Missile Warning and Tracking for Next-Gen Threats

Watch the Video

---

Read the Transcript

---

This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, I’m Jennifer Reeves, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to this Mitchell Institute panel on the future of missile warning. Today, we are doing a lot of new things in space, everything from ground Moving Target Indication to proliferated communications. However, we can never drop our eye on the ball when it comes to the importance of basic space mission sets that we’ve been doing since the earliest days of the Cold War. Missile warning, especially as it relates to strategic nuclear forces, remains a bedrock mission for the US Space Force, our adversaries are rapidly advancing their capabilities beyond traditional ballistic missiles to include hypersonic weapons, maneuvering re entry vehicles and cruise missiles that can threaten our forces and homeland from multiple axes and domains, the Space Force, Space Development Agency and Missile Defense Agency are undertaking a massive transformation of our space based warning and tracking architecture to meet these challenges, from proliferated constellations in Low Earth Orbit to new sensor technologies and processing capabilities. These efforts will fundamentally reshape how we detect and track missile threats. To help us understand these developments, we have an exceptional panel of experts who are leading this transformation. Colonel Alexander Rasmussen serves as the chief capability officer at the Space Development Agency, where he oversees the development of the tracking layer architecture, comprising 54 satellites proliferating missile warning missile tracking capabilities. Colonel Bobby Schmitt commands mission Delta four, the delta that delivers strategic and theater level missile warning to war fighters around the globe using three constellations of overhead, persistent infrared satellites and two types of ground based radars. Finally, Colonel Rob Davis is the PEO for space sensing at Space Systems Command, responsible for acquiring our next generation of missile warning, missile track and Missile Defense satellites. Thank you, gentlemen for being here, and let’s jump right into these questions. So first, Bobby, when you look at how missile threats have evolved over the past decade, from traditional ICBMs to hypersonics, cruise missiles and maneuvering re entry vehicle each presents unique tracking and detection challenges. Help us understand how these different threat profiles are driving changes in our war fighting requirements.

Col. Ernest Schmitt:

All right. Good, perfect. Thanks, boots. So I guess thinking through the threats that we have to deal with now, I tend to think of them in two different bins, right? So you listed off some of the advanced threats, some of the things that that we’re seeing today, but we also can’t forget the what I call legacy threats, right? Which is the ballistic missiles, you know, the Intercontinental, intermediate, short range, and those kinds of things, right? And so, so when I think of the threats, I think I’m in two different bins, and we are seeing the adversary evolve in both areas. And so first, on the ballistic missile side, you know, that’s something that that we’ve developed our systems over the past 2030, years to be able to address those threats and and up till today, we are, we are very, very good at tracking ballistic missile threats. The what we’re what we are seeing, though, is more proliferation. So for more countries have access to this, what I would call legacy technology, but they also are looking at getting more of it. It’s becoming cheaper to feel, to develop, develop and build those capabilities. And so, for example, what we saw with Iran last year, you know, they have a lot of a lot of missiles, right? But they’re all, they’re mostly the legacy systems. And so the the adversaries are doing using those legacy systems and implementing different TTPs, so using more mass and more trying to time it differently. And so those are the things that we are seeing. So that legacy mission hasn’t gone away, and in fact, it’s continued to grow, even over the last few years, has been demonstrated in real world operations. But the second bin is what I think you hit on as well, which is the hypersonics and the aerodynamic payloads and those kinds of things. And of course, those are a concern as well. You know, for mission Delta four, you know, we focus on, how do we do things that dot mlpfp? What are the TTPs we can implement, taking the current technology and the current capabilities that, again, were designed against a different threat, and apply those against a new threat. And what we found is that we actually have a lot of capability to do that as well. There’s been some things we’ve had to do, implement TTPs, some software tweaks to fuse. Data better or fuse it differently, working closely with Colonel Davis and his team to do that. And so, you know, we are staying ahead of the threat. Obviously, the future architecture needs to maintain that, that competitive edge, to stay ahead of the threat going forward. And I think that’s where these two gentlemen come in.

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):

Awesome. So gentlemen, anything to add at this point.

Col. Robert Davis:

Yeah, Bobby hit, everything about that. I call the target threat the missile threat. And the different elements there, we can’t forget the counter space threat as well. And we’ll talk about that more throughout the panel here, about why we’re doing what we’re doing in the architecture, not only to get after the dimmer targets and the hypersonic maneuvering vehicles and stuff, but also to counter space threat. Awesome.

Col. Alexander Rasmussen:

Yeah. I’ll just add it’s see the threats. But ultimately we’re looking to respond, to give combat commanders around the world war fighters the ability to either defend or to respond and put steel on target. That’s ultimately what we’re trying to do, is enable the kill chain Absolutely.

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):

So let’s follow on and talk about how our warning architecture actually needs to evolve. So for decades, we’ve relied on a small number of exquisite Geo and Heo satellites. But again, as we’re talking about the threat pictures change dramatically. So how does proliferation into Leo and Neo support not just improved tracking, but also improved architecture resilience, additionally, bearing in mind what’s going on right now. How might these architectures be scaled to underpin a const a concept like POTUS, new golden dome and Raz let’s start with you.

Col. Alexander Rasmussen:

Thank you. Just to highlight from what I just said earlier, is it’s an architecture, but really it’s a war fighting system for every soldier, sailor, airman and guardian, to use across the spectrum of operations, from offense to defense. And so really what we’re trying to have is a resilient kill chain, or kill web, that is, that comprises of multi sensor, multi data pathways, multi opportunities to process the data, and ultimately the ability to get to multiple weapon systems to respond to the threat or carry out operations. So we need a resilient kill chain that is not kill web really. It doesn’t have a critical path, per se. It’s got multiple paths to get to a weapons system or an interceptor. So with this new Leo architecture, we have multiple sensors across the tracking layer, custody. We got mio as well. So there’s multiple sensors at any given time. And really what we want to get to is the war fighter downrange, whether it’s whatever orbit of satellites or it’s a radar or some other sensor, it almost doesn’t matter. They’re just going to know where the threat is and they’re going to be able to respond. Able to respond. And part of that is the transport layer for the pwsa to get that data to where it needs to go via current waveforms, whether it’s lick 16 or IBS to get as far as the edge as possible, or evolving waveforms that are coming soon, and also actually to resiliency is also acquisition resiliency. We need to be able to be opportunistic and respond. And so with what mio and Leo are doing in terms of two year acquisition cycles or capability cycles, it really enables us to win the capability competition, to get that capability out there every couple years, actually, every year, if you think about it, between SSC and SDA, whether that’s a new technology that’s matured, or something new from the commercial space that we needed to take a take advantage of, or to respond to threats. And then lastly, you mentioned the Iron Dome. Between the two of us, we are ready. We have the architecture in place, already executing. We can expand on it. We can add new capability. You mentioned MDA earlier. They’ve had great success with hptss and this sort of fence. We’re working with them to partner with that. We already have some of those payloads going into pwsa, so we’re really in a great place to move forward across the partnership of SSC, MDA, others, to be able to provide that capability to defend our nation or defend our allies. And last thing I didn’t mention is we got to take advantage of all the tools, especially commercial we’re looking at, how do we connect into all the architectures again, to get the data to our needs to go?

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):

That’s awesome. So Rob, let’s, let’s hear from you in the perspective coming out of SSC,

Col. Robert Davis:

Yeah, you know, Raz kind of hit, most of it there. But if you talk about what it’s taking to rebuild our military or re establish deterrence, you know, like you said in your opening boots, like having a missile warning, architecture underpins our nation’s security is about all that. And so that’s what we’re absolutely doing, you know, we’re taking a, you know, embracing the proliferation, the go fast approach that Raz kind of hit it on there between SSC and SDA, every year, we’re putting requests on the street to start developing new capability. And so there’s opportunity in industry to keep innovating, to keep that sustained competition and all the goodness that comes with that alive, you know, trying to keep the recurring injury and low using as much commercial technology as you can. We’ll talk more about that later. I think. Keeping the size of the vehicles low, contract structure, the fixed price contracts, and trying to get to the three year ish, if we can, it’s really quick, but three year timelines to get capability from award to orbit and then check out and then eventually into the war fighters hands. So Space Force obviously going to play a central role in Golden Dome. We’re heavily integrated. Raz and I, and our team is heavily integrated into the planning team that’s happening right now, the technical planning team at the Pentagon, and we’re ready to support however we can.

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):

Okay, that’s awesome. So let’s talk about some more details. So one of the biggest challenges I see, certainly, is all the data integration, right? Multiple sensors. I mean, we’re going to have all these different sensors, even more, in multiple orbits, collecting different types, quality types, etc, of data. So help us understand what you guys view is the critical technical and organizational hurdles infusing the data into an actionable as you talked about Raz an actionable picture and Rob. Why don’t we start with you first?

Col. Robert Davis:

Yeah, so it’s, to me, integration of sensors. It comes down to a couple of things, making sure you have clear boundaries between the different systems, of systems, the program programs. I get this asked this question all the time, because people are used to the old legacy architecture, where everything’s very intertwined, interdependent each other. We have architected a way between the different organizations, SDA Leo architecture and the SS media architecture to be mostly independent. That’s by design, with very defined messaging standards that both of us are responsible for producing out of the Space segment, out of those sensors, ultimately to the ground, and the ground is where the magic happens for that integration, right? We’ve architected that way not to try to integrate the space segments, but integrate on the ground. And so those messages get delivered, and then they get put to the three different fusion engines, obviously near engine to our heart and the Space Force is Forge. And so Forge is going to underpin all this effort, both on the, obviously the mission data processing side we’re talking about here, but also on the c2 side for the architecture going forward.

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):

Okay, so I want to talk to Bobby in a second, but here, let’s hear more about it from the architecting perspective, from Raz and then we’ll go to Bobby.

Col. Alexander Rasmussen:

We’re going to have an awesome opportunity here. We’d have more data than we’ve ever known what to do with coming between Neo Leo and other sensors coming online. And the question is going to be, are we going to be able to take advantage of it? We’re going to need the systems that I think will be able to process it, but how is it going to make sense to the guardian or the war fighter, with so much coming at them, as we’ve seen in real world events, systems need to be pretty robust to be able to make sense of things. So people make decisions in real time. So with all this data coming at us, that’s one of my concerns. And the other part is we’ve had great success, as Rob said, standardizing message and networks. But what’s the next step is, how are we going to lower latency? How are we going to get to anywhere it needs to go, whether that’s an army system, whether that’s a navy system, so that data can go straight down from a sensor or even be transported use using space based networks to get to that that cruiser or that system faster, and then they consume it and either cue their own radars or be able to launch on remote or something like that. So those are the next steps. Is moving on to lower the latency and take advantage all the data we have.

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):

Okay, Bobby, we want to hear about it on the ground.

Col. Ernest Schmitt:

Yeah. So, so these guys obviously hit on a lot of the sensor piece to but from a from my perspective, Mission Delta four, I think the biggest thing we have to make sure we focus on is the human factor, right? So, you know, we have opera, we have operators that are on the ops floor. Their job is to get accurate information as fast as they can down range so that our joint force can take cover, protect themselves, cue missile defense assets, etc, and so, so it’s critical that all of these layers, which is an amazing amount of capability, always works together once it gets to the ground and can be fused together. And I know Rob mentioned the forge, I think that’s going to be a game changer, as far as being able to fuse all of that data at the operator level, so the operator can have everything in front of them that they need to make a very timely decision, and then to get that, that information down range. And so that that’s, to me, the critical piece. And I will say that, you know, we, we work hand in hand with with Colonel Davis’s team in particular, on the delivery of these systems. You know, with the new IMD, we now, I am now responsible for sustainment, and so that line of integration is further into the development cycle of these new weapon systems. And so we work to have operators at every level of development, so that when these systems are fielded, when the trainers are developed, in order to make sense of the data and then, and then make decisions and get it out that that’s all there, built in, sort of baked in, if you will. As we deliver these capabilities, one of the things that I’ve seen in the past, I’m not saying in the missile warning mission, is sometimes a system will come but it won’t have all the other things baked in. And so it’s a great capability, but if the operator can’t use it and execute TTPs, and it ends up being.

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):
Not as effective as it could be. So I don’t think that’s the case in this mission area, and I think we have a plan forward to make sure the operators have what they need to be that effective war fighter, but there’s always work to do, and we’ll continue to do that. That’s awesome. Great. So let’s keep talking about resilience. This question I’m going to go to Rob on this one, when we discuss resilience, there’s been heavy emphasis on Leo and Meo proliferation, but resilience is more than just volume and numbers, so Rob walk us through what mix of approaches, from proliferation to orbit, diversity to protection that you see as essential for a truly resilient architecture.

Col. Robert Davis:

Yeah, thanks, boots. Think of a setback you talk about resilience and stuff. It’s not some esoteric thing, right? Yearly, I start with why we hit on it earlier. The camera, space threats. Many of you are tracking all that, and we’ll talk about that much here. But there’s a real reason that the Space Force, a number of years ago, made the decision based on analysis from SWAC to pivot away from the geo Heo architecture to Leo Meo architecture. It wasn’t just to get closer to the energy source of the targets we’re trying to track. There’s a real element to counter space there too, through the proliferation of numbers and also the orbit diversification. So we’re trying to really make sure we have that resilience there to re establish that deterrence. We want to make sure that we have the capabilities that give people pause before they make decisions against us. If that it turns fails, we’ve got to be able to win to the fight, because long are gone. Are the days where, you know, app space capabilities, I’ll say that on purpose here, right? App space capabilities were being offered to the joint force, and they were there. They’re good to have. They were kind of force multipliers, but there’s ways around them. That’s not the case today, right? We are integrated. Space Force capabilities are integrated in joint force absolutely essential. If the Space Force isn’t there, the joint force isn’t going to be able to be successful. So it’s important that these things that we’re developing, not just in our mission area, but across the entire space force, are assured to have those so how do we go about doing that? What comes back to things like Benjamin Duran said, deny first mover advantage to proliferation. We can make sure that people don’t have that opportunity to have a first mover advantage, to give them that pause and kind of make them realize that anything they’re going to do is going to be self defeating or ineffective, and so why even bother trying? And so through proliferation and dispersion, just like you would on ground forces and not dispersing on the ground. We have built this prolific architecture, or in the process of fielding today, to make sure we have that resilience and deny that first mover advantage. But a key point here, I want to emphasize, is we’ve talked a lot just now in this panel so far about resiliency and proliferation in Leo and Miu and whatnot. But you need to have an entire system, the entire architecture, resilient. So we have to get after the ground resiliency as well. And so you can’t just have a very cool constellation, lots of shiny satellites up there, and then have your ground architecture not be as equally resilient. Otherwise you have a weak leak in the overall Kill Chain, if you will, our kill chain, and somebody could take advantage of that,

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):
Guys, anything you wanted to add to this,

Col. Alexander Rasmussen:

One of the benefits of our agile acquisition or agile deployment approach of capability is every year we have an opportunity to put something new up so we can pace a threat. We can learn. Maybe that’s changing orbits, maybe that’s changing some TTPs, but the agile approach, the spiral development allows us to learn, allows us to modify and maintain that first mover advantage.

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):

Cool. Okay, so let’s, let’s talk about sustainability. We need to be clear eyed about long term sustainability. A proliferated architecture means regular replacements. So Raz, tell me more about your thinking on the industrial base requirements and life cycle costs to sustain this approach.

Col. Alexander Rasmussen:

So I don’t look at it quite like a sustainment strategy. It’s more of a capability strategy. We’re not really buying replacements. We’re buying next capability, next thing the war fighter needs, the next thing in the kill chain we need, whether that’s another radio or another sensor, every two years we have an opportunity to deploy new capability. So there is an ongoing cost to that, but it’s not like we’re launching something that that’s all we’re going to have for the next 15 years. We’re going to have this for about five years, but there’s something new coming every two years, and that’s the same across the epics and the tranches between SSC and SDA for industry. What this this means is consistent demand, consistent competition that should create our supply chains to be more resilient, because they’ll have more of a consistent demand versus high peaks and high lows across me only been a little different. There’s a lot of commonality. So that enables industry to be able to invest, to look at, hey, where could we get in next? What technologies are you bringing the table? What capabilities are you looking at and also looking for new entrants? It’s an opportunity every every year on the. Host for new entrants to be a part of, either as a prime or a teammate, part of this. So this, this model really enables industry to invest and also team tightly. Because if we’re going this fast, you got it. You got it from the kickoff is basically go now. So that predictability, we hope that industry is able to respond, and they have been. We really appreciate the partners we have in SDA and SSC, but that’s why I’d say that is it’s more about capability, bringing new capability and that consistent demand from industry.

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):

And Rob you finding the same thing on the SSC side.

 

Col. Robert Davis:

I am, and I think it fits right into the idea of, you know, that competitive endurance always being there, developing new capability, and you keep responding to threat, whatnot, underpinning kind of thinking there. I think a couple of things I’d like to add is, first off, well, we’re going to do our very best to keep the cost down. We’ll talk more about that in a second. You know, resiliency isn’t free, right? New requirements in this architecture aren’t free, and so we got to figure out how to resource those. And I know there’s a lot of conversations right now about that, and we’ll see how that plays out. It’s really important to remember that adding these these requirements comes with the cost. So how do we manage those costs and make sure we minimize the impact to the overall duty budget, obviously the nation’s budget? I think that’s through the approaches we’ve taken where we’re trying to do just good enough long we’ve had really great people developing these exquisite systems, the big, juicy targets that boots mentioned earlier, and that was perfect for the time. That was exactly what we need at the time. We’re in a different world now, where good enough is the answer. So how do we make sure we have a great dialog and great partnership with industry and government to make sure we dial in those requirements? We’re not asking you guys to do stuff that’s gonna be a price driver and keep it very as simple as possible, leverage as much of commercial technology as you can be at the bus. Obviously, there’s not a lot of opir commercial technology out there directly, not a lot of missile warning technology out there directly in the commercial market. That doesn’t mean there can’t be elements of the industry we can’t leverage through commercial busses, across links and whatnot, to keep that price point low

Col. Ernest Schmitt:

I’ll just add something real quick, just more more back to the person on the ground that’s executing the mission. You know, I heard a lot of it’s not really a sustainability question, but more of a I heard resiliency coming out of these two gentlemen. And I think that’s exactly it. I think there’s also resiliency in how we train our personnel to operate these systems, to integrate these systems, to make decisions and get get that information where it needs to go. And so, you know, as we continue to build up our training capability through the Space Force, as delivers more capability, as we continue to raise the level, if you will, of our operators and understanding of the mission and understanding what they’re required to do and what the joint force needs, I think that it also builds resiliency as well. You have operators that can think through complex problems and come up with solutions on the fly, rather than wait for a technological solution to that problem and so, and we’re seeing that every day, today, we’re seeing that now, and it’s it’s great to see, and we will continue to press on that training piece to make sure our people are more resilient, just in their ability to think and execute the missions they have.

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):

And are you seeing feedback mechanisms into the requirements chain to get those smart ideas from these SMART operators back to the gentlemen and ladies who are actually building our systems. How is that? How is that going? Bobby,

Col. Ernest Schmitt:

So I can see her in the room now, Lieutenant Colonel manship, she’s the 11 Swiss commander. So, one of her jobs as the commander of 11 Swiss is one of responsibilities, if you will, is to be that squadron that tests out new capabilities, and then is that integrated back into the SSC development chain to make sure those any changes or things that we can improve are being fed back into the development side. And so, you know, I think that’s been a good model, and I think that’s the model we’re going to use going forward to make sure that that we continually have that feedback loop back and forth.

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):

Super that’s heartening. So, as a former second space Warning Squadron Commander, I can promise you that the ground segment, I know that you guys know is as important as important as our satellites. And I know that, Rob you’ve already mentioned that we have, though seen some programs struggle with ground system sustainment challenges and programmatic delays in the past. I know I’ve lived it myself. So what specific steps are being taken to ensure that our ground infrastructure will keep pace? I know that the necessary that you guys recognize it’s necessary, but how are we making sure it keeps pace with the new space assets? And Rob, why don’t you go first?

Col. Robert Davis:

Yeah, first off, I’ll disagree with my statement and clarify a little bit and disagree with you, but the ground isn’t equally important. I actually argue it’s more important. And I think, you know, I’ve been really trying to carry that message in my team. I mentioned I kind of believe this earlier, right. Grounds often been an afterthought. I. You know, a lot of the resources and attention has been put to the Space segment for good reason, but that gone as those days, we have to focus on the ground at least as much, probably more, because that’s where all that magic is happening, that integration is happening. So your specific question, what are we doing to make sure we’ve learned from programs of the past? Be it you know, the sibers block 20, you know, be it OCX, you name the big, monolithic ground systems that we’ve tried to feel as a nation and had struggles with. So what we’ve done is we’ve broken those up. We’ve broken it up into a system, a system. So, like, they call it program programs. So systems of systems is pretty, pretty clear, right? It’s a modular system, breaking it down, versus, you know, just having one bidded big, monolithic delivery by a single big prime, it’s breaking that apart, and having the government be the integrator. And the government own that technical baseline, own the technical data rights and stuff, which comes down to play later for sustainment as well. So I hand it over to Bobby here and his successors. We’re not having to go back to the OEM and lose some that innovation and other thing that comes with the bill to re compete that sustainment of those capabilities. But the most important part here, the magic, I think, really, is that program of programs. We’ve taken those individual systems and we have them as individual mini programs, if you will, where we go out and we individually compete those in the marketplace to find the best person that suited for that system, not going to a big prime that’s going to build the antennas and build the ground system and build the software it goes on top of it, be it scheduling, be it the mission processing, be at the c2 but every single one of those elements is a new program, and we can compete and pick the right person, the right industry partner, or in many cases, the partners. We’re doing a lot more of that now where we kind of take a couple or handful of folks into the process and can see what they really do after a year or so and pick the best one, but pick the right vendor for that particular element of the job. And that puts a lot more work on the team to have to manage those contracts and source selections, all that kind of stuff. But we’re seeing great opportunity there already in how the system is coming together the next thing we need to do, and this, you kind of alluded to. This already, the feedback, already, the feedback mechanism is have a super type coupling between the operators, the radius generators and the capability developers, and that’s growing by the day. I’m really proud of the way the teams have come together. And Bobby, thank you for your leadership on that on your side, and making sure that you know the colonel manships of the world could have that voice in the system and get that feedback in. And we’re still have a little nascent we have some work to do there. But great example we did recently is there was a demand signal that came from Colonel Schmitt and his team and from Spock about, hey, how do we get Leo data into Forge? It was always on the timeline, but it was kind of out there on the horizon, a bit kind of undefined. And so we went through an effort collaboratively to lay out the trade space and go, Okay, we can do that. Here are this, here are the trades, though, because nothing comes for free, right? There’s no free lunch. What do we have to give up? What do we have to shift around in the requirements or in the development process? Was that can do the schedule, and we collectively came to an agreement that was the best for the mission, not that was best for ops, not that was best for acquisition, making sure meeting all the requirements and stuff, but what was best for the mission? And I’m looking forward to more of that as we continue. But this model is delivering. We are in operations today with forge only a handful, you know, I mean a handful like three years after, four years after forge started in in earnest. So in Oba today, in the OPR battle space awareness center under Colonel man ships leadership at 11 Swiss. It is in operations today. We’re delivering more capability this summer, and we’re starting to get that rhythm up where at least once a year there’s a delivery, and then we’re going to continue to spin off of that and get into that Dev, sec ops pipeline and continue to refine it over time.

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):

Oh, that’s awesome. So Bobby, your thoughts?

Col. Ernest Schmitt:

Yeah, to Rob’s point about the, you know, forge, and the kind of the whole model for software development, you know, I think that is a game changer as far as how we do space operations, right? And so it’s the opportunity to through the ground software system, the the opportunity to stay ahead of the adversary, as the adversary is developing new capabilities, we can feedback to Rob’s team says, Hey, we need a software that can do X, Y, Z, right? And and he can go off and get it and rapidly develop that capability and bring it to us in a very, very short timeline. So I think, I think that’s a game changer as far as how we’re going to approach this missionary and how we’re going to stay ahead of the threat. The other part, back to the original question about ground resiliency. I think the other part that we as a Space Force are really tackling head on is the infrastructure around that, that that weapon system, right? So it’s something I would argue in the past, it’s tend to be neglected. So the power, the the water, the facilities, all those things that you need to run a an operations center or a series of operations centers, and so, you know, we’ve put a lot of emphasis on that. I know Spock has been working with Space Force Staff to to lay in some of those requirements so that we can make sure we’re staying ahead of those facility requirements and not trying to solve it after we deliver a weapon system.

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):

Oh, great. So I’m going to shift gears for just a second here, and I would like us to hear about the international dimension. Okay, our allies are developing their own warning capabilities and so, and we have worked with allies and partners in the past. So let’s hear from all of our panelists about the opportunities they see for integration while still protecting our sensitive capabilities. And Bobby, I think we should start with you.

Col. Ernest Schmitt:

Yeah, I think I have the easy one. Here. We, we, we are very reliant upon our allies, the five eyes, partners in the missile warning mission area. We, as, as you know, from your time at two Swiss you know, we have allied mission partners that are integrated in our ops floor, that are part of the crew that do the training and exercises that we expect of us personnel. And so again, we rely very heavily on those partners. We have partners in our ground based surveillance systems that, you know, that do the ground based missile warning. We have Canadian partners integrated in every one of those units. And so again, we, we, we really like working with those are those partners, and we can’t, we can’t thank them enough for for how much they do provide to this mission. As far as you know, other other nations, there may be opportunities down the road,but, but I think really, you know, we’re going to lean into the partnerships we have today and to make sure those are as effective as possible.

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):

That’s awesome. So gentlemen, I would love to hear about our any kind of partnerships we see on the development side. Raz, let’s start with you.

Col. Alexander Rasmussen:

Yeah, on terms of the kill chain, we’ve had some really good successes in tranche zero, getting link 16 demos, and we had to do them with our allies, because we couldn’t get the FAA to prove it here in the US. So we did link 16 demos in Australia, as well as upcoming in Norway. And those are just kind of foundational things to work across mission sets, whether it’s missile defense or anything else in the kill chain. So really appreciate the work we’ve had with them, as well as working where we’re putting gaps around the world, working through some policy on how we can continue to share data, working with COCOMs as they partner so well with so many of our allies, and then also with industry. We’ve talked to many of our industry partners and our allies, what we want to do is enable our industry partners to work with allies and get out of the way as much as possible. We’ll certainly support if we need to, to help with any policy. But we want to enable that collaboration across industries, ourselves or our allies, to be able to get the best capability out there to keep that spinal development going and get the best capability for all of us.

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):

And Rob, what do you guys see in from SSC,

Col. Robert Davis:

Yeah, so it’s kind of cliche to say, but usually cliches are that way because they’re true. But the partner to win, right? We are partnering win today, I think. But there’s so much more potential there. I agree with the kind of sentiment that maybe there might be certain areas of our mission, area where we don’t depend on coalition partners, street, missile warning, for example, there’s no reason that we can’t in other areas of the fight. You go to other parts of this conference right now, you’re going to hear people talking about the air fight. And I for I’ve seen my, you know, my Storied Life here. There’s definitely a dependency on the coalition. When you’re talking about an air war, why can’t we have the same in the space for right? So let’s, let’s talk about that like, what can we do? Can we take what the model we have today at the front range here, where there’s a handful of five eyes inside a US controlled MCs, and turn that on its head? I mean, Australia’s Got a processing site by themselves now. It’s run by them, right, for their for their mission, right? Can they could be a coalition orient Center, where we sprinkle in some US personnel, like we do for five eyes here on the floor. What other things can we do in the space segment? There’s interest in by several partners to consider their own space technology for their own national security reads. But can we integrate them into our architecture, and that same system and systems architecture that we spoke about earlier, have them deliver things in the same messaging formats, so we can fuse that data with our sensors as well, and maybe vice versa. So there’s total potential there. I think, just in our world, right, we’ve always been like street missile warning, so therefore we can’t share, we can’t talk about outside protected areas and the people that we trust the most and the five eyes. But I think when you think about the tactical warning mission and the growing threat there, there’s definitely room where we can expand that. Thinking,

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):

Awesome. Okay, I want to switch gears one last time, and we’ve talked about technology modernization, but I’m hoping that our audience can get a little peek behind the curtain. So let’s explore the technology horizon over the next few years, with sensors and processing advancing so rapidly, walk us through which emerging technologies you see as game changers for missile warning over the next decade. And let’s start with you. Rob

Col. Robert Davis:

Sure, I think it’s important to really identify where we want to put our focus here. Yeah, because what we don’t want to do, especially in this architecture like alluded to before a little bit, is making sure that you know better is not the enemy. Good enough. We had to make sure that we’re really thoughtful about where we press the technology, that we’re not trying to recreate these big, high value assets just in different orbital regimes, because we’re loading up a bunch of tech on them. We’re taking risks in the development cycle with recurring engineering or non recurring engineering. Excuse me, are you driving? Cost up, driving, size up, driving schedules, all that stuff. So we really thoughtful there. This whole architecture is based on this low complexity design points in the on the space nodes they can scale. So we’d be mindful that, how are we doing that? Like I mentioned earlier, we’re taking advantage of commercial busses, making sure that our rec that our requirements that we put into the architecture don’t dry drive you all in industry to make deviations off your product bus line, except where necessary. And then we’re doing whatever we can in the OP IR space. The actual IR sensors and stuff to leverage technology is coming from other purposes as well. There are a couple areas where we definitely need to focus on the technology to pull this tech, this architecture, together. The biggest one in my mind is the cross links. I know there’s been some conversation about that lately, and there’s some good, valid, you know, concerns there, but we are definitely making great progress there. You know, tranche has made some great progress. I’ll let you talk about that more as when you got to this here. But we have to take that technology and scale it to the media ranges to be able to not only communicate amongst ourselves, but we got to go interplane and then actually probably inner orbit at some point, meio to Leo, to be able to move that data around, especially in a resilient way, so we can make sure we get the data to the war fighter in a timely manner. The other thing that I’m really excited about is coming back to the My Bigfoot stomping today right the ground. How do we make sure the ground is keeping pace with all this? It was mentioned earlier, the raid sizes we’re talking about and seeing these days, the amount of data we’re having, these number of sensors we’re having, are going to go order of magnitude higher. Not only is the numbers, but the sensitivity that they’re gonna things are gonna be seen, things we haven’t seen before. So how do we make sense of all that? And really leaning into AI and ML, so the OPR tap lab just up the street here in Boulder is pivoting to that technology, and they come a long way. We’re doing a crawl, walk, running approach there. First thing we’re doing is, how can we help the human augment the human on the processing chain there to make sure we aid in their decision making. But then we’re going to take a look of how do we go deeper in the data, particularly the battle space awareness area, to make sure that we’re getting everything we can out of the data. I hypothesize we’re throwing 90% of the data on the floor every day. So what’s what’s buried in there, with the new, modern processing technologies that we can make more sense of that and give that down range to the warfighter. So there’s a couple areas there, cross link technology and then AI ml on the ground.

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):

Okay, anything else to add, gentlemen? Okay, if not, here’s the deal I’m going to give each of you, like, like lightning round. What’s the last thing that you want to say to leave with this, with this great audience, about what it is you’re doing and how we’re moving the ball down the field. Ras, let’s start with you.

Col. Alexander Rasmussen:

The most important thing to me is that that global Kill Chain. How are we sensing and then either defending or putting steel on target, whether that’s soldiers, sailors, airmen or guardians? How do we do that? How do we integrate it? How we break down the walls or the silos across different weapon systems or across different domains? We need everyone to be thinking that across industry and across the services, because this fight, and we talk multiple domain, but it just, it’s it all. It all bleeds together. Now, space, ground, maritime or air, it all bleeds together. So how are we making whether it’s connections between systems work, how are we processing that data fast or getting towards autonomy? And how are we learning fast? How are we taking advantage of demos to say, hey, I don’t know what the technology is in the next 10 years, but I got to have the courage to try now get that demo on orbit and not be afraid for it not to work out, but maybe you’ll learn something you didn’t expect that we can spiral into the next to the next cycle. So again, I’ll emphasize that that kill chain, getting that getting the multi sensor, multi data pathway, multi processing and multi weapon system, all working together to accomplish the missions that we need, globally and for our nation.

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):

Awesome. Rob? Lighting round.

Col. Robert Davis:

Yeah, simple team sport, not just the team that you see up here, but the team with all of you and you know, both in wearing this uniform, wearing, you know, civilian clothes if you’re a civilian wear. You know, wearing the contractor. You know badges if you’re a contractor. But it’s going to take the entire nation to keep the focus back to your main point, opening boots on this mission area, and stay ahead of the bad guys, because we’re in a race. So keep it up. I appreciate the teaming. I’ve already seen, the can do attitude, and just keep asking you guys to come to work every day with that thread in mind, realizing we’re in that race, and it’s going to take a team to get get us, you know, keep us ahead.

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):

Awesome. And Bobby from you.

Col. Ernest Schmitt:

So just from my perspective. Active as the operator up here. You know, we’re focused on, how do we employ what do we have, what we have today, in the most effective way. And so, you know, we are doing that day in and day out. We’re tweaking the software. We’re implementing TTPs regularly to get the most capability we can out of what we have. We are excited about what’s coming. And so we’re really fortunate that we have these guys up here working on these systems so that we have those in the future. But the bottom line is, you know, our guardians and airmen as part of mission Delta four, we are focused, laser focused, on the mission, on what we know the joint force, our allied and partners require, and we’re going to do everything we can in our power to get the most capability we can.

Col. Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.):

Fantastic. So ladies and gentlemen, we’ve come to the end of this great AWS panel, a quick public service announcement to visit the Mitchell Institute’s booth. We have our interesting and timely materials on all the current issues for your reading pro leisure right across from the entrance to the expo. Thanks again to Colonel Rob Davis, Colonel Bobby Schmitt and Colonel Alexander Rasmussen for taking the time to speak with us today, and from all of us at Air and Space Forces Association, have a great space power kind of day. Thanks, gentlemen.