Washington: The US Space Force’s push to prepare for a future war in the Indo-Pacific in the next few years is not just about quickly fielding more resilient satellites and ground systems — it also means ensuring guardians and the broader joint force are trained and ready to use those capabilities during a conflict.
Chief of Space Operations General Chance Saltzman has made readiness a top priority for the service and has called on the organisations that write requirements, train guardians and develop test and training infrastructure to move quickly to prepare the force to operate in a more contested space environment.
That’s a big task for a service that was established just five years ago and is transitioning from viewing space as a benign domain to a potential theater of war. And the leaders of the service’s testing and training enterprise say they are feeling that time crunch.
Col Corey Klopstein, who leads efforts to acquire operational test and training infrastructure at Space Systems Command, said Saltzman’s mandate means his organisation has “a long way to go in a very short period of time.”
“We’ve got to make sure that we’ve got our forces ready to present as quickly as possible,” he said during a recent Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference webinar. “We’re not in the same position as other services that have been training in these contested environments.”
Maj Gen Tim Sejba, head of Space Training and Readiness Command, said that while it will take decades for the Space Force to build high-fidelity training and testing ranges, there are interim steps the service can take to improve its live and simulated training infrastructure.
Speaking at the annual I/ITSEC conference in Orlando, Florida, this week, Sejba said the Space Force is taking a hybrid approach to improving its current systems, stitching together legacy capabilities with new technology available in the commercial market. “The only way we’re going to be able to support the joint force and our allies is to partner with industry differently than we have in the past,” he said.
The service is using its $12 billion Space Enterprise Consortium contract to buy some of these capabilities. The contracting mechanism allows the Space Force to issue task orders to more than 750 preapproved companies and get solutions faster than it might under a more traditional acquisition program.
In September, the service issued an RFI through the consortium seeking commercial companies with satellites on orbit that have excess capacity and could be used to support Space Force live training and testing. This and other acquisition tools are not only efficient ways to buy new capabilities, but they’re often more affordable, too, Klopstein said.
“I want to see what’s out there and push the boundary to see if there’s anything that we can bring in and leverage as quickly as possible,” he said. “And if you can partner with commercial industry and you can have dual use of technologies, that helps us collectively bring the cost down.”
In the near term, Klopstein said, the service plans rely on whatever capability it can get from industry to address its biggest training gaps: integration and outdated simulators.
The integration challenge involves understanding how the service’s satellites interact and affect one another on orbit and simulating that in a virtual training environment. Today, much of the Space Force’s training happens system by system, but Klopstein said the service needs to better connect its capabilities to make its training more comprehensive and realistic.
The Space Force also needs to invest in upgrading its simulators, which don’t currently provide the capability the service needs to validate its tactics, Klopstein said.
For now, Space Systems Command is doing what it can to piece together new capabilities and existing systems, but the Space Force’s future training needs will require a more robust virtual training infrastructure.
Klopstein’s team has met with industry several times over the last year to assess what modeling and simulation capabilities it might be able to take advantage of today to build that future infrastructure. That work is informing a broader acquisition strategy that the service expects to unveil early next year.
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