The Pentagon and Air Force - along with the U.S. intelligence community - have struggled lately with major satellite development programs. Sources say the Space Radar program could be doomed by conflicts between the Defense Department and intel agencies. On April 6, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced plans to scrap the Transformational Satellite (TSAT) program over costs and whether it would even be needed after defense officials proposed a much-changed Army Future Combat Systems (FCS) effort.
Complexity was the main problem with programs such as Space Radar and TSAT, says Josh Hartman, who recently resigned as special adviser on space to the Pentagon acquisition executive.
Brought in by former acquisition chief John Young, Hartman designed a new mold in which senior DoD officials will buy satellites: smaller, simpler, more rapidly deployable - and cheaper. Defense officials "need to evaluate alternatives to the large complex systems, and use less-complex systems when we can do so without compromising the missions our satellites need to perform," Hartman said in an interview not long before he resigned in early June. "Our needs neither can, nor should they be satisfied from one orbit with a single mega-sensor acquisition model."
A. It's been received fairly well. There is a core of people who agree at the second-highest level of the Pentagon. Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs [Marine] Gen. James Cartwright certainly agrees with it. My initial talks with Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter indicate he's in agreement. There are not a lot of new programs, so creating programs fashioned on this is going to be a bit difficult in the near term. Building smaller, simpler satellites will require new starts. But we are applying this to things where we're going to [have] evolving technologies, on programs like Wideband Gapfiller, the Advanced Extremely High Frequency program. We're maturing the technology a lot sooner than we had been through cooperative efforts with both industry and the laboratories. A greater emphasis has to be put into science and technology.
A. The way you do that is from an oversight perspective. It's making sure the oversight entities - Congress, OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense], senior service leadership - empower the program manager to say no. When new requirements are at issue, the program manager has to say no - but he has to feel empowered by all levels of the chain all the way up to Congress and the senior-most levels of the executive branch up to the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.
A. That's something we've already started to institute. They sign a program manager agreement that says they will stay there for four years or until a major milestone. The issue in space is that our programs take longer than four years to build, so the question becomes how much are you achieving by doing that. That's why in the business model, I've advocated shortening our cycle times - our build processes should not take four years. There also has to be a civilian piece to program offices that retains continuity and can provide information and rationale and reason as to why decisions were made and what was the general guiding philosophy.
A. Survivability, space situational awareness and international cooperation. For the latter, it's a policy void on what kind of data and when do we share it with individual partners because we're stepping into uncharted territory. We want to be cooperative, but we want to protect ourselves at the same time. On survivability, we're talking on-orbit or terrestrial survivability. This goes to the business model, having a few systems versus a proliferation of systems, and what the effects are on dissuasion and deterrence of an enemy attack. What level of on-orbit protection is necessary either inherent to the satellite, meaning things like hardening, or otherwise? What kinds of defensive capabilities are needed? But not weapons.
A. We're going to actually do a flight demonstration, putting something into space. In FY10, we're going to launch a quarter-Earth steering sensor on a commercial communications satellite. It's going to be a hosted payload on an SCS Americom satellite. We will take the data from that and pump it through our ground systems and learn the performance of the focal plane, do an end-to-end systems integrity check and then fold that into the acquisition process - proving the sensor works, proving the ground system works and then being able to demonstrate some missile warning capability. The objective will be a full-Earth sensor. If everything works out, we'll have some operational leave-behind. We would then, in the FY12 or FY13, [perform] a full-Earth demonstration of the payload. There would be two of those, a competitive fly-off.
A. A lot. Then-Pentagon acquisition chief John Young made sure that the acquisition community was sufficiently empowered to engage in these debates across the enterprise. We made sure that our analysis was a core part of that discussion.
A. There are three processes that drive weapon system development: requirements, resources and acquisition. Prior to 2005, when Congress mandated there would be joint milestone decision authority between the defense secretary and the DNI [director of national intelligence], there was no connection between the acquisition world. That forced the two communities to debate, discuss and come to the solutions within the Joint Intelligence Acquisition Board. The problem is [that] on the other two touch points, there's no great connectivity. There is not joint planning or substantive debate about cost-sharing, allocation of resources across the board - it's been about onesies and twosies, and been very personality-based. On the requirements side, it is hard for DoD to nail down a single entity within the intel community that articulates requirements the way the Joint Oversight Requirements Council does for the department. We need to create the same kinds of connections as we have with acquisition between the resources and requirements.
A. Because of the way the law creating ORS is written, the size those satellites can grow to is limited, so the impact they can provide is limited. But they could still play a role in providing a layer of communication globally, or they could provide focused communication on specific regions, for specific users. That is technology, from a niche perspective, that ORS would be perfectly positioned to leverage.
A. When I walked into this job two years ago, some folks who had been trying to do space acquisition oversight for a while came to me and said, "Josh, the problem is that OSD is not properly engaged in the development of the plans from the very beginning. The Air Force builds the plans in a vacuum and then throws them over the fence. And then the OSD guys naturally are frustrated and resist acceptance of those plans." So we got engaged earlier in the process. I think over the last two years, we've built a good relationship on Air Force space programs. It used to be a confrontational relationship, one of mistrust and poor communication. I think we've fixed that. ■
-- By John T. Bennett in Washington
Employees: 480.
Mission: Oversee and ensure proper execution of the Pentagon's process for developing and buying new weapons.
Goals: Create an agile, ethical work force; seek strategic and tactical acquisition excellence; develop technology to meet war-fighting needs.
Source: AT&L Implementation Plan.
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