Commercial Industry: It Is Your Move

Intelligence experts are asking commercial companies that supply remote space-sensing capabilities to reduce latency and present more than just siloed solutions, among other things.

The U.S. military, the intelligence community (IC), as well as our allies and partners—such as Ukraine and Israel—are depending upon remote space-sensing capabilities at levels not seen before.

Even the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines is recognizing the wide geopolitical impacts commercial space-based solutions are having, which is leading her Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the ODNI, to partner in novel ways, she said.

“There are other changes that have made our need to partner in new and different ways far more acute,” Haines stated. “There is no question that certain industries now yield substantial geopolitical influence, and as the threat landscape is diversified and power has become more diffused, so has the potential impact of the private sector's work. This makes it crucial that we better understand developments in the private sector, as well as the overall balance of competitive strength and security within key sectors. Over and over again, we see how decisions made in the private sector have significant impact on national security matters of interest, intentionally or otherwise.”

The commercial industry's ability to provide remote space-based sensing, especially in the Ukraine conflict, has provided valuable shareability among coalition partners, a means to refute Russia’s false claims and the ability to influence public narratives, said Kari Bingen, director, Aerospace Security Project and senior fellow, International Security Program, Center for Strategic & International Studies.

“The purpose of intelligence is to reduce uncertainty for decision-makers,” she noted. “What I think about with Ukraine, what commercial imagery is able to do is share [data] with our Ukrainian partners and our allies in a shareable [defense against Russia]. It is hard to deny that something is happening if the evidence is right before your face.”

What David Gauthier, chief of strategy for GXO Inc., sees the remote sensing industry getting right is its move beyond supplying raw data to now providing derived information products. Gauthier is a former National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency official and as director of the Commercial and Business Operations Group, was instrumental in pioneering policy changes at the agency that allowed commercial sources to be primary sources of intelligence.

“What I've seen going well lately is the capability for the commercial industry to deliver derived information products to the edge and help the warfighter make those decisions in a timely fashion,” Gauthier noted.

Some of the best products, he said, are those that provide continuous monitoring of military activity and offer an understanding of changes in behaviors. “That can be accomplished now with combined virtual constellations of imaging systems and RF [radio frequency] collectors,” he shared. “That's gone well.”

Problems remain, however, such as with the latency of commercial solutions, Gauthier continued.

“What I'll say has not gone well is almost the other side of the coin for commercial remote sensing—it is still not timely enough,” Gauthier opined. “We need to get faster. We need the latency down, the constellations should [be] faster, the optical communication links faster. We're close, but we're not fast enough.”

Moreover, commercial solutions are still siloed, said Ricky Freeman, president of Amazon Kuiper Government Business and a former Marine. Amazon’s Kuiper project is an “ambitious launching” of 3,236 low-Earth-orbit satellites in a constellation to further global broadband access.

“We [have] commercial solutions for resilience and commercial solutions for security . . . but they are, in my mind, siloed and sequential and serial in nature,” Freeman stated. “They have not captured the underlying needs of the network."

Lastly, Bingen pointed out that while the United States is pursuing mostly communications-related satellites, the People’s Republic of China is rapidly progressing its space-based sensing abilities.

“Over the last few years, 90% of the satellites launched by the United States were communication satellites, whereas more than 50% of what China has launched in the last few years are ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] satellites,” she said. “What really worries me is that while we are seeking to connect the world, China is taking a state surveillance model that's really been perfected on land and bringing it into space.”

The experts spoke today at the Intelligence and National Security Summit, an annual IC conference organized by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance and AFCEA International.