WASHINGTON — The Space Force has finalized a plan for harnessing commercial satellite capabilities in times of crisis through a Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve.
That strategy, approved in this month by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, outlines a framework for how the Space Force will scale up its use of commercial capabilities including satellite imagery and communications during a conflict to augment military systems.
“It’s an example of doing the planning and the expectation management before you actually need the capability,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said at an Oct. 18 event hosted by the Center for a New American Security. “So, pre-working the contract vehicles, pre-working . . . how would we get access to this rapidly if we needed to, so that when the crisis occurs, we don’t then start the contracting action, start the discussion.”
The service’s acquisition arm, Space Systems Command, announced last year it was making plans to create a Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve, or CASR. The team met with industry in February and created a task force soon after to work through legal, policy, contracting and programmatic concerns.
The resulting strategy, according to the head of the Commercial Space Office Col. Richard Kniseley, factors in those concerns as well as feedback from more than 60 companies. That partnership, he said during an Oct. 18 Space Industry Days conference, is key to ensuring the government and industry both understand the requirements and risks associated with leaning more heavily on commercial systems during conflict.
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“The whole premise of CASR is that we know in a threat that the capacity requirements during crisis or conflict are expected to exceed peacetime, steady-state requirements,” he said. “We needed the ability to be able to be integrated, operated, wargamed and potentially prioritized depending on how expensive the battle is.”
The CASR strategy comes amid growing concern from some Pentagon officials and members of Congress about the role of commercial industry, and particularly Elon Musk’s SpaceX, in military space operations. Musk, who provided terminals to Ukraine to access his company’s Starlink communication satellites, has said he opted not to activate the capability in certain regions to prevent Ukraine from targeting key Russian assets due to escalation concerns.
The Space Force recently awarded SpaceX a $70 million contract to provide Starlink services and is heavily reliant on the company to launch military satellites.
Asked whether he’s concerned companies like SpaceX could make decisions that impede U.S. military operations, Saltzman emphasized that any Space Force contracts with commercial firms have detailed terms and requirements that are not subject to the whim of a CEO.
“We write contracts with SpaceX, not Elon Musk,” he said. “We do expectation management, we put those details in the contract and then we expect that they’ll follow through. And I have no reason to believe that they won’t.”
Companies who sign on to CASR will also be subject to contractual terms, and Kniseley explained that the strategy lays out a spectrum of services firms can provide to support scenarios ranging from day-to-day operations to a national war.
Under level one operations, firms would provide a minimum commitment of peacetime capabilities to the Defense Department. Level Two, which includes regional conflicts or a major crisis, would require a higher level of commercial services. In a level three wartime scenario, companies would be obligated to prioritize government needs over their other customers.
Kniseley noted that the Space Force is initially restricting CASR involvement to U.S.-owned companies, but is considering options for integrating international firms.
With the strategy approved, the Commercial Space Office is now working to finalize its concept of operations for CASR and craft a funding plan for the next few years. Kniseley said there may be some flexibility within the service’s fiscal 2024 and 2025 budgets to provide initial funding for the reserve, but the service plans to formalize its CASR spending plan in its FY26 budget request.
Commercial integration
The CASR strategy is just one piece of the Space Force’s approach to engaging with commercial industry, both in peacetime and wartime.
The service has also been crafting a broader strategy meant to answer fundamental questions about which capabilities it wants to buy from industry, which it wants to own and how it will integrate commercial services and systems into its architecture and day-to-day operations.
A team led by Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, deputy chief of space operations for strategy and programs, submitted an initial strategy for Saltzman’s approval earlier this fall, but the Space Force chief requested more detail.
“I didn’t think it provided the necessary specificity that would really help industry give us what we needed,” he said this week, adding that he’s hopeful the plan will be completed by the end of the year.
Saltzman said he wants the strategy to include more detail on things like software procurement mechanisms. He also wants it to address which capabilities and functions the Space Force wants to perform and where it prefers to buy commercial services.
“I just felt like it was important that we answered these questions first, so that when we say what we need to industry, we can say it with enough specificity that we can really get what we’re looking for,” he said. “I’m pushing them hard, because I know there’s a hunger for this.”
Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.
Autonomous aerial vehicles have made headlines since the start of the Ukraine war, with commercial drones changing tactics almost overnight. Given this transformation, policymakers are calling for a renewed focus on autonomy on the ground.
The U.S. Department of Defense is at an important juncture as it thinks creatively and ambitiously on how to leverage this critical new technology at scale for strategic advantage.
The last decade has seen significant technological progress on the ground. An AI-driven revolution is currently underway on American roadways, with important implications for both our economic competitiveness and our national security. After many years and billions of dollars of private sector R&D, autonomous vehicles have arrived.
While autonomous technology will soon begin to fundamentally change the way goods and people move, its impact may soon reach far beyond American roadways. AVs will change the strategy for modern ground warfare while saving lives and keeping our service members out of many dangerous situations.
For years, the U.S. Army has experimented with autonomous ground operations, in which a human-driven leader vehicle would chart a path for one or more autonomous follower vehicles. While the “Leader-Follower” approach frees up manpower and reduces potential human casualties, it also makes leader trucks high-value targets; disabling a single lead vehicle could potentially put an entire convoy at risk.
While the technology developed for “Leader-Follower” was a major innovation, in the past five years American commercial autonomy developers have leapfrogged the many DoD-funded efforts. Passengers can now hail driverless taxis in multiple cities and developers are planning to deploy the first driverless trucks next year — no “leader” vehicle is required.
While these vehicles are not yet as resourceful as human drivers, they are programmed to come to a safe stop, pull over, return to base, or even call for a human to offer remote assistance.
Encouraged by this progress, the Defense Innovation Unit, in partnership with the Army, piloted a program in 2022 to leverage commercial autonomous solutions to make the Robot Combat Vehicle fully autonomous. Through this defense acquisition approach, DoD reaps the benefits of continuous software improvements being learned on U.S. roads every day, while de-risking its technological investments and ensuring solutions are being developed and integrated at the speed of relevance.
The Army continues to think through the best use cases that leverage AVs for high-risk missions such as re-supply, reconnaissance support, casualty evacuation, route clearance, and explosive ordnance disposal. Using human-robot teams offers a solution to an enduring challenge for ground forces — building mass to leverage as a force multiplier. Allowing each soldier to control a small fleet of ground and air systems has the potential to address this challenge, exponentially increasing the capability and flexibility of deployed forces.
Human-robot teams will offer additional capabilities beyond what humans can do alone. Low-cost, attritable autonomous systems can overwhelm adversarial forces by saturating an operational area to force an adversary to move, be detected, or be targeted. They may be able to employ deception to confuse the adversary’s operational picture by making it difficult to differentiate real targets from decoys.
Ground vehicles could also be outfitted with ISR assets and short-range air and missile defense systems and driven autonomously to forward deployed positions to provide better situational awareness, planning, lethality, decision support, and more dispersed and enhanced protection for soldiers in theater.
Re-imaging Army acquisition
However, to fully harness this burgeoning technology and take advantage of the tremendous progress in the commercial sector, the Army should re-imagine its acquisition strategies and be open to new concepts of operations. While Ukraine has understandably caused the Army to double down on its existing focus on resiliency and lethality to better prepare for a high-intensity conflict, it should also be thinking critically about how autonomous systems can focus on injecting redundancy, flexibility, and adaptability into force structure through autonomous systems.
A common myth in defense circles is that commercial industry can only function with fixed infrastructure, well-mapped roads, and structured environments. The reality is that American highways are incredibly unpredictable environments, on par with what Army vehicles must contend with.
The millions of autonomous miles of public road driving these companies have completed gives them a significant advantage as they adapt their mature systems to make meaningful progress in complex environments, off-road, and without a human driver in the vehicle. Companies that are operating commercially will deliver an autonomous solution to the military faster; they have moved beyond science experiments and lab demonstrations to developing and delivering a product.
When it comes to adopting ground autonomy at scale, the U.S. military needs to think ambitiously about how to leverage the advances of the commercial sector for a meaningful strategic advantage for the troops.
Don Burnette is the founder & CEO of Kodiak Robotics, a Mountain View, California-based supplier of autonomous vehicle technology. Lt. Gen. Joe Anderson (ret.) is a former Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army.
WASHINGTON — A Defense Innovation Unit embed will serve as the Chief Technology Officer for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s new Joint Mission Accelerator Directorate, helping the organization connect with the commercial sector.
Adm. John Aquilino, commander of INDOPACOM, announced the creation of the directorate at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies for Defense conference in Washington. The office will work to ensure the command’s top priority programs have a network of support within the Defense Department and industry.
As the Pentagon’s liaison to commercial companies, the DIU official embedded in the directorate will play a key role in making sure the connection between technological needs and industry solutions is strong, DIU Director Doug Beck told reporters Aug. 29 on the sidelines of the conference.
“The person will be somebody who is that dual-fluency talent, who combines deep expertise in relevant technical areas from the commercial sector as well as doing it live at DIU in a leadership role for a while, working with concrete commercial solutions to DoD problems,” Beck said.
The leader, who will serve as the Joint Mission Accelerator Directorate’s deputy director as well as the CTO, will be joined by a team of DIU staff working throughout INDOCPACOM, he added.
Through its Defense Engagement Team, DIU has officials embedded in other combatant commands and units throughout the military services, including U.S. European Command and U.S. Special Operations Command. Beck said the arrangement with INDOPACOM is part of an effort to “dramatically” build the commercial innovation organization’s presence within existing offices.
“This is about taking that capability and going to a whole other level,” he said. “This is an embed role that’s about being part of the team to help solve a problem . . . help identify where the places are that commercial technology can make a difference.”
In a separate speech at the conference, Beck said the expansion of DIU’s partnerships within the Defense Department is part of a deliberate shift toward fielding military-relevant commercial technologies at a larger scale.
That means “being disruptors of the team to disruptors on the team,” he said. While DIU will maintain its focus on finding commercial capabilities and “serving them up,” Beck hopes that building deeper relationships within the department will help the organization “understand the demand signal and then make sure that we can help find the solutions to those problem.”
“There was a time when disruptors of the team was what was needed,” Beck said. “Now, what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to be disruptors on the team. And that’s about disruption at scale.”
DIU has crafted a plan for this expanded role, which Beck said is awaiting review and approval from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.
WASHINGTON — When Joe Laurienti founded space propulsion company Ursa Major in 2015, he didn’t expect its first contract would come from a Pentagon hypersonics program.
It was a pivotal year for the commercial space industry as private funders flocked to space startups in record numbers. At the same time, Congress was pushing the Defense Department to eliminate its dependence on Russian-made rocket engines and invest in domestically produced space launch systems.
In that intersection of commercial investment and national security need, Laurienti saw an opportunity. The aerospace engineer, who had worked on propulsion systems for SpaceX and Blue Origin, decided to start a company focused on building engines for space launch vehicles using advanced manufacturing techniques.
But Ursa Major’s first deal wasn’t for a space launcher.
The 2017 contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory was to supply the company’s Hadley liquid rocket engine for the lab’s X-60A, a hypersonic test vehicle. It turns out the same liquid propulsion systems that provide maneuverability and deep throttle capabilities for rockets are also useful for hypersonic aerial targeting and flight testing.
The contract, Laurienti said, broadened his vision for Ursa Major.
“Hypersonics fell in our lap,” he told C4ISRNET in an interview. “That, pretty early on, forced us to architect a very dual-use, single engine that could work for space or hypersonics.”
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Ursa Major’s expertise remains in rocket propulsion, but it is now developing a portfolio of engines that can be used for Defense Department and commercial missions, as well as support a range of air-launched, space and hypersonic applications. In May, the Air Force lab awarded the company a contract to continue developing and testing two of its engines — Arroway for space and Draper for hypersonic launches.
While Ursa Major’s pathway into the DoD hypersonics market isn’t typical, it’s one of many commercial and nontraditional companies looking to make inroads in a field dominated by defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and RTX (formerly known as Raytheon Technologies).
What they may lack in experience with major defense programs, these startups make up for with specialized expertise, private capital, and novel approaches to developing and producing hardware and software. Some, like Ursa Major, offer flexible, dual-use subsystems and components that could be integrated into the Defense Department’s hypersonic efforts, which are largely focused on developing and testing high-speed weapons and defending against similar systems that adversaries, including China and Russia, are building.
Others are stepping into new territory, developing hypersonic aircraft that could one day pave the way for high-speed military and commercial transport.
As the Pentagon looks to begin fielding hypersonic weapons in the next few years and eyes a future that could include aircraft traveling and maneuvering at Mach 5 or higher speeds, investing in these companies could help ensure the department has a strong, diverse industrial base on which it can rely.
“Our voice in the DoD lately has been: How do you use what we have built — if not the end product, all of the underlying technology and capability set — for adjacent markets?” Laurienti said. “I think the DoD [is] going a layer deeper on the capabilities of these companies, and where they can pull those threads will be really important over the next few years.”
Attracting private investment
Venture capitalists invested at least $356 million last year in U.S.-based startups developing hypersonic systems and technology, according to analytics firm PitchBook. However, that figure — up from $78 million in 2020 and $111 million in 2021 — is likely even higher due to unannounced funding.
Drawing private funding is crucial for any startup, but particularly for those developing breakthrough capabilities in areas like hypersonics, where extreme heat and complex aerodynamics present significant technological challenges. To attract the early capital needed to build systems that operate in that environment, demonstrating demand is important.
While most companies developing hypersonic aircraft or supporting technology have long-term commercial ambitions, that market doesn’t yet exist. For those firms, the Defense Department’s interest in hypersonics and its urgency to begin fielding weapons make it a natural first customer, according to Zach Shore, vice president of growth at startup Hermeus.
DoD partnerships have been crucial for the Georgia-based company, helping generate interest from investors and providing access to test facilities.
Founded in 2018, Hermeus secured a $1.5 million contract in 2020 from AFWERX, the Air Force’s innovation arm, and a $60 million follow-on deal in 2021 to complete development of its reusable hypersonic aircraft, dubbed Quarterhorse.
The company will use the vehicle to validate its Chimera turbine-based combined cycle engine, which is built on General Electric’s J85 turbojet system, which powers the Air Force’s T-38 jet trainer.
In 2019, Hermeus raised $100 million in private capital to complete Quarterhorse development and fund work on a second vehicle — an uncrewed hypersonic aircraft called Darkhorse. Both efforts will inform work on Halcyon, the company’s commercial passenger aircraft.
“You have to have an intermediary market where you can create revenue and validate the tech,” Shore told C4ISRNET. “The Defense Department does that. It’s that step in between.”
Zachary Krevor, CEO at California-based Stratolaunch, said the company’s work with the DoD has helped show investors that there’s demand for hypersonic systems.
“It gives you a lot more credibility as you walk into that investor world,” he said. “There’s a real demand, and it’s demonstrated by the contract signing.”
Will Roper, a former Air Force acquisition executive who now sits on the boards of Ursa Major and Hermeus, said the success of these companies also has implications for the Pentagon. A robust commercial hypersonics market, he explained, could help make future defense development and production more affordable.
“If it [the Defense Department] gets this wrong, there’s no guarantee there’s going to be another wave of deep tech companies that are focused on defense,” Roper told C4ISRNET in an interview.
Defense opportunities
The Pentagon has shown signs it recognizes the value of partnering with companies whose capabilities could help with near-term needs like testing, materials and subsystem technology.
The department’s tech accelerator, the Defense Innovation Unit, is working to leverage commercial aircraft, payloads and supporting technology to provide more avenues for the DoD to test high-speed systems. Through its HyCAT effort — which stands for hypersonic and high-cadence airborne testing capabilities — DIU has awarded contracts to Rocket Lab and Fenix Space to provide launch capabilities, and to Australia-based Hypersonix to provide a test vehicle.
During the second phase of the HyCAT program, DIU plans to choose payloads and other technology to integrate onto the test vehicles, including alternative navigation, advanced communication systems and low-cost materials.
Lt. Col. Nicholas Estep, DIU’s program manager for HyCAT, said one of the program’s goals is to help the department expand the national security-industrial base for hypersonics by involving commercial companies.
“These are vendors that are not the go-to partners that have been doing hypersonic weapons testing in the past,” he told C4ISRNET in an interview. “We’re fostering the innovation base.”
The Pentagon’s Test Resource Management Center and the Navy are leading a program called the Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed, or MACH-TB, in which they’re working with traditional and nontraditional companies to demonstrate and validate hypersonic technologies.
Stratolaunch, which was founded in 2011, is one of the companies working with the Pentagon on MACH-TB. Its Talon-A test bed — slated to take its first hypersonic flight this fall — is designed to provide a reusable, affordable system for government and commercial customers to test and validate high-speed components and other technologies.
Leveraging commercially available tech for hypersonic applications, Krevor said, is an idea he’s seen the “DoD really starting to explore.”
“If we can start to move technologies that are working in other flight environments or other environments in general and move them into the hypersonic environment, we can really start to short-circuit the typical development timelines for a hypersonic system,” he added.
Indeed, that pull from the Defense Department is starting to happen, albeit at a small scale. Take Varda Space Industries, a California-based in-space manufacturing company founded in 2020: The firm plans to launch small satellites, which it calls “production facilities,” that are able to build components in orbit and return them to Earth in a capsule.
Through a strategic funding increase agreement issued last January, the Air Force, NASA and several private investors awarded Varda $60 million to study whether the capsules it will use to return products to Earth could also serve as a test platform for hypersonic materials and components.
Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said Varda’s story highlights not only the potential that lies within innovative companies, but the flexibility of these organizations and their interest in adapting to the needs of unlikely customers.
“That’s an example of how the commercial world, which was moving in one direction, has been able to be repurposed towards DoD efforts in hypersonics,” Clark told C4ISRNET.
The long play
Despite the smaller investments in companies like Varda and programs like MACH-TB and HyCAT, the Defense Department’s broader vision for bringing commercial capabilities into its hypersonics programs is unclear.
James Weber, who is responsible for the Pentagon’s high-level approach to developing, fielding and integrating high-speed systems across the military services, declined an interview with C4ISRNET, and a spokesman refused to answer questions about the DoD’s engagement with commercial firms.
But Clark noted that many of the department’s acquisition approaches still favor larger defense primes, and that its requirements process, which he called “specialized and aspirational,” tends to emphasize high-end needs for capabilities that can take decades to materialize — a paradigm that doesn’t always work for nontraditional companies.
“The commercial world is not interested in a 20- or 10-year [research and development] program. They would rather figure out ways to adapt technologies they are already developing to be applied to military use cases,” Clark said. “That, to me, is the big issue. DoD needs to be able to have a more evolutionary approach to requirements development so that it’s able to tap into commercial capacity as opposed to getting exactly what it wants at the start.”
Roper, who also sits on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board, noted that while the department has shown interest in working with nontraditional companies, it hasn’t backed up its rhetoric with funding.
“There are steps in the right direction; they’re just not big in value,” he said. “If the department cares about hypersonics — and it certainly talks [like] it does — then it needs to place a bet on it with the startups that are working in it.”
Roper has for years encouraged the department to work more closely with startups. With hypersonics, he said, there’s an opportunity for a “long play” approach from the DoD that moves beyond small efforts to integrate commercial capabilities within existing programs. With an eye toward future needs, the Pentagon should provide more testing and prototyping venues for “deep tech” companies looking to validate hypersonic aircraft and supporting technology, he argued.
“This, to me, is a must-succeed mission if the industrial base is going to grow,” Roper said in an interview. “The companies that are working in areas like hypersonics, aside from pulling together great teams, they’re also convincing private investors that there is a successful company that can de-risk these initially military technologies for eventual commercial use.”
Roper has experience here. During his time with the Air Force from 2018 to 2021, he championed a program called Agility Prime, which aimed to bring credibility to the fledgling electric aircraft market by creating test and certification opportunities for emerging companies.
The Agility Prime model could translate to the world of hypersonics, he said. And by providing startups with valuable test and validation data, as well as a path toward airworthiness certification, the DoD gets a chance to reduce technical risk and support a burgeoning industrial base it will likely rely upon, he explained.
“It’s also a nice synergy because it teaches the Pentagon that its value in this market is not just money,” Roper added. “It’s much more heavily weighted toward initial testing and certification.”
As the department seeks to work more with new entrants to the defense market, Hermeus’ Shore said it’s important that engagement moves beyond meetings and small contracts to recognizing and valuing innovation and integrating it at scale. It may also mean changing processes to make it easier for startups to compete with more traditional defense contractors.
“There’s just this inherent tension in the department, still, of push versus pull in the way the department buys technology, the way the department originates an idea and the way the department thinks about competition,” he said. “I don’t think the department has yet figured out how to commit to actually bear-hugging new technology sets and working with them.”
Ursa Major’s Laurienti noted that while it’s easier for the Defense Department to leverage commercial capabilities in space, where there’s an existing market, doing that within the hypersonics portfolio requires some creative thinking on the government’s part.
“Just getting DoD to wrap their heads around — ‘This company has X, Y and Z capabilities. Let’s pull that thread a little bit’ — that’ll be game-changing for how the department develops new capabilities very quickly,” he said.
Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.
WASHINGTON — The Defense Innovation Unit is about to enter its technology scaling era.
Founded in 2015 to help create a bridge between Silicon Valley startups and the Pentagon, the organization’s early work has focused on building partnerships and proving the value of commercial technology for military needs.
Now, according to DIU’s new directo, Doug Beck, it’s time to make a deliberate shift toward fielding the most military-relevant commercial technologies at a large scale.
That means moving away from a model where DIU fosters these capabilities, tees them up for military units and hopes that they’ll embrace them toward a posture in which the organization is embedded within the services and combatant commands to ensure that the technology they need is making it to the field.
“What we have to do now is take that capability that has been built and employ it for a strategic effect,” Beck told reporters July 20 during a virtual media briefing. “That is what this next phase of DIU is about.”
A former Apple executive, Beck took the helm of the organization in April. His comments come as leaders in the Pentagon and in Congress move to elevate the role DIU plays in pushing commercial technology to military users.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced in the spring that Beck would be a direct report to his office, shifting that responsibility away from Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu.
“The DIU director shall serve as a leader inside the Department to catalyze engagement with and investment into private sector communities where commercial technology can be adapted and applied to meet our warfighters’ requirements,” Austin said in an April 4 memo revealing the change.
Congress also sees a role for the organization in helping drive innovative technology to military users. In the House Appropriations Committee’s fiscal 2022 defense spending bill, which the panel approved June 22, lawmakers propose allocating $1 billion toward a DIU-managed “hedge portfolio” made of commercially available systems like low-cost drones and satellites and agile communication nodes.
“If properly executed, this hedge has the potential to reduce the taxpayer’s burden by leveraging private capital, expand America’s economic advantage by accelerating emerging technology, and broaden the pool of talent supporting national defense,” the committee said in a report accompanying the bill.
Beck said those steps are signs that the Defense Department is at a “tipping point” toward expanding its adoption of commercial technology.
“I’m extremely optimistic about where we are headed in terms of putting real energy behind making that tipping point real,” he said.
As for the details of how DIU will work with companies and DoD organizations to field capabilities in larger quantities, Beck said he’s still refining those. He plans to deliver a report to Austin later this summer laying out his near-term action plan.
Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.
WASHINGTON — A strategy for harnessing technology from commercial and non-traditional companies proposed by former Defense Innovation Unit director Mike Brown has caught traction in one House committee’s fiscal 2024 defense spending bill.
The legislation, which the House Appropriations Committee approved June 22, would allocate $1 billion toward establishing a “hedge portfolio” made up of innovative, commercially available systems including low-cost drones and satellites, agile communication and computing nodes and artificial intelligence capabilities.
DIU, the Pentagon’s commercial integration hub, would oversee execution of the funds, which it would use to advance existing innovation initiatives and support fielding new capability within the next three years. The bill calls for the department to submit a report within 90 days of the legislation’s enactment that outlines an acquisition plan for the portfolio and identifies 10 candidate projects.
“This portfolio is a hedge against growing and innate tactical and logistical risks to current weapon systems, as well as a hedge against industrial base risk, given the lack of capacity and diversity,” the committee said in a report accompanying the bill. “The development of non-traditional sources and non-traditional solutions are essential to this hedge, and it will require intentionally taking calculated risks to incentivize positive, deliberate, accelerated change.”
The proposal echoes a “hedge strategy” drafted last year by Brown — who led DIU from 2018 to September 2022 — and retired Chief of Naval Research Rear Adm. Lorin Selby. They argued that while the Defense Department has a number of organizations focused on innovative concepts aimed at rapidly fielding new capabilities, it lacks a focused, systematic approach to delivering them.
Brown and Selby called on DoD to develop a process that fields emerging technology-based capabilities in large quantities, applies commercial capabilities with a sense of urgency and focuses on small, low-cost, AI-enabled autonomous systems.
The committee indicates that the push to create a hedge portfolio is also a response to the ways in which Ukraine’s military has harnessed technology from commercial companies in its resistance to Russian aggression.
“After observing the use of non-traditional weapons from non-traditional sources in Ukraine, the committee supports maturing and focusing ‘innovation organizations’ on rapidly fielding new capabilities from new sources at scale,” the report states.
Elevating DIU
The establishment of the portfolio, and the associated funding, would be a significant boost for DIU and follows Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s recent decision to elevate the office to report directly to him. The committee highlights the move in its report, saying the transition provides “a timeline milestone to deliberately create a hedge portfolio.”
“If properly executed, this hedge has the potential to reduce the taxpayer’s burden by leveraging private capital, expand America’s economic advantage by accelerating emerging technology, and broaden the pool of talent supporting national defense,” the committee states.
The proposed $1 billion allocation includes more than $612 million in additional funding for DIU, with the remaining $420 million transferred from existing accounts. Congress appropriated just $191 million for the organization in fiscal 2023.
The bulk of the new funding is in a “Defense Innovation Unit Fielding” account, which supports a range of AI-related technology, including $10 million for AI-enabled drones, $23 million for autonomous virtual take-off and landing logistics systems and $13 million for digital engineering. It also would provide $220 million to rapidly funnel field-ready hedge projects to combatant commands.
The committee directs DIU to coordinate with the Pentagon’s chief digital and AI officer on these efforts.
The bill also recommends that the secretary of each military service create a Non-traditional Innovation Fielding Enterprise lead who would be responsible for working with commercial industry partners and shepherding projects within the service. The new organizations would “bring together the nexus of best practices identified in the last several years of defense innovation.”
“These designated Nexus fielding projects will begin with a problem statement and will iteratively mature requirements while developing software and hardware for fielding at scale within three years using small teams of warfighters, acquirers and technologists,” the committee said.
Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.
CHANTILLY, Va. — Within a few days of establishing a marketplace for commercial companies to provide surveillance and tracking data to military users, the Commercial Space Office received its first tasking from U.S. Africa Command.
The U.S. Embassy in Guinea contacted the combatant command in late May to help identify the origin of a chemical spill that was impacting its fishing industry. AFRICOM reached out to the office, which then turned to its pool of commercial surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking companies who used data garnered from satellites to identify the source.
“With commercial SRT data, we actually [narrowed] down that culprit from 350 ships down to five,” Col. Richard Kniseley said. “And we think we’ve already found out who that culprit was.”
Kniseley is the senior materiel leader for commercial space within the U.S. Space Force’s acquisition hub, Space Systems Command. He leads the nascent Commercial Space Office, which it established in April to bring together a number of the service’s initiatives aimed at partnering with companies and helping military users better leverage commercial space capabilities.
During a June 6 briefing at the opening of his office’s new Chantilly, Virginia, headquarters — dubbed the Commercial Space Marketplace for Innovation and Collaboration — Kniseley told reporters he wants to expand the marketplace concept that allowed his team to quickly respond to Africa Command’s tasking to other mission areas.
The service has already established a Space Domain Awareness Marketplace, which works with U.S. Space Command’s Joint Commercial Integration Office to provide space observation data to operators and allies. Future marketplaces, according to Kniseley and other Space Systems Command officials, could include missions like overhead persistent infrared, weather and alternate positioning, navigation and timing capabilities that could augment the Space Force’s GPS constellation.
While these commercial marketplaces are just one way the Commercial Space Office is looking to better leverage industry systems, SSC Commander Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein said in a speech at the new headquarters they’re a key part of the push to support operators and international allies by linking them to the capabilities they need on rapid timelines.
“When we connect our partnerships into an operational environment, the opportunities are endless,” he said.
Commercial first
While the Space Force operates its own satellite fleets in many of these mission areas, the service is trying to change its mindset from a build-first approach that is heavily reliant on military-owned systems to a buy-first posture that emphasizes the many commercial products already available.
The creation of the Commercial Space Office, according to Guetlein, reflects that shift and aims to provide the acquisition structure and leadership to support it. Kniseley’s role, he noted, is the first time Space Systems Command has had a senior materiel leader focused on commercial space acquisition.
“He is a board-selected individual by the United States Space Force to lead our guardians in what I believe is going to be one of the key missions going forward,” Guetlein said. “That was our commitment to getting that started.”
As SSC establishes its organizational infrastructure for commercial acquisition, it’s also working with Space Force and Defense Department leaders to create a more stable funding source for the effort.
Within its annual budget, which grew to $30 billion in fiscal 2024, the service allocates about $4 billion on commercial capabilities, Guetlein said.
“That’s a sizeable amount of money. When we look at how much it could be, it’s just a drop,” he said.
That commercial funding is tucked within program offices rather than consolidated under one budget line, which can make it hard for the service and industry to see what commercial services and systems the Space Force is buying. Creating a single program element for commercial capabilities would help the companies SSC works with “see where we are serious about getting after that partnership,” Guetlein said.
When it comes to working with combatant commanders, SSC is also crafting a business model that it expects will make it easier for military users to get the space capabilities they need, he said.
Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.
ST. LOUIS — The unending appetite for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance within NATO is driving deals with commercial satellite imagery providers, according to one official.
Satellite imagery is a resource of growing importance, with governments and private citizens relying on it to keep tabs on their respective surroundings. Overhead photos were used to expose Russia’s materiel buildup ahead of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and, more recently, have shown the scale of destruction in Eastern Europe.
The imagery arrangements at NATO plug a hole where there is insufficient collection from the “normal airborne assets that we’ve known and loved,” Paul Bowman, who leads the ISR cell for NATO’s Battlefield Information Collection and Exploitation Systems, said May 22 at the GEOINT Symposium in St. Louis.
The U.S. and U.K. are leading contributors to NATO joint ISR, with “everybody else” tailing, Bowman said.
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“When we’ve run NATO joint ISR exercises over the past five years, we consistently find that there’s not enough collection to really sustain the number of people that are willing to produce geospatial intelligence out of that collection,” he said. “What does that point to? That points to commercial capabilities.”
Bowman did not disclose with whom the deals were struck, nor did he specify their respective price. U.S. leaders in satellite imagery, however, include Planet Labs and Maxar Technologies. NATO’s website describes the proliferation of commercial satellite imagery as both a risk and a boon — while Russia or China can benefit, too, private players offer the alliance “cost-effective and scalable solutions that meet” demand.
NATO earlier this year launched the Alliance Persistent Surveillance from Space initiative, or APSS, meant to streamline the process of gathering and disseminating reams of data collected from space for use in the alliance. It banks on existing and planned space assets from friendly countries to establish a virtual constellation known as Aquila.
“We need persistence, we need collection,” Bowman said. “But we need collection that is technically shareable.”
Colin Demarest is a reporter at C4ISRNET, where he covers military networks, cyber and IT. Colin previously covered the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration — namely Cold War cleanup and nuclear weapons development — for a daily newspaper in South Carolina. Colin is also an award-winning photographer.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The Space Force has a new office tasked with helping the service better integrate commercial space capabilities across its portfolio.
The Commercial Space Office, led by Col. Richard Kniseley, will replace the Commercial Services Office, which was established just a year ago. The organization will bring together several other initiatives, including SpaceWERX — the service’s technology hub — and Space Systems Command’s Front Door, an online portal companies can use to connect with the acquisition community.
The office will also lead the Space Force’s efforts to create a Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve to leverage companies’ space capabilities in a crisis. In an April 18 interview at the Space Symposium here, Kniseley told C4ISRNET he’s working to craft a framework for the program by this summer.
“We have got to get these capabilities integrated in peacetime so that the warfighter has a chance to use it, so that we can integrate them into exercises and wargames to really make it part of the architecture,” Knisely said.
In the same wide-ranging interview, Kniseley discussed his plans to expand the Space Domain Awareness marketplace — which allows companies to compete for space data contracts — to other mission areas and laid out his priorities for the new office.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When was the Commercial Space Office created and where will it be headquartered?
It was officially stood up [in April], and I’ve already started aligning the processes and the offices. The actual headquarters for the Commercial Space Office will be in Chantilly, Va.
In fact, in June, we’re opening up our Commercial Collaboration Center in Chantilly, and it’s this perfect sweet spot to have it because it’s right next to the National Reconnaissance Office. It’s right near the Space Development Agency, you have NASA nearby along with other mission partners. But also it’s in a good sweet spot of industry as well.
Just having it out there is going to be a benefit to all of us because at the end of the day, I look at this commercial space office as a collaboration amongst everybody. And we were already building those relationships with NRO as well as the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency — understanding what contracts they had available so that we’re not recreating contracts, but we could tap into those other areas with the appropriate funding and the requirement from the warfighter.
What are your initial priorities in the Commercial Space Office?
Some of them are a little early on, but from a strategic standpoint, transitioning the Commercial Satellite Communications Office away from the Defense Information Systems Agency. Right now, organizationally, it is under the Space Force, but we are still utilizing DISA for contracting. To make this office work, we’re standing up a working capital fund, which we are anticipating by the end of September.
That’s going to allow us to really get after those other mission areas going forward. What we’re doing with DISA is anything that is ongoing or if they were already in source selection, we’re letting those go through. But soon new procurements, those will be actually coming through the Commercial Space Office contract.
When it comes down to the commercial space office, the biggest thing I want to do is make deliberate investment in commercial that’s just really going to get after what the warfighter needs. Because the feedback I’ve gotten from the commercial entities is they want to get involved. They want to be good partners. It’s really all about a partnership. And the way to do that is to really show that you’re deliberate in building that. The best way to do it is through investments. So, aligning contracts and aligning the right funding to do this.
How will your efforts be funded? Will that come from the program offices you’re working with?
I look at my office to do a lot of the execution. I will be looking at the program executive offices — and I think this is even coming down from Space Force leadership — to look at their mission areas to really understand . . . how mature is the market right now? And also figuring out what are those inherently government missions or capabilities that need to be built in house and what can commercial take on today?
The way I look at it, especially with this conflict that’s coming [with China], we have got to get these capabilities integrated during peacetime so that the warfighter has a chance to use it, so that we can integrate them into exercises and war games to really make it a part of the architecture. You don’t want to try and do that while you’re in conflict. This is the time to do it so that if a crisis, heaven forbid, ever kicks up, you know it’s there and you know how to use it. And it becomes almost part of your lexicon.
The Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit works closely with companies and program offices to help get commercial technology to the warfighter. How will your office collaborate with DIU?
We talk constantly on many different issues. I’ve been working with them on their hybrid space architecture, and some of the companies that are a part of that capability. And really, I see so much utility in some of the capabilities that can help us get after so many things that we’re trying to do. So I’m working on one effort right now to get them hooked up to the Naval Research Lab testbed, so that we can really prove out that capability. And then I think a lot of these are going to migrate to a live demo.
So, you would be connecting DIU’s hybrid space architecture with the NRL testbed?
I’m connecting certain pieces of it.
How is your office engaging with companies? And what feedback do you hear from them about impediments to working with DoD?
As I grow out the Commercial Space Office, one thing that we’ve done extremely well in my mind in the Space Force and definitely in Space Systems Command is to have industry engagements. We had 11 last year, which is huge.
We started with space-to-space communications in February of ‘22, and we had one almost once a month. That’s where we’ve been having a lot of conversation about our mission areas and posing our problems to them and, through a reverse industry day model, getting their feedback.
I plan to continue those. We mentioned the [artificial intelligence/machine learning] day in May. We’re going to do alternate positioning, navigation and timing in June. I think there’s gonna be a weather one because I see that as a big area that, why wouldn’t we go commercial?
Where I see industry getting frustrated is that there’s been talk, but they want to see action. They want to see deliberate integration and funding in commercial and getting those capabilities to the warfighter. So that is definitely what I’m going to challenge my team on and that’s where I see success — contracts and funding and capability delivery.
Where is some of this commercial integration happening already within the Space Force?
We talked about the success of the commercial SATCOM office. I mean, that’s about $1 billion dollars per year that executes through that office. I would like to do more with the Space Domain Awareness (SDA) marketplace, which is going to come under my office. There’s areas that I’ve got in my head of making it more of an investment in commercial while still ingraining that character and the discipline that we want out of the companies.
The work that’s being done with [U.S. Space Command’s] Joint Commercial Integration Office (JCO), that is actual operators utilizing that commercial capability — that is huge right there. That commercial capability is being brought in to utilize by operators and our allies alike.
I want to create other marketplaces for other areas so that I can almost replicate that SDA model and get it out to the JCO and start doing that type of stuff. If the warfighter has a requirement, I can throw it into that marketplace and have the competition there and then quickly get that capability out.
Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The U.S. Space Force expects to set an initial framework this summer for how it might take advantage of commercial space capabilities during wartime or crisis.
Col. Richard Knisely, head of the Space Force’s new Commercial Space Office, said his team is working to establish this construct so that the Space Force has a capability in place to quickly access commercial capabilities before the next U.S. military conflict.
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“We have got to get these capabilities integrated in peacetime so that the warfighter has a chance to use it, so that we can integrate them into exercises and wargames to really make it part of the architecture,” he told C4ISRNET in an April 18 interview at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo. “This is the time to do it so that if a crisis, heaven forbid, ever kicks up, you know it’s there and you know how to use it.”
Knisely said the framework will address five “cornerstone” elements of creating what the service is calling a Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve, or CASR: contracting, programmatics, policy, operations and industry feedback.
The service is looking to the Air Force’s Civil Reserve Air Fleet as a model for crafting a commercial space surge capability. Through the CRAF, the Air Force has contracts with commercial airlines to provide extra airlift capacity to support military operations or humanitarian missions.
The Space Force met with industry in February to discuss the CASR concept and formed a task force soon after, Knisely said. Based on initial work with policy and legal experts to understand potential barriers to relying on commercial assets for commercial missions, Knisely said he’s optimistic that the service can establish a program within the next few years.
Incentivizing companies
“I’ve worked in the Pentagon before, so I’m as skeptical as anybody — there’s not much standing in my way on this one,” he said. “I think we have the right policy. And from a legal perspective, I think we’re good.”
Knisely noted that there are still questions around how the Defense Department would provide protection and compensation for commercial satellites or ground systems targeted by adversaries, but said he’s confident answers are within reach.
Beyond policy, the Space Force is considering what missions might be best suited for commercial augmentation. It plans to use satellite communication as a “pathfinder” mission, but Knisely said areas like tactical intelligence and space observation also make sense for CASR.
The task force is also considering how to structure contracts with industry and how to incentivize companies that participate in the program. The Air Force’s approach through CRAF is to offer companies intelligence updates that allow them to better understand what investments they need to make to offer capacity to the government, and Knisely said that approach may work for CASR.
He said the most consistent feedback he’s heard from companies — both on CASR and in broader discussions about melding commercial and government space capabilities — is that they want to see action from the government.
“There’s been talk, but they want to see action,” Knisely said. “That is definitely what I’m going to challenge my team on. . . . Success is contracts and funding and capability delivery.”
Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.