Increasing military use of satellite communication for tactical operations means the Defense Department should create a new tier of protected space systems, says the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments's Todd Harrison.
Currently the Pentagon has a binary military satellite communications architecture – those satellites with a full range of passive defenses to protect against jamming, detection, interception or ground-system attacks, and systems without those defenses, Harrison says in a report (.pdf) released July 24.
The military uses the former mostly for strategic uses such as missile warning and nuclear command and control.
But given a breakdown of a post-Cold War implicit assumption that deterrence would be sufficient to protect American space systems during a conventional conflict, Harrison argues that heavy reliance on satellite communications systems has created an asymmetric vulnerability for U.S. forces – in fact, one that insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan have already exploited.
For example, Defense analysis of commercial satellite links used by the military during a 16 month period of Operation Iraqi Freedom (the military is a huge consumer of commercial satellite links) identified five suspected instances of hostile jamming targeting uplink signals. All five cases involved a transmitter using a continuous wave carrier signal, meaning the radio interference was unlikely to be an accidental transmission by a friendly user. The interfering signals also had the characteristics of a jamming signal, since they varied center frequency, "what is known as a 'sweeper' signal in jamming because it creates intermittent outages across a wider piece of the spectrum," Harrison writes.
As a result, the Pentagon should create a middle-tier space segment that would deploy some passive defenses, but not to the full extent deployed now to strategic satellite systems – for example foregoing hardening against a nuclear blast/.../