Schriever Wargame 2010 - Air Force Space Command

The two problems with the current model are:
1. It will break down in a contested environment. As simultaneously
capacity is reduced through attack or jamming
and there is a clamor for bandwidth from militaries,
media, and commercial interests due to crisis, DoD will
likely find that it cannot secure the service required.
2. It passes up a golden opportunity to greatly reduce cost by
leveraging industry’s more efficient acquisition model.
A better model would be to establish serious long-term contracts
directly with satellite operators. These contracts could
include clauses that would give DoD first rights to bandwidth
during crisis (at a premium) and would lower peacetime costs
through bulk buy. DoD should give industry specific requirements,
such as anti-jam, in these contracts and guarantee a
fixed level of purchase for a fixed number of years. This action
would free industry to design and launch systems tailored to
DoD’s needs at greatly reduced costs relative to acquiring additional
government systems.
International Traffic in Arms Regulation – Think the
Traditional Air Force that Flies Planes
When our pilots encounter F-16s flown by a hostile nation,
they have the advantage of understanding the characteristics of
the system that they are facing—because we built it. This is not
true facing MiGs or Mirages. Why on Earth would we not want
the same advantage in space? In many ways, exporting satellites
is better than exporting planes/tanks/ships/etc.—they tend
to be on orbit when delivered and so cannot easily be reverseengineered.
Export restriction on all but the most sensitive spacecraft
systems should immediately be lifted and encouraged as much
as possible. There is an added benefit in that nations that purchase
our systems will be more likely to share them back with
us in the case that ours are destroyed.
Schriever Wargame 2012 – Think Tactical
Five Schriever games in a row have provided great insight
into the operational level of a space conflict. The placement of
the Schriever V Wargame and SW 10 a year apart with common
leadership between the two was highly successful—SW
10 was in many ways a much richer, more nuanced version of
the Schriever V Wargame. What is missing is the tactical aspect.
The Schriever Wargame 2012 should be held in conjunction
with a set of space exercises to explore the tactical nature
of the game.
Space Acquisition – Think Depth, Local Empowerment,
and Stability
The once mighty space acquisition system producing the
greatest wonders of the classified security community, and directly
responsible for America’s dominant information advantage,
is now seen in many parts of the Pentagon as the worst
performing of the troubled military procurement systems. “Oh,
the most expensive page in DoD,” a recent offhand remark by
one of DoD’s highest ranking officials when offered a one page
summary of space programs by the Air Force in the presence of
this author, illustrates the climate.
Our collective inability to halt this decline has led to highly
fragile systems and is pricing us out of the space business.
For example, DoD once paid between $100 - $200 million a
year to field a weather satellite program in two orbits (Defense
Meteorological Satellite Program [DMSP]). Under National
Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System
(NPOESS), it would have paid $800 million to $1 billion for
that same privilege. With DMSP, we routinely had multiple
vehicles ready for launch, with NPOESS, we were one launch
failure from a multi-year gap in capability.
Much as we would like to wish it away, building satellites
to survive the rigors of space without any human intervention
is more art than science. Highly complex, with little design
margin, unforgiving, temperamental, with thousands of oblique
rules learned the hard way—from past failures. Building a satellite
involves a thousand decisions any one of which can manifest
itself either as a failure of the entire system on-orbit or as
rework during the integration and test phase when a satellite’s
“burn rate” is at its highest.
The following difficult, perhaps impossible, changes are required
to regain our ability to pioneer an Apollo, or a Corona:
1. Government Program Office personnel and leadership
need depth, not breadth. Ideally, a SPO director and
his/her direct reports will spend his/her entire career not
just in space acquisition but in the acquisition of space
systems of a specific mission type (i.e., infrared missile
warning or protected satellite communications).
2. Contractor program office personnel and leadership need
depth, not breadth. We must acknowledge to ourselves
that there really isn’t competition in the space industry
base. With two and one-half large primes, none “allowed
to fail” and the government picking up the tab for the inevitable
overruns, the only competition is that between
creative proposal writers and innovative costing. Competition
at the second and third tier suppliers is often nonexistent.
There are few if any examples of an incumbent
contractor/government team foundering on a follow-on
Ideally, a SPO director and his/her direct reports will spend his/her entire career not just
in space acquisition but in the acquisition of space systems of a specific mission type (i.e.,
infrared missile warning or protected satellite communications).
High Frontier 52