It’s 2027. Chinese warships have encircled Taiwan. High above, China’s growing fleet of satellites track and target United States military forces across the Pacific. At the same time, an array of Chinese counterspace measures threaten to disrupt and severely degrade U.S. space capabilities essential to any military response.
Today, time is running short to meet the challenges posed by this scenario and establish the deterrence that could prevent it by fielding advanced U.S. national security space capabilities. Failure to do so puts American lives and other vital interests at risk.
Achieving the speed needed to outpace threats in space and beyond will require putting real resources into new approaches. Our nation has long excelled at developing exquisite systems that offer unparalleled performance. But as profound technological shifts remake the space domain, our current moment calls for us to invest in the space capability innovators that are emerging as the U.S.’s greatest relative strength.
Surging private investment in space has created opportunities for the government to buy at scale from new players like commercial start-ups and non-traditional national security companies. By fixing the way we enable and on-ramp their innovative capabilities into government missions , we can more rapidly acquire and deploy war-winning capabilities to the warfighter.
In our view, efforts to achieve these aims should focus around four key areas:
Set requirements that enable leapfrog capability
For decades, the defense acquisition process has been top-down and heavily prescriptive, setting requirements that don’t work well with increasingly dynamic development and production approaches. We must shift from having the military specify how to design a system and instead look at the results that need to be delivered, with an eye toward requirements that enable on-ramping of near-term commercial capability. An 80% solution in the fight is far better than a 100% solution that is too late.
Newer approaches like Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies (APFIT) investments, the modernized budget structures proposed by the Congressional Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) Reform, and smart use of Other Transaction Authorities for contracting by organizations like the Defense Innovation Unit demonstrate faster and less restrictive procurement approaches that can on-ramp new capabilities and enable greater collaboration between government and industry. These efforts streamline processes without compromising their integrity, and should be adopted more widely by government agencies and acquisition organizations.
Develop with speed from the start
Staying ahead of the threat means spending time less studying and more time on decision-making. New systems that could historically take a decade or more to develop and deploy need to be accelerated to a few years, or even months in the case of rapidly evolving software-defined or cyber capabilities. We won’t always get these decisions right the first time, but we cannot allow that to paralyze decision-making.
Acquisition reforms are important, but as we’ve learned from the Air Force and Space Rapid Capabilities Offices, many of the needed acquisition authorities are already in hand. The challenge is to empower organizations — through cultural shifts and the right incentives — to use these authorities to act decisively and avoid unnecessary obstacles along the way.
Space Force leaders rightly adopted a commercial-first strategy of “exploit what we have, buy what we can and build only what we must.” This approach creates opportunities to tap into the faster pace of commercial development and leverage private investment in these capabilities. Scaling these efforts further will require prioritization and shifts in funding. More can also be done to improve collaboration and information sharing between government, industry and investors to bridge into larger contracts.
Operate with flexibility
The pace of change in space requires a more flexible, resilient and capable mix of integrated government and commercial capabilities. The government should encourage interoperability between space systems wherever possible to allow for a continual on-ramping of new players and new capabilities, and for more rapid production.
Interoperability can help reduce the time to integrate payloads on different launch vehicles and satellites from months to weeks, reroute data between satellites and ground sites under attack, and surge the deployment of dozens, if not hundreds, of new proliferated satellites at a time into operational service. Iterative technology insertion, like that envisioned by the Space Development Agency, should become standard practice as we refresh and improve on-orbit capabilities.
Ensure it reaches the end user
As space systems become more interconnected and involve more participants than ever before, we are only as strong as our weakest link. Bringing in new technologies faster will mean little if pieces don’t connect end-to-end and reliably deliver essential capabilities to the warfighter. We must also ensure complex kill chains are resilient and able to withstand adversary attacks. Advantage in future conflict will depend on warfighter access to timely, integrated data from multiple sources. But integrating new technology into complex military systems does not happen overnight, and these investments cannot wait until the eve of conflict.
This is where efforts like the Fight Tonight Consortium, where The Aerospace Corporation plays a critical role, can make an impact. The consortium brings together the best of traditional and non-traditional companies on an open invite basis to work collaboratively to quickly plug critical gaps in kill chains to deliver effects on relevant timelines.
The threats the U.S. faces from adversaries like China, and the challenges we face in confronting them, are real but not insurmountable. Scaling up the capabilities coming out of the most innovative parts of the high tech and emerging space sector will be critical to improving combat readiness, modernizing our forces, and deterring adversary aggression. U.S. leadership in space depends on it.
Steve Isakowitz is President and CEO of The Aerospace Corporation.
Ray Rothrock is a venture capitalist, cyber expert and philanthropist, and founder of FiftySix Investments LLC.
Randall Walden is former director and program executive officer of the Department of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office.
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