‘Tactical ISR’ from space requires DoD, NRO policy changes: Calvelli

WASHINGTON — The Defense Department needs to fully control use of future space-based systems being jointly developed with the Intelligence Community to gather battlefield intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), Air Force space acquisition head Frank Calvelli said Friday.

“We are clearly moving away from airborne ISR assets and moving into space. It’s the absolute right thing to do from a resiliency and sustainability perspective,” he told the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “I think if we drive tactical ISR in space to be more like national technical means the country will lose, the warfighter will lose.”

National technical means is a term of art often used for referring to US spy satellites owned and operated by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to support intelligence analysis, including verification of arms control treaties.

But that will require changes to outdated policies on both sides, Calvelli explained.

“It’s policy. … The policies about space ISR were written in the ’80s and ’90s, maybe even the ’70s, when we were trying to sort of manage a much smaller constellation of national systems,” he said. “I think the DNI [Director of National Intelligence] and DoD both need to review the policies about tactical ISR systems in space, and allow them to have the same control, same classification and same direct downlinks that tactical airborne ISR systems have today.”

Calvelli stressed that any new tactical ISR satellite networks being developed in tandem by the Space Force and NRO — such as for tracking moving targets on the ground — need direct data connections to US military platforms on the ground, at sea and in the air.

“[T]he systems that we’re building in partnership with the IC and others needs to allow for unclassified data down, direct downlink, to theater into ships and to our Army units, into our Air Force planes and units for weapons flight updates — and they need to be really, really tasked and controlled and owned by the Department of Defense,” he said. “And it’s all doable, but I think the legacy policies of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s need to be updated.”

DoD and NRO last spring finally agreed on an acquisition strategy for new satellites carrying Ground Moving Target Indicators (GMTIs or MTIs) — sensors that can track in near-real time objects of interest like PLA warships in the South China Sea or Russian tanks in Ukraine. The satellites will replace Air Force’s aging E-8 Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS), which currently provides targeting data to air-, ground- and ship-based weapons platforms, at least in part.

Space Force chief Gen. Chance Saltzman in December said the service was circulating a first draft about how that new constellation will be operated to all stakeholders, noting that there were a lot of moving parts to be worked out — particularly with the NRO.

Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt, the service’s deputy for operations, on Feb. 13 told the Air Force Association’s Warfare symposium in Colorado that while the Space Force is working with the Intelligence Community with regard to GMTI tasking and operations, Guardians will be responsible for responding to tasking needs from combatant commanders and operating the GMTI satellites accordingly.

“Guardians will work the tasking of that system with a combatant command on what they are allocated of when the capability is available, working on the Joint Staff’s allocations and priorities that are given up,” she said. “So, that will be tasked, worked with the CoComs through the service components at each of the CoComs, back to Guardians, who will fly that satellite shoulder-to-shoulder with the National Reconnaissance Office every day to provide those capabilities.”

Burt said that there “is a definite partnership” with the Intelligence Community, but that once the Joint Staff has worked out priority allocations for satellite access and a satellite is surveying a certain region, the “combatant commander has tasking authority [and] will set the priorities just as they did with JSTARs.”

That said, she stressed that “other intelligence entities [and] other combatant commands” can request certain types and/or areas of data collection.

“Let’s be clear, all the data is shared across the entire Intelligence Community and to everyone. We are not trying to constrain the data from being used by anyone. So, all the intelligence community will have access to anything collected from these platforms.”

What Burt’s comments did not make fully clear, however, is how much power the Joint Staff will have versus leaders of the IC in the up-front decisions about how satellite data access is prioritized at any one time. And that question, of course, has been the crux of the the debate about tactical ISR for the past three years.