Schriever Wargame 2010 - Air Force Space Command

of the world. Sticking with a Cold War mindset of assuredness
is to ensure that data at the JSpOC will be irrelevantly late, substandard,
and is to ignore the information revolution occurring
all around us.
More JSpOC – Telepresence
If I told you that we would have full motion video of the volume
of all the world’s oceans, 24/7, tracking every moving fish,
you would be pretty skeptical. The volume of space to geosynchronous
Earth orbit (GEO) is 220,000 times the volume of the
world’s oceans. We don’t actually know where anything is in
space; all we really know is that when we looked at it last week,
it was in a certain orbit so we assume it is still there—we must
recognize now the impossibility of “tracking all the dots, all the
time.” As a result, understanding what is going on in space is
less about watching the dots and more about understanding the
medium of space, how it behaves, how objects in it behave, and
what likely actors are up to.
A minimally sufficient set of experts, then, to understand a
complex space event such as a space war will never ever all
be sitting at Vandenberg—by its nature, the “space situational
awareness (SSA) system” is not a set of sensors and computers
but is instead a combination of sensors, knowledge tools
and, most importantly, the network of the national set of space
experts who must be able to meaningfully collaborate on a
timescale measured in minutes. These experts are likely to simultaneously
be at Vandenberg, Peterson, Schriever, Chantilly,
Langley, Goddard, Wright Patterson, Los Angeles, and Albuquerque—not
to mention places like Canberra, Luxembourg
(SES), Dulles (Iridium), Paris, and so forth. Rather than a large
command center, we should think of the JSpOC as the nexus of
a world web of connections that can be exercised at “the speed
of light” during confrontation. Required, then, is a well thought
through telepresence system pre-configured to access all these
sites and a set of long distance collaboration tools allowing
multiple users to access the richly visual and computationally
intensive data set that underpins SSA.
An interesting corollary to this point is a direct finding of
the Schriever Wargame 2010 (SW 10) (the 6 th Schriever game)
Industry Cell. The Schriever V Wargame postulated the need
for a “CSpOC” which combines allies and commercial entities
into the JSpOC. While potentially a reality for allies, how can
we possibly integrate what may be 100+ companies into the
JSpOC—surely each cannot have their own representative and
most companies will be loath to pass sensitive operational data
through another company’s representative. Instead, the JSpOC
could establish a high definition instantly-accessible telepresence
link between Vandenberg and each company allowing the
JSpOC to immediately collaborate with relevant corporate officers
in time of crisis.
Figure 3. Satellites being built today will be operating in a world of content,
communication, and innovation that we do not even understand.
Satellites – Think iPhone
Today’s satellites are technical marvels in the same way that
dinosaurs were biological marvels—the asteroid has already
hit, though, and it is called the internet.
The problem with satellites in the current phase of the internet
age is that they take 5-10 years to build and are then
untouchable on-orbit for another 10-15. In the 20 years, then,
between a system’s technology freeze date and its end of service,
computing power has increased almost 15,000 times and
vast networks of connected individuals on Earth have invented
entirely new ways of doing almost everything. Ask yourself
who in five years (or even now) will buy a paper map Listen to
music from a CD Open a Yellow Pages book Go to a video
rental store Read a paper newspaper Watch a TV weather report
A mere five years ago these were all critical components
of modern life. By building single purpose (missile warning,
PNT, etc.) giant stovepipe systems, our space infrastructure not
only presents fragile temping targets to adversaries, but worse
runs counter to the phenomenon that is the internet rather than
harnessing it.
A more robust model would be holistic, distributed, and
open—it would leverage the power of the network of knowledge/people
that is the Internet, adapt rapidly, and degrade
gracefully. Instead of building single large stovepipe systems
to cover all requirements of a specific mission area (i.e., missile
warning), such a model would start by asking what types
of capabilities need to be on orbit to satisfy the set of military
and intelligence mission areas. This set may be, for example,
a number of infrared sensors, general purpose radio frequency
(RF) emitters in bands a/b/c, general purpose RF receivers in
bands d/e/f, a number of telescopes, a number of flash detectors,
and so forth As much as possible, these would be launched on
individual smaller spacecraft and all would be connected by
second generation high bandwidth laser communications. All
computing power would be pushed to the ground where it can
Today’s satellites are technical marvels in the same way that dinosaurs were biological
marvels—the asteroid has already hit, though, and it is called the internet.
High Frontier 50