paul Godfrey, assistant chief of space operations for future concepts and partnerships at the U.S. Space Force; Rear Adm. Heidi Berg, deputy commander of Navy Space Command; Rob Atkin, vice president of General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems Group; and Robert Lightfoot, president of Lockheed Martin Space, participated in the “Space as the Supported Command” panel at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference on September 16, 2024. Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, USAF (Ret.), Explorer Chair of AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies Spacepower Advantage Research Center, moderated the session. Watch the video below:

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.), Explorer Chair, AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies Spacepower Advantage Research Center:

Well, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. And welcome to this Mitchell Institute panel on space as the supported domain. I’m Kevin Chilton, the explorer chair of the Mitchell Institute’s Space Power Center of Excellence. For decades, space has provided service to war fighters on the ground, in the air, and in the maritime domains. The entire joint force indeed is now structured around having the effects that space provides. Be it in satellite communications, precision navigation and timing, missile warning, or weather information. Russian and Chinese hostile action has made it clearer than ever before that space is indeed a contested domain. The space domain will increasingly need to be supported from the rest of the joint force to preserve our ability to benefit from services provided in, through, and from space. In 2019, U.S. Space Command was stood up as the newest combatant command to ensure that the US and its allies would enjoy space superiority.

A term that before that we weren’t even allowed to use when discussing space operations. With more threats than ever before, we need to start thinking about space as a supported war fighting domain in its own right. This shift has profound implications for doctrine, force structure, and operations across the entire joint force. It will also impact the sorts of systems we need to develop. To discuss space as our supported domain, we’re fortunate to have been joined by four incredible military and industry leaders. First from the Royal Air Force, we have Air Marshal Paul Godfrey, assistant chief of space operations for future concepts and partnerships here in Washington, DC, working for the Space Force. Welcome, Air Marshal. Now I promised him we’ll give him a pass because the questions I will ask him will be in the context of his RAF hat, not his Space Force hat, lest he get in trouble with his boss in the Pentagon.

Air Marshal Paul Godfrey, Assistant Chief of Space Operations for Future Concepts and Partnerships, USSF:

Yeah, we just discussed that offstage that if I get into trouble with the secretary or anyone over here, I was answering as an ally.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

Right.

Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

Anything else that doesn’t get me into trouble, I’m answering from U.S. Space Force.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

And I’m holding his passport and so we’ll see if he gets it back or not afterwards.

Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

I’m never getting out of here.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

We’re also pleased to have with us Rear Admiral Heidi Berg. Admiral Berg serves as a deputy Commander of Fleet Cyber Command and Navy Space Command. In this role, she leads the Navy Service element attached to U.S. Space Command. Next, we’re glad to be joined by Rob Atkins, Vice President of Special Systems at General Atomic Electromagnetic Systems. Rob, good to have you with us.

Rob Atkin, VP, General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems Group:

Thanks for having me.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

And last but not least, a great friend of the space community, Mr. Robert Lightfoot, president of Lockheed Martin Space. Great to have you with us, Robert.

Robert Lightfoot, President, Lockheed Martin Space:

Thank you.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

Well, I’d like to dive into some questions here. And this would be for our two military members on stage, so Admiral and Air Marshal. Given your understanding of the air and maritime domains, could you outline for us some ways that air or naval assets on Earth might be able to disrupt, deny, or even destroy adversary space capabilities? We’ll start with you, Air Marshal.

Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

Thanks very much. I think I’m reasonably safe with this one, although if you’re in the previous panel, you would’ve heard Doug Schiess, Lieutenant General Doug Schiess talk about Ukraine. I think that is a really interesting case study to start with where the very first shot fired on the 24th of February was actually a cyber shot that took out the Viset network and then literally hundreds of thousands of modems across Europe, even outside of Ukraine. We watched from the Space Operations Center inside of the United Kingdom as a missile warning aspect to that as well, the first salvo of a hundred missiles, many of them taking out communications infrastructure that denuded Ukrainians ability to be able to talk to each other, both from a military and from a civilian perspective as well. That’s where Starlink has come in. And at the same time, if you looked at a jamming map of GPS, you would see or position navigation and timing, whichever side you’ll see there’s a large black hole in the middle of Ukraine right now.

None of those talk to the orbital segment here. All of those can be done by the other services. And I think one of the second points in this as well is the training and education required. I started my space journey just over four years ago now. I had been the Co-Director in the 609th. That was eye-opening to me to see how space is integrated into multi-domain operations. And I think there’s a two-way street where the other services need to understand the criticality of space in everything that they are doing on a daily basis so that when asked to support and look at what they might need to target, then it does make an integrated priority list.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

Thank you. Admiral, how about from the naval perspective?

Rear Adm. Heidi Berg, Deputy Commander, Navy Space Command:

No, thanks very much and really appreciate the opportunity to be here. Clearly from the Navy’s standpoint, we have always seen our reliance on space. Almost everything we do that involves going over the horizon, whether it’s assured command and control, whether it’s long-range fires, even our long-range logistics is dependent on space. It’s an inherent part of our war fighting domain. And yet the approach that we’ve taken in the Navy is twofold, and I really want to emphasize this. First is we have made this an integrated staff with our cyber, our cryptology and our electronic warfare, and it’s part of building the broader ecosystem that we need to have as a war fighting domain that we leverage those other staffs, that other expertise to really get at integrated kinetic and non-kinetic fires. It’s an essential part. And the other piece of this is really when we look at our support to US space command being that terrestrial maneuver force. 70% of the world is covered by ocean.

We as a Navy operate forward. It is our intent to ensure that we deter by this forward presence around the globe. It does not require access basing and overflight. We operate in international waters in accordance with international norms. And by doing so, we create the terrestrial maneuver force for US space command. And we see this as a core part of as we continue to drive and integrate those key capabilities. Of course, none of it can be done without our allies and partners and we see that as an integrated part of our way ahead and that is how do you ensure that you are planning, you are looking at the policies, you are building really threat representative training to be able to execute and do this from the ground up so that we can then start exercising together and ideally continue to operate together.

Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

Can I jump in with an additional comment on there? One of the primary partnership areas in spaces with CISPO, the combined space operations forum, there’s now 10 nations, the Five Eyes, France, Germany, Italy, Norway and Japan. The really interesting thing about that is pretty much almost all of those nations have started a relatively late military space journey. The UK has been doing it since 1969 when they put their first communications satellites up there, but it was only three and a half years ago the UK formed a space command. It was only four years ago that France, Germany and so on, people were putting these things together. The really interesting thing is that there are people in the room who get it because that entire room of 10 nations is made from people from Army, Navy, Air Force. It’s predominantly air Force in the room. But I think it is a great starting point. You make a really good point on the fact that allies and partners, clearly my allied hat on right now, need to be in the room for the discussion to understand those priorities and understand the terrestrial and COCOM priorities in a particular region as well. We’ll get into later that I’m sure the command-and-control aspects of this, of how difficult it is to bring space command into the individual combatant commands. But yeah, the allies and partners and how we do this is incredibly important.

Rear Adm. Heidi Berg:

And one just final point to add on, which I think is a great one, as you talk about bringing different tools, bringing different authorities in. This journey took place for space or for cyber about 10 years ago. And so, I think learning from how we operate and integrated the cyberspace domain into the maritime, the land and air domains is important part of how we move forward.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

I’m going to press a little harder on both of you. You both brought up cyber and we’ll talk a little bit more about that going forward, but I didn’t hear anybody talk about options from aircraft or options from ships at sea to interdict adversary space capability. We shot the NRO satellite in Operation Burt Frost from a Navy cruiser at sea. We picked the cruiser rather than a land base because we could fly under the orbit multiple times and be in a position to do a direct ascent kill. And back in the days when we were trying to develop an airborne laser, I didn’t care as a space command guy, I didn’t care if we could shoot down a missile. I wanted to point a megawatts up in the low earth orbit and see what I could do there without creating debris. Are these possibilities and should the services, in your view, whether they be our allied services or our own services, be fielding counter space capability to help support the US space command mission of space superiority?

Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

This sounds like-

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

Beyond cyber. I mean beyond cyber; you brought those up. That’s good.

Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

Sounds like a question that could get me into trouble. Okay.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

[inaudible 00:10:52].

Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

No. I think there is an allied perspective here. There’s an interesting one. When we stood up UK space command, like I say three and a half, four years ago, NATO had only declared space and operational domain, which is part of the reason that we came along, in 2019. Prior to this, it had been the despite the fact that essentially it has been weaponized by our adversaries over the years, it was seen as a peaceful domain and more than any other domain, we are collaborating with our civil space colleagues. And for me to just roll into the room and just even back then in 2020, 2021, talk about an operational domain was a bit of a trigger word. I think we have got to the point now where we’re calling it a war fighting domain because of its criticality to any war fighting in any of the other domains as well.

I think most nations out there are now wondering how would you prosecute this? How do you degrade the adversaries space capability and how do you protect and defend your own space capability? And certainly, one of general Saltzman’s tenets on his competitive endurance is that responsible space campaigning. And this is where when you’re talking the orbital regime, it is completely different to the earth. You drop a bomb on something, the frag disappears when gravity takes effect and that’s not the case in space. An awful lot of the time when you start talking about the ASAP side of things, we are then reducing our own ability to work in space as well because those debris clouds continue to orbit. Doesn’t mean you can’t think about these things or understand how the adversary might do these things, but I think collectively we all need to policy discussions, understanding the risk of throwing all of that debris out there is do we really want to do that?

And actually, is that the element that deters anyone from going to war in space and does that mean that we’re more aligned on the left-hand edge of the scale of reversible effects, which is what we’re talking about responsible campaigning. Now I’m sure there are all sorts of hard-edged effects that you can have, but I think all of us think that that is on the right-hand edge of this if this is getting really serious. It’s a point that is being discussed in many nations around the world as they stand up their space commands as to what capabilities are you going to bring to this. And the final point in there, I know I’m probably going on a bit too long on this one and you guys haven’t said anything yet, but don’t underestimate the cost of those capabilities, the things that you’re talking about when as various nations stand up space commands, the budgets are reasonably small. I think we’ve got to think more innovative and initially we have to think reversible whether it’s cyber, whether it’s electronic warfare in order to add the most value to the coalition. And that’s all nations.

Rear Adm. Heidi Berg:

I’ll just add on and really think you brought up some great points. We know our adversaries are developing counter-space capabilities. And we know that China is developing an extensive counter C5 ISRT network and of course the command-and-control cyber communications, computers as well as intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting. And that is intended to be able to track, target and strike the joint force. As a Navy person, a lot of that is our Navy force is moving in. And so, in accordance with deterrence theory, it makes good sense that you develop credible counter-space capabilities to deter your adversaries and the employment of those capabilities. And that goes back to the point I was making about the Navy being we play the away game and I’ve always been counseled, don’t use too many joint sports analogies because I’m terrible at them, but we play that away game specifically in that forward deployment and that allows for, as I was describing, that terrestrial force of you will have the terrestrial point to be able to execute.

Now when I talk about the cyber domain, I think this is important. Cyber wasn’t considered a traditional military activity until 2018, about a decade after we were building our cyber forces. And so I think as we look at non-kinetic and kinetic means by which we can have a credible counter space capability, this is an essential part of how we will deter our adversaries and ensure that they know that through our ability to execute it as well as a trained and ready force that is able to execute this counter space capabilities is what deters our adversaries from executing.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

It is about a risk trade off, right? Orbital debris versus ships at the bottom of the ocean, and our ships. And so, there’s a risk trade off there. I value our sailors more than I worry about orbital debris personally, but that’s the policy debate, right, that’s in front of us. Let me turn to industry. We talked about; we got some great examples. I’m sorry, Air Marshal, go ahead.

Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

Just on that point. You make a good point, right? You’re talking about robots if you like in space and orbital debris, but it is the fact that’s why we need to understand space because if you get a Kessler event and all of a sudden, it’s taking out everything, then no one’s navigating anywhere. You’re going to have more accidents, the traffic lights aren’t working, you can’t get money out the ATM. And just the societal breakdown of the lack of a P&T signal if this happened in around MEO and the GPS satellites I think far outweighs anything that we’re talking about now. It is about risk, and it is about understanding the impact of debris and that’s across all space as well. That’s why the United Nations are looking at this as well. That’s why a lot of the nations, including the US, have signed up to non-testing of DASAT type technologies as well. But I do agree with you, but I don’t think it’s just as simple as that equation.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

Okay.

Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

I’m getting testy already.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

We can agree to disagree on the point. Space is a big place. There’s lots of places to put satellites besides low earth orbit. And for our industry partners, Robert and Rob. We had some great examples here for how the Ukraine world kicked off with attacks on satellite ground stations, a successful cyber-attack. Can you think of any other elements of the space systems? And we always get focused on the satellite. There’s so many other vulnerabilities in delivering data from a satellite or command and control that are physically located below a hundred kilometers that are viable targets for air, land and sea forces to hold at risk. Robert, why don’t we start with you?

Robert Lightfoot:

Sure. First of all, it’s great to be here. Appreciate the words you guys led in here pretty quickly. I think one of the challenges we have is it’s not just the physical asset of the satellite, it’s the entire infrastructure that comes with it. How do we enable an architecture, it’s really an architectural discussion, not a single platform discussion. What I mean by that is think of every satellite, including frankly our aircraft and our ships as a node and a neural network, how do you share the custody of that data? How do you move that data around? Frankly, I think it gets past data. I think you can do a lot of the compute on the edge and turn it into intelligence so that if you do have one of these events happen, you have an opportunity to hopefully have some resiliency in your entire architecture, not just your single platforms.

Goddard’s touched on a couple things there that I think are really important and I just share this story because I think it illustrates the lack of awareness of space in your daily lives by most people. I don’t think anybody in this room will have this challenge, but we built the GPS satellites today and we shipped one a couple of years ago and I spoke at a Chamber of Commerce event, and we had just shipped it that day, so I was pretty excited. I brought it up, hey, we shipped a GPS satellite. And as a joke, as a joke, I said, and somebody in the room came up to me and says, why do we need GPS satellites anymore? I have maps on my phone. Now when I said that, roughly half the room laughed and I said, for those of you that didn’t laugh, we need to talk after this meeting.

You still need the satellites. Think about weather, think about getting gas, thinking about going to an ATM, all the things that we use space for. I remember Admiral Jim Ellis, retired Admiral Jim Ellis, I was talking to him once and he made the comment that history is replete with first thing you do is you explore, then you find some commercial applicability associated with that exploration and guess what? That leads to conflict. You have to be able to protect and deter others from taking away your ability to do that. And so, I think space, space is looked at from a very, I don’t know, inspirational view. It’s looked at with what we do in my old days at NASA, what we do with human space flight. It’s very inspirational. I saw what we did this weekend, the first commercial private crew actually doing a spacewalk, very inspirational.

If we don’t protect that capability, if we don’t deter others from getting involved with it, we’re going to be in trouble. We’re going to lose that as an opportunity. I think for us just protecting all those pieces, but also making sure those pieces are stitched together. By the way, we didn’t buy them that way. We didn’t acquire them or build them to be stitched together. Now we have to do that, and I think we have the capability to do that, and I think that’s going to be the biggest strength we have across industry but also across the services.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

Rob, any thoughts?

Rob Atkin:

Yeah, I’d like to pull on that architecture thread. If you look at our architecture, one of the big focal points is the ground stations, right? We have very few of them. Everybody knows where they are. They are obvious targets. You take those out, we’re hosed, right? Launch, same situation. We only have a few places to launch from. The industrial base, we don’t have very many companies. We have a few very large companies that consolidate their, Lockheed being one of them, consolidate their space manufacturing in specific sites. It makes sense because they’re large spacecraft. As we start transitioning towards smaller spacecraft, we really need to start pushing towards a more broadened industrial base where things can be made in random industrial parks. They’re not so obvious as a target to be targeted from a weapon perspective, but also from espionage or cyber and things of that nature. At General Atomics, we’re trying to really facilitate that by building mobile optical terminals, mobile ground stations, even transportable man-packable ground stations that can be used to control spacecraft so that things are disaggregated on the ground. It provides less of an opportunity for the adversary to know where your command-and-control nodes are coming from.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

That’s great.

Robert Lightfoot:

If I could add one thing, you reminded me of something, Rob, I think is really important. We tend to downplay the threat in space. I think we’re so careful about what we talk about. We had behind classification, we had behind all those things. I just throw out there, I remember the uproar of the balloon coming over the US. I would just say there’s a lot of balloons that the public doesn’t get to see, we don’t get to see. And if you could get people to understand that’s what’s there in a different way, we may have an opportunity to get policymakers to think differently, get the funding we need to support the space arena and support these architectures that we’re talking about.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

Air Vice Marshal, I was going to ask you and the Admiral about, because we flip this around and start talking about red vulnerabilities in the terrestrial domains that could help maybe neutralize their ability to launch direct ascent ASATs or employ jammers or lasers or perhaps we could interdict their command and control of their satellites or degrade their situational awareness so they can’t target. Any thoughts on that and cooperation between us and our allies? Cause this is a case where geography matters. The US doesn’t have all the land on the planet. We can sail our ships around. But thoughts on this as far as how we interdict or disrupt their abilities to hold our satellites at risk in the terrestrial domains and the roles of the other services in supporting this?

Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

Yeah. It’s a really interesting one. I’ll come back to the point that Robert made that I used the balloon gate as I called it with our defense secretary in my previous job, which made his eyes go wide because everyone had concentrated on that and during that same five-day period there had been classified number, but in and around somewhere around 500 Chinese satellite over flights of the United Kingdom that people weren’t talking about. And really difficult, and this probably comes into this answer. When you are looking at dual use capabilities, it’s just an earth observation satellite. Is it, or does it have a military component as well? Just understanding the scale of the problem and therefore when it comes to things like the law of armed conflict, if you’re hitting a satellite station, a network station, is a network station that is actually also controlling…

Is it a bay down satellite that’s actually looking after something to do with a hospital somewhere? Just the targeting aspect of this is incredibly difficult. And we’ve already talked about you’re looking at a global issue here where there might be potential ground stations all across South America running around the world to the things that you’re interested in, but they’re in friendly nations. How do you actually do this? Which comes back to my point about that sliding scale of reversible versus non-reversible effects. And I guess I don’t want to talk too much again, but the final point here is that command and control.

My experience in the 609th as the count director or in fact as a fighter pilot actually, I didn’t want to get into a target area at 40,000 feet and see that the high marks were still firing and there wasn’t all around me. That was a reasonably simple coordination with some army LNOs inside probably a combined area and space operations center, but now you are talking global, you’re talking individual COCOMs. You’re talking the actual co-com operational level, not just the strategic level, not just down at the tactical and operational level that a CAOC is dealing with. How do you coordinate all of these things? How do you make sure that something in one theater, given the global aspect of space, doesn’t adversely affect another theater that have got their own campaigns and objectives? It is a hellish difficult problem and Doug Schiess talked to this in the previous one. This is where US space command comes in, needs to understand the plans and objectives, the O-plans of all of the geographic component commands and cybercom as well in order that we can prioritize the targeting for a particular aim or objective. It’s tricky.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

Right. Admiral? Thank you.

Rear Adm. Heidi Berg:

Really, really I think important question, one of which just glad to see so many allies and partners, the joint force, but it also points the need for commercial industry alliances as well as we build up this ecosystem. How we like to think of it is really you’ve got to build the ecosystem where you have the information flow that’s coming in so you understand how the adversaries are operating across multiple domains. As you described with Space Comm as a supported command, this is much the way that we had done this at US cyber command as well, where you’ve got the geographic combatant commanders who understand what is happening within their AORs, but you’ve got to understand the domain from a global aspect. I’m a former AfroCom J2 and a former Cybercom J5. I’ve lived in both these spaces where you really have to understand and build that ecosystem.

That ecosystem, what becomes essential is that common operating picture that you use, a similar framework by which you’re evaluating these assets and as we look across the globe, the importance of having a Space Comm versus an Indo-Pacom or a geographic combatant command from focusing on this is they really have the ability to keep that global look at all times, which is absolutely essential to be able to execute it. I mean you described some of those lessons learned that we had from Russia-Ukraine, and I think one of them as we look at particularly in that domain is the importance of a resilient, redundant architecture that enables us to ensure that we’ve got confidence. For us, we need it for absolutely everything that we do in the Navy, but for the joint force from assured command and control from our ability to be able to execute fires, it is an incredibly essential part of this, but having that ecosystem, having the broader understanding of spaces, not just with the space components, but it’s every single part of the organization has to understand the vulnerabilities associated with cyber and space, but also how they can effectively target it from an integrated fires perspective.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

There’s a lot of similarities here. I’d say listen to both of you. The same challenges we had in the cyber domain, collateral damage, but collateral damage isn’t new to any COCOM with regard to, again, it’s about gain loss of something. But the similarities and Admiral, I’m sure you see this on both your space and cyber hat that you wear that these are similar issues we have to address, but the idea of another service or command supporting cyber and space, I mean my favorite cyber weapon is a Mark 84 through a server farm. There’s an example of air power supporting a cyber operation. And this is what we’re trying to get at in this panel here is how can the other services support US space command with their air, land and sea components? Just how they can support cyber command as well. And it’s not just in domain, right?

It’s got to be cross-domain support. And I’m glad you both brought up command and control because I want to turn to our industry partners ’cause they’re going to hopefully help solve some of these issues. I mean there’s a lot of data on the table out there today, right? We’ve got MQ-nines out there, we’re going to have more air-breathing assets, F35 is a great sensor platform besides being a great fighter aircraft. There’s a lot of data that’s going to be coming in. Well, not to mention overhead reconnaissance assets that are both civilian and military in nature and from the intelligence community. What do you see as ways for us to make sure that all these data are leveraged to the maximum extent possible, not just by the air or Navy commander on scene, but also by the guardians trying to assess terrestrial threats to their space assets?

Rob Atkin:

I think you hit the nail on the head with the number of sensors that are coming online. Everything has sensors in it. More and more spacecraft have optical sensors and there’s just no way for the communication network to keep up with that amount of data and there’s no way for the guardians to be able to process it. You have to do edge processing, you have to push the processing out on the spacecraft so that they’re doing the analysis and forwarding things that are intelligence-based that they’re doing, some of the spacecrafts are doing. And sensors just generally are doing some of the analysis to help reduce the amount of communication that’s required because we just simply can’t keep up with it and to offload the decision-making that the guardians and others need to do. And part of that is to disaggregate the down links like I was talking about earlier. To make sure that the intelligence data that’s pre-processed can get down to people that need it directly as opposed to having to go a circuitous route.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

Right. Thanks, Robert.

Robert Lightfoot:

Yeah, I think this is going to be a place where AI is going to be a big leverage point for all of industry and even the services. And it’s not to make the decisions, but it is, as you said, to make it easier for the decision-maker. Let’s get the right information at the right time to the decision-maker. If you go back in time and you think about how space has evolved, I mean we used to take cameras, and you’d take big rolls of film and you’d look at them and see what changed since the last time you went over. Now we’re doing that constantly and it’s coming down with more and more data. Leverage these tools that are coming out that allow us to get the right information, the right intelligence to the decision-maker. Now that’s going to take a while. It’s going to take a little while to get to trust. We’re going to have to build the trust that what we’re bringing down is the data they need. That’s what we’re going to have to work on, but I think that’s going to be the big leverage point for us with all this data that’s coming from everywhere. Like you said, it’s not just space assets, there’s airborne assets, there’s all this integration that we can do once we get these systems in place.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

Great. Thank you. Drone operations have become front and center in the war in Ukraine for sure, and we’re seeing both cyber efforts to mitigate that. We’re seeing kinetic efforts to mitigate it. We’re also seeing electronic warfare methods to mitigate that. And I guess I’ll start with the industry, our industry partners and work across to get the military view on this. If we’re fielding jammers that can affect the command and control of drones in a theater which may be being controlled over the horizon through SETCOM, is there an opportunity to repurpose these jammers to do both, to be counter UAS and counter satellite?

Robert Lightfoot:

Well, I think there’s an opportunity, well absolutely. First of all, I would say yes, there is. Anytime we get a threat and we have to defend that threat, we can turn that the other way around. I mean, that’s the we think and then it’ll get the threat against it and we’ll go back and forth in this battle that we do all the time. But I think to your real point here is as we’re learning and there’s a lot of learning going on right now due to the conflicts that are happening across the globe, we’re leveraging systems. Maybe we’ve wondered how they were going to work, how they’re going to react, how they’re going to respond to the systems we’ve got and what we’re seeing, I think what we’re seeing at least on our side and talking to services is the same thing. This integration, you call it what you want, joint, all domain ops, GEDC-II, whatever we’re calling it, this right now, we’re seeing the power of that. If we can get to that where you can leverage multiple sensors, multiple domains to actually get the best information there. Now you watch how it responds, jamming of GPS, jamming of drones, all the things that are going on, a lot of learning going on for that so that we can protect that in the future. Yeah, I think you can go both ways.

Rob Atkin:

Yeah, I think the jamming situation is a particularly interesting one because a lot of it is communication that’s being jammed, right? And the amount, this goes back to what I was saying before about the amount of information that we have to push through. If you have to push more information, you have to make exquisite use of the available bandwidth. Whereas if you can reduce the amount of data, you can use different waveforms that are inherently much more difficult to jam and then that solves both problems, right? You can still communicate; you can still get effective data where it needs to go, and you can resist being jammed. Disaggregation is a big part of that and shrinking systems and all of those intended things, I think.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

Thanks. Admiral, did you have any thoughts?

Rear Adm. Heidi Berg:

I just have one. As we start to look at how we build this ecosystem and how we start to move data, counterterrorism, we had 20 years of where we had a focused effort of industry. We had a funding flow of OCO funds coming in and it was an incredible focused effort to get after building up that ecosystem to be able to target it. I think we need a similar effort, but we don’t have the time. And so, there is a sense of urgency that I think we all share that we really have to come together and think through this. And I love, the point you raised about artificial intelligence and machine learning has to be an inherent part of this to be able to drive the sense-making of all of the information that is there, so it doesn’t overwhelm the leader at the edge trying to make these decisions.

But as we look at this jamming environment that we’re in, every time we see that capability, we see a vulnerability and we’re looking to exploit it, but also we have to look at building the resilience within our own systems and ensure that we have laid a groundwork of cybersecurity from the ground up with all of our industry partners because, and part of it is also the culture, the ecosystem that we build of ensuring that we are defending our own for all of our assets and we build really a resilient architecture to be able to do it ’cause that’s going to be the essential part. And when we look at this jamming environment, the proliferation and the redundancy are going to be a critical part of how we can provide jamming resistant systems that we’re going to need to be able to burn through what has been in some extent, as we look at what’s happening in Russia-Ukraine, a successful jamming environment.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

Great points. You can’t put a band-aid on the system to protect it from, you got to bake it in if you want to be cyber secure right from the beginning. We saw that with OCX. Of course, the environment changed. It’s unfair to say that, but they had to redesign it because of the cyber vulnerabilities, because we didn’t realize we had a cyber threat back in the day when we started those programs. Air Marshal, did you want to add anything on this?

Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

Just to say yes to all of the above. It was interesting in the last three years as we operationalized UK space command and we looked at how are we protecting and defending our Skynet satellites. There’s six Skynet satellites out there. And it was fascinating to me to see, right, we’ve got interference. Okay, is it interference or is it jamming? That is a really difficult thing to try and work out from 36,000 kilometers away when some of these spacecrafts have been built a fair old time ago. We’ve got there, we’re getting there. It is about sharing of data. I’ll come back to allies and partners again. It makes a difference. It changes my response. Obviously if it’s just interference from a taxicab company in Brazil, vice-deliberate jamming from somewhere in Russia or China, but is it only on my satellite or is it on everyone else’s satellites as well? Are we building a picture in the electromagnetic spectrum? And one thing here that I think it’s about common operating picture, and we always talk about common operating pictures in individual domains.

We had an awesome air common operating picture in the CAOC out in Al Udeid when I was there. But this is a really difficult one because you’re looking at common operating inside the electromagnetic spectrum as well as the physical aspects of what’s going on in space from both the GEO, MEO and down at LEO, we’re now seeing thousands and thousands of more satellites all transiting the globe. Again, people are getting there, but it is a really difficult nut to crack. And I think learning about ourselves, certainly the other nations that are standing up space grants is the biggest thing to understand how we might repurpose, as you mentioned, these sorts of things in order to become valuable in a fight later on.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

Okay, this will be my last question, and we only have 30 seconds each for a response from our two military people. We are very focused on China in our discussions today. Yet Russia potentially is on the verge of deploying the most irresponsible type of space system, and that would be to place a nuclear weapon in a low earth orbit, which would essentially turn all our satellites into debris in that domain. Any thoughts on how we deter them from doing this other than purely diplomatically?

Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

From my perspective, it’s a holo-government approach. That’s why the US tabled a resolution at the United Nations in terms of reaffirming that people would not put nuclear weapons into space. And it’s one of these things, if you shame, I know I’ve only got 10 seconds, but if you shame nations into not potentially doing these things if they are going to do it, I think that’s how you start to deter. But then you also have to work on the fact that if they did that, how do we operate? What are we going to do if the worst happened?

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

Right? Beyond shaming. I mean that didn’t work with Chinese for the deployment of their anti-satellites. We tried that. Typically, it doesn’t work with dictators, but sometimes it does. Sometimes-

Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

But with China, I think there is a reliance on space as well that is now in the calculus in that there’s over a billion people that are probably as reliant as we are over here. There is a pain versus gain discussion to be had on that particular.

Panel Moderator: Gen. Kevin P. Chilton USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, Admiral? Thank you.

Rear Adm. Heidi Berg:

Russia has proven to be an irresponsible actor in space, absolutely. And irresponsible actor in many other domains as well. The whole-of-government approach is absolutely a core element of this as we look at from sanctions to diplomatic pressure to also credible military pressure that can be applied. As we’ve talked about with that ecosystem, there are many vectors and many venues by which the US can exert both a credible threat to deter that. As well as, again, when we look at the credible threat, the credible threat, it can occur through multiple domains. And again, combined with all of the other actions that can be brought to bear by the international community to show the cost of that irresponsible behavior.

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This transcript was auto-generated and may not be 100 percent accurate. The source audio and video can be accessed above.