US Army leans toward superstars after ‘flexing’ in Ukraine – Ars Technica

The head of the US Space Command, an Army general named James H. Dickinson, said on Wednesday that megastars like SpaceX’s Starlink network played an important role in Ukraine’s efforts to deter a Russian invasion.

“We are seeing for the first time what megaplanets mean to the world,” Dickinson said. “This provides such flexibility and redundancy in terms of maintaining satellite communications in this instance. This is powerful, and the department is moving in that direction.”

Dickinson made his remarks In the Aspen Security Forum. As commander of Space Command, Dickinson is responsible for the command and control of all US military forces in outer space. He said Starlink facilitated communications between Ukraine’s armed forces and that other commercial companies provided basic surveillance services through means such as synthetic-aperture radar, which can monitor at night and through clouds.

Risk distributed

In addition, Dickinson said that by having a constellation of distributed satellites, it was more difficult for Russia to take countermeasures.

“Having a huge system, quite frankly, frustrates our adversaries,” he said, “because you don’t know how many satellites you would need for any kind of deterioration of that architecture to occur, or which one if you had to pick one you would have to, you know, have a bearing against.”

Last October, the deputy director of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Konstantin Vorontsov, said that the use of Western commercial satellites by Ukraine constituted a “very dangerous trend.” While Vorontsov did not specifically mention any satellites, he was almost certainly referring to SpaceX’s Starlink constellation of satellites, which Ukrainian soldiers have used for communications and to track the movements of Russian troops and tanks.

Vorontsov said that the use of civilian satellites for war purposes essentially made them military targets. Dickinson was asked how Space Command would respond to an attack on a commercial American satellite by an alien adversary. Basically, he was chasing the question.

He replied, “I have a mission area that protects and defends, and this is widely known, the assets in orbit.” “But to be honest with you, these things would have to be directed at me, you know, by my boss, and my boss’s boss, if that eventually happens.”

By the time US Space Command was re-established in 2019, Dickinson said the organization was tracking about 25,000 objects in space — active and non-existent satellites, as well as old rocket stages, debris, and more. He said that number is now close to 50,000. Part of this is due to the growing number of satellites, but a large reason has been due to activities such as Russia’s anti-satellite test in 2021.

balance

Dickinson said some of that growth is due to new things being identified and tracked by commercial service providers. At present, he said, Space Command works with 133 commercial space companies, which perform various functions from satellite communications to awareness of the space domain. He said that these partnerships have proven effective in enhancing the capabilities of the US Department of Defense.

But does this increased reliance on commercial corporations — which have their own priorities and sometimes mercurial leadership — not also threaten Space Command’s ability to do its job? What if a company decides it no longer wants its products to be used as part of the military’s combat capabilities?

“It’s a balance,” Dickinson said. “In other words, we won’t all be commercial. We may not all be military. But when we look at our mission areas within US Space Command and the Department of Defense, there’s a balance between what’s purely military and what can be relied upon as a service.”

He said that the US military already relies heavily on commercial services in other areas, such as at sea, for freight, and in the air, such as the use of commercial aircraft for some phases of troop deployment. However, he acknowledged that space is a relatively new field, and the extent to which the military will depend on commercial services to perform its duties is still being worked out.