The United States needs to recognize that space is no longer a benign environment, and should take more steps to protect its critical infrastructure, one of the Pentagon’s leading space experts said Friday.
“We have put together an architecture which accomplishes missions very efficiently, but it will not have the capability to protect itself and be resilient in the face of threat,” said Winston Beauchamp, the deputy undersecretary of the Air Force for space.
“The secret is out that the American way of life, as well as the way of conducting warfare depends very heavily on space capabilities for global reach, command and control, precision timing and navigation, and folks have figured that out,” Beauchamp said, speaking at a breakfast hosted by the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. “Potential adversaries of ours have invested heavily in capabilities to either neutralize or take a way” the U.S. advantage in space.
“We have been in this area for some time where we treated space as an enabler of function as opposed to a warfighting domain,” he continued. “And so we find ourselves now looking at something that we have largely taken for granted for several decades… We need to figure out what we need to do to adjust, to treat it just like we do every other domain.”
That includes building redundancy into space systems, hardening them against attacks, streamlining clear lines of command in the event of an emergency, and increasing communication and cooperation between the Pentagon and private sector, Beauchamp said.
“That will be the work of years, but a good chunk of it will be on firm footing before the end of this administration,” he said.
But Beauchamp – who also serves as the staff director for Deborah Lee James in her role as the Principal Defense Department Space Advisor – said one of the parts that needs the most work is the ground-based control systems the Air Force uses to control satellites and other space assets.
“If you ask me what single part of our architecture keeps me up at night, it’s the ground,” Beauchamp said. “Everyone always talks about the parts that are in space. That’s the sexy part of the space enterprise. But by far the most vulnerable are the things that are right here on the terra firma.”
Space experts have long warned that cyber-attacks are a huge threat to space operations, since they could disrupt or block the computers the military uses to control and communicate with satellites.
Beauchamp also added that the U.S. has “way too many separate ground control systems.” Each satellite system was developed independently, leading to “separate stovepiped” ground control systems that don’t always work well together.
“It leads to this patchwork quilt on the ground,” he said, adding that the U.S. needs to try to better unify the technology and processes it uses to fly satellites.
This past week, attention turned to North Korea after evidence arose that the reclusive nation might be preparing to launch a rocket into orbit.
The Defense Department, Beauchamp said, is skeptical that the launch has altruistic intentions.
“The work that you would do to develop a space launch program could certainly aid the development of ICBM capabilities,” he said. “I think there is a consensus, at least in the West, that the North Korean program is at best dual-use and at worse entirely cover for an offensive capability.”
