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Alan W. Dowd is a Senior Fellow with the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes on the full range of topics relating to national defense, foreign policy and international security. Dowd’s commentaries and essays have appeared in Policy Review, Parameters, Military Officer, The American Legion Magazine, The Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, The Claremont Review of Books, World Politics Review, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Jerusalem Post, The Financial Times Deutschland, The Washington Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Examiner, The Detroit News, The Sacramento Bee, The Vancouver Sun, The National Post, The Landing Zone, Current, The World & I, The American Enterprise, Fraser Forum, American Outlook, The American and the online editions of Weekly Standard, National Review and American Interest. Beyond his work in opinion journalism, Dowd has served as an adjunct professor and university lecturer; congressional aide; and administrator, researcher and writer at leading think tanks, including the Hudson Institute, Sagamore Institute and Fraser Institute. An award-winning writer, Dowd has been interviewed by Fox News Channel, Cox News Service, The Washington Times, The National Post, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and numerous radio programs across North America. In addition, his work has been quoted by and/or reprinted in The Guardian, CBS News, BBC News and the Council on Foreign Relations. Dowd holds degrees from Butler University and Indiana University. Follow him at twitter.com/alanwdowd.

ASCF News

Scott Tilley is a Senior Fellow at the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes the “Technical Power” column, focusing on the societal and national security implications of advanced technology in cybersecurity, space, and foreign relations.

He is an emeritus professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. Previously, he was with the University of California, Riverside, Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, and IBM. His research and teaching were in the areas of computer science, software & systems engineering, educational technology, the design of communication, and business information systems.

He is president and founder of the Center for Technology & Society, president and co-founder of Big Data Florida, past president of INCOSE Space Coast, and a Space Coast Writers’ Guild Fellow.

He has authored over 150 academic papers and has published 28 books (technical and non-technical), most recently Systems Analysis & Design (Cengage, 2020), SPACE (Anthology Alliance, 2019), and Technical Justice (CTS Press, 2019). He wrote the “Technology Today” column for FLORIDA TODAY from 2010 to 2018.

He is a popular public speaker, having delivered numerous keynote presentations and “Tech Talks” for a general audience. Recent examples include the role of big data in the space program, a four-part series on machine learning, and a four-part series on fake news.

He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Victoria (1995).

Contact him at stilley@cts.today.

DOD Seeks New Satellite Communications Prototypes

Thursday, March 12, 2020

Categories: ASCF News National Preparedness Bipartisianship

Comments: 0

The Defense Department wants satellite operators, including smallsat start-ups and other innovative companies, to offer visions of a new seamless communications system for the U.S. military.

A contract solicitation issued on March 3 launched a four-phase prototyping effort that will lead to “a new architecture that looks nothing like the current one” for command, control, and communications, said Doug Schroeder, oversight executive of DOD’s Joint Capability Technology Demonstration. The idea is that, eventually, the new architecture would allow “any user using any terminal anywhere to seamlessly connect to any other user using any other terminal” anywhere, he told an audience of industry executives during a panel discussion at Satellite 2020 in Washington.

The solicitation, in the form of a Broad Agency Announcement, says the new system “will enable the DOD to reliably communicate with all its tactical and strategic assets.” It adds that the goal of the prototyping is to transition the winning technologies “into programs of record as a component of the department’s next-generation communications system, which is currently under development.”

Though many of the details are classified, the next-generation system will be a radical departure from current models, said fellow panelist Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy Stephen Kitay. It will employ many more satellites to ensure redundancy and have the ability to maintain communications even in the face of anti-satellite weapons that are increasingly being deployed by U.S. adversaries, he said.

“It is a fundamentally different architecture than we have today,” Kitay said. “It is based on a proliferated low earth orbit constellation that goes from [a legacy system consisting of a few] big fat juicy targets to a much more distributed system, … much more resilient.”

The BAA comes as the military faces what some are calling a crisis in military satellite communications as the DOD’s legacy Ultra High Frequency, or UHF satellites reach the end of their useful lives, and their replacement—the Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) satellite constellation—is lagging.

The BAA envisages a four-phase process, a white paper and pitch day, followed by a system design phase, a system development phase, and finally a system demonstration and prototyping phase. The process, which could take up to four years, will be done under Other Transaction Authority—a form of acquisition that makes it quicker and easier to ink deals with companies, like startups, that aren’t traditional defense contractors.

There is no dollar amount given in the BAA. Instead, white paper submissions are expected to include a cost to complete the development phase.

“Our technical leadership … are relying heavily on industry to transform our C3 networks,” said Schroeder. But once it gets beyond the prototyping stage, the reboot will be transferred as a program of record to the new Space Development Agency, he said.

The solicitation invites submissions in three capability areas:

“Protected radio frequency (RF) Beyond Line-of-Sight (BLOS) communicationsMulti-user high bandwidth laser communicationsCommunications with submerged assets, like submarines.

“These are three critical communication capabilities that the warfighter needs,” Joanne Sears told Air Force Magazine. Sears, a former Defense Department official now a partner with Velocity Government Relations, moderated the panel where Schroeder unveiled the BAA.

She noted that there was “a very tight window” for white paper submissions, which have to be sent in by March 31. “They seem to want to move fast, which suggests either the need is very urgent or they already have certain concepts or companies in mind.”

Sears said the BAA seemed very open as to the kind of solutions it was seeking, “It could be a new way to use existing constellations,” she said, “They are asking people to be very flexible and creative.”

Photo: From left to right, Douglas Schroeder, oversight executive in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering; Joshua Huminski, director of the National Security Space Program at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress; Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy Stephen Kitay; and Rebecca Cowen-Hirsch, senior vice president for government policy and strategy at Inmarsat Government, appear on a panel on March 9, 2020, during the Satellite 2020 conference in Washington. Photo by Shaun Waterman.

Link: https://www.airforcemag.com/dod-seeks-new-satellite-communications-prototypes/

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