Space Operations Command just approved the Remote Modular Terminals for initial fielding, a spokesperson told Defense News Wednesday, adding that the jammers will be in the hands of military users imminently.

The Space Force plans to field 11 systems as part of the first release, giving units a chance to use the system before it’s accepted for operations. The program has funding to build around 160, and the service expects to need as many as 200 in the coming years.

The Space Rapid Capabilities Office, a fast-moving acquisition team based at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, is the lead for the RMT program. Space RCO Director Kelly Hammett told reporters last week the small, modular terminals are designed to block adversary communications from satellites that are surveilling U.S. and allies, particularly in the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.

“We want to be able to disrupt their comms and their kill chains and their targeting links,” Hammett said during a Dec. 11 media briefing at the Spacepower Conference in Orlando, Fla. “That’s what these systems are intended to do: to block reception going either from, say, sensors that are that are looking at our joint forces and reporting up to a satellite and back to a battle management node, or vice versa.”

The U.S. is particularly concerned about surveillance satellites China has launched in recent years. The remote systems, called Yaogan, provide continuous, uninterrupted coverage of the Indo-Pacific theater to identify gaps in U.S. and allied forces. The latest version, Yaogan-41, launched to geostationary orbit late last year and can track car-sized objects, according to a January 2024 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The RMT jammers will essentially “yell in their ear” so the radars can’t command other systems to attack U.S. assets, according to Hammett.

Hammett declined to say where the first systems will be fielded, but said the initial locations have been identified. Speaking this fall at a separate Space Industry Days conference in Los Angeles, Hammett said operators will be able to control the systems from locations in the U.S. even as they’re deployed around the world.

The Space RCO awarded contracts for the program just 18 months ago, working with a small, Virginia-based company called Northstrat. The firm partnered with a larger company, CACI, to leverage mostly off-the-shelf technology to build the terminals.

The terminals themselves are small, Hammett said, and cost roughly $1.5 million each.

“As far as space electronic warfare goes, you can’t get much better than that,” he said.

Officials staged the two-week experiment last month in the Baltic Sea, which has become something of a microscope of global tensions. NATO, Russian and Chinese vessels routinely criss-cross the shallow body of water, as vital communications cables and energy pipelines lie on the seabed.

The German sea service explicitly envisions an anti-submarine warfare role for the BlueWhale vehicle, made by Israel Aerospace Industries. Equipped with various cameras as well as active and passive sensors, the drone can spot submarines, surface vessels and sea mines — notably, without emitting signals of its own that would alert targets that they are being tracked, according to the Germany Navy.

“This a capability currently only available via manned submarines, which makes it significant for maritime surveillance,” officials wrote in a statement posted on the Navy’s website.

The BlueWhale drones fall into the category of large unmanned underwater vehicles, weighing in at 5.5 tons, with a length of almost 11 meters and a diameter of over 1 meter.

German naval-systems specialist Atlas Elektronik participated in the recent test, which service leaders consider a stepping stone towards their “Marine 2035+” strategy. The plan envisions accelerating the development of unmanned technology and quickly integrating new drones into the sea service’s command-and-control schemes.

Asked about the approach to integrating a non-NATO system into German and alliance naval operations networks, Dror Bar, vice president of IAI and CEO of subsidiary ELTA Systems, told Defense News there were existing interfaces to fall back on during the drill.

Those were developed in cooperation with Atlas last year for two NATO exercises hosted by Portugal, the Robotic Experimentation and Prototyping augmented by Maritime Unmanned Systems (REPMUS) and the Dynamic Messenger events, Bar said.

Interest by NATO nations in underwater and surface drones as complements to manned naval warfare has increased significantly in recent years. Officials envision them as unattended sensors for repelling enemy warships or monitoring the health of critical infrastructure on the sea floor.

Instead, we are wasting the talents of America’s world-class tech sector and, in doing so, putting our country and allies at risk.

That’s because we have an ecosystem without a marketplace. The Department of Defense won’t buy commercial capability at scale from Silicon Valley. The result is fighting with one arm behind our back.

What’s at the root of the problem? Warfighting and deterrence capabilities are typically hardware-enabled and software-defined, but the Pentagon treats those attributes as though they evolve at the same pace.

This paradigm does not work in today’s geopolitical reality where wars are fought both on and off the battlefield. It actively harms our warfighters and disincentivizes the U.S. tech industry from joining the defense industrial base.

It’s time for a sea change. America and its allies must signal in unambiguous terms that we are committed to purchasing technology based on clear and concise requirements without prescriptive solutions. We must enact flexible policies that allow for consistent upgrading of new capabilities based on need and scale.

Where do we begin?

First, by adopting the recommendations of multiple congressional commissions and think tank task force studies, such as streamlining security reviews and accreditation of software use across multiple U.S. federal agencies.

Next, we need to be able to export older-generation technology to partners and allies with protections against exploitation by our adversaries. The U.S. government should partner with defense tech companies to assess vulnerabilities of existing systems and provide mechanisms to safeguard legacy technologies.

Finally, we need a clear mandate to a specific leader within the government to ensure ownership and accountability of this problem. If everyone owns the solution, nobody owns the solution. The new administration should clearly empower a specific existing organization such as the Defense Innovation Unit or a DoD under secretary to take ownership and report progress on the effort.

Incentivizing a competitive marketplace that promotes U.S. national security interests ensures that we maintain a competitive advantage against those who do not share our core values. By beginning with the above steps, we do exactly that.

The result is an agile and lethal force that can decisively defend the free world.

Ellen Lord is a former Pentagon acquisition executive and a commissioner on the Atlantic Council’s Commission for Software-Defined Warfare. Tyler Sweatt is the CEO of software company Second Front Systems and an industry commissioner on the same panel.

The Terrestrial Layer System-Brigade Combat Team Manpack, or TLS BCT, is being fielded to the service’s three “Transformation in Contact” brigades. The Army selected the brigades to receive new commercial equipment, expert training and a series of experiments while preparing for operational deployments.

But soldiers shouldn’t worry — every brigade will receive the TLS BCT.

“The system is going to be deployed to every brigade combat unit in the Army,” said Ken Strayer, program manager for Electronic Warfare and Cyber in an Army release.

Officials intend to field the TLS BCT Manpack to up to two brigade combat teams a month over the next three years, according to the release.

TLS BCT is a configurable radio system that can survey radio frequencies, collect signals, perform direction-finding operations, detect electromagnetic attacks and visualize electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) data.

The Army awarded a nearly $100 million contract to Mastodon Design, a CACI subsidiary, to build, field and train soldiers on the system in July, according to an Army release.

Brig. Gen. Ed Barker, head of Program Executive Office-Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors, laid out some ways in which commanders might use electronic warfare equipment on a panel at the annual Association of Old Crows Annual Symposium in National Harbor, Maryland, on Thursday.

“To help that commander see what they look like within the [electromagnetic spectrum],” Barker said. “What do they need to control?”

Barker also discussed the suite of electronic warfare capabilities in his PEO portfolio, including the recently fielded TLS BCT and the future TLS Echelons Above Brigade, or TLS EAB, under development.

The systems will allow soldiers to conduct both signals intelligence and electronic detection and attack in one package.

“It’s providing them the ability to understand and affect in the [electromagnetic spectrum] environment,” Barker said.

In an Army release, Col. Leslie Gorman, Army Capability Manager — Electronic Warfare director, described the TLS BCT as a smaller and lighter version of a similar device first used by Army special operations forces.

The three “Transformation in Contact” brigades now putting TLS BCT through its paces are the 2nd Light Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii; the 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York; and the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

Traditionally, the military often withdraws units from operations to field, test and implement new equipment and tactics. The “Transformation in Contact” approach seeks to continuously improve equipment fielding and adoption as the modern battlefield rapidly transforms.

The 101st Brigade conducted their rotation at the Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort Johnson, in late August. In October, the Hawaii brigade did its Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center at home.

The 10th Mountain brigade is slated for an overseas rotation next year in which its members will use the TLS BCT.

Two of the brigades already have the gear, according to the release, with the third to receive it soon. Officials did not specify which brigades had the equipment.

All three will provide feedback from experiences “in the box” at the combat training center rotations and on real-world deployments back to the developers. That feedback is expected to help improve the equipment as the service upgrades it and fields new versions continually across the Army.

Kelly Hammett, who leads the Space Rapid Capabilities Office, told reporters Wednesday the service is concerned that its current antenna network wouldn’t pass muster during a conflict. The system, which is dispersed around the world, provides critical launch support, satellite tracking and control, and emergency assistance for spacecraft.

Those concerns are driving an urgency to field the first new antenna through the Space RCO’s Satellite Communications Augmentation Resource program as fast as possible and secure funding more systems in the fiscal 2025 budget.

“If we get into a conflict in space, we will need additional augmentation to command and control our assets,” Hammett said during a briefing at the Space Force Association’s Spacepower Conference here. “There’s been a pretty big push to fund more than just article one.”

The first units will be deployed in Indo-Pacific Command.

Hammett noted that the purchase of additional antennas is at the top of the Space Force’s fiscal 2025 unfunded priority list — a compilation of projects that didn’t make it into the service’s budget request.

The Defense Department and other federal agencies rely on the Satellite Control Network for operations support, and demand for the capability has grown significantly in recent years. For the last decade, utilization rates have surpassed the industry standard, according to a 2023 Government Accountability Office report.

That strain on the system has limited its availability, with government auditors warning it could compromise missions in the future.

The goal of the Satellite Communications Augmentation Resource (SCAR) program is to replace the aging network with new phased-array antennas built by BlueHalo. The systems, dubbed Badger, provide multi-beam, multi-orbit mission operations and are designed to make it easier to track and manage satellites. They can also be easily transported around the world.

Space RCO awarded the company $1.4 billion in 2022 to deliver 12 units by the early 2030s. In September, BlueHalo announced it would expand its supply chain and manufacturing investments to support SCAR, with a goal of reducing both risk and cost. That increased production capacity is enabled through a new integrated testing capability that lets the program complete large-scale testing on faster timelines.

Hammett said the team has used this new automated testing process to rapidly qualify the antennas and is working to finalize the design of the first unit.

Once operational, SCAR will increase satellite communications capacity by ten-fold for spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit, the Space Force estimates.

“I think it is absolutely inevitable,” Isaacman said at the Space Force Association’s Spacepower Conference in Orlando, Florida. “If Americans are in low Earth orbit, there’s going to need to be people watching out for them for all the reasons we described before.”

Isaacman, a tech billionaire who has traveled to space twice on commercial missions, said exploration and economic ambitions will drive more commercial and civil activity in space in the coming years — from space mining to NASA discovery missions. While some of that work will be done by robotic probes or remote operators, some of it will also require human input, he said.

Isaacman is CEO of Shift4 Payments, a payment processing company based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In 2012, he co-founded Draken International — a firm that trains pilots on its own fleet of privately owned military fighter jets. He links his interest in space to his own background as a jet pilot.

In 2021, he self-funded a mission to space aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, the first-ever spaceflight crewed only by civilians. In September, he took his second trip to space as part of a SpaceX program called Polaris. During that mission, he and three crewmates performed the first commercial spacewalk.

Isaacman is not the first to suggest that the military may one day have troops in space. The former second in command at U.S. Space Command, retired Lt. Gen. John Shaw, said in 2020 that the Defense Department would one day send guardians to operate command centers or perform other missions in the domain.

Other military officials have suggested it could be several decades before Space Force personnel deploy to orbit.

Isaacman didn’t offer a timeline for his prediction but suggested that a military presence in space could coincide with future NASA moon and Mars missions.

“This is the trajectory that humankind is going to follow,” Isaacman said. “America is going to lead it and we’re going to need guardians there on the high ground looking out for us.”

Soldiers from the U.K.’s 16th Regiment Royal Artillery, which specializes in providing air defense for ground troops, used the laser mounted on a Wolfhound armored personnel carrier to destroy drones at a variety of distances and speeds, the MoD said in a statement on Wednesday.

The ubiquity of drones over the battlefield in Ukraine, where infantry typically operates under a constant buzz of multiple UAVs overhead, has Western armies racing to find countermeasures. The U.S. Army in September tested laser-equipped Stryker combat vehicles to destroy drones, while France deployed a vehicle-mounted prototype anti-drone laser during the Paris Olympic Games.

“This is still an emerging technology, but the world has changed and we are seeing more use of drones in the battlespace,” said Stephen Waller, directed-energy weapons team leader at the MoD’s Defence Equipment & Support organization, or DE&S. “This requires a more cost-effective solution to protect our troops.”

Ukrainian troops are using thousands of drones every week, including first-person view drones that can cost as little as a few hundred dollars apiece but can be lethal when packed with explosives, while small commercial quadcopters costing a few thousand dollars are used for scouting and adjusting artillery.

The “virtually limitless” ammo supply of laser weapons could make them more cost-efficient than some alternatives, the MoD said. This year’s Eurosatory defense show in Paris featured counter-UAS measures ranging from cannons with airburst munitions to net-firing drones, rockets packed with metal balls, jammers and spoofers.

The British Army’s experimental laser weapon uses advanced sensors and tracking systems to maintain lock on target, according to the MoD, which has said the setup is fully portable and easy to operate. As part of its Land Laser Directed Energy Weapon Demonstrator program the ministry in July tested the laser on enemy drones at distances of more than 1 kilometer at its testing range in Porton Down.

“Having the capability to track and eliminate moving drones will give U.K. troops a better operational advantage and these successful trials have demonstrated that we are well on our way to achieving this,” Waller said.

The MoD will now assess the steps needed to develop laser weapons for future frontline use by the British Army, the ministry statement said.

The 16th Regiment Royal Artillery tested the laser, developed in cooperation between the Ministry of Defence and an industry consortium led by Raytheon UK, at Radnor Range in central Wales. The weapon is being developed under a £16.8 million (US$21.4 million) contract from the British government.

In the live test, the soldiers destroyed dozens of quadcopter drones within the constraints of the Radnor range, the MoD told Defense News, without providing details. Radnor, situated in a steep valley, features a 5-kilometer-long testing range for 40mm cannons and aerial countermeasures.

Every engagement using the laser weapon removed a drone from the sky, and what was notable was “how quick a drone can be taken out,” Warrant Officer Matthew Anderson, trials manager for the Army’s mounted close combat trials and development group, said in the statement.

The U.K. is working on other laser weapons, and earlier this year fired the DragonFire laser weapon against aerial targets for the first time. That weapon is being developed within a £100 million program with industry partners MBDA, Leonardo and QinetiQ, and the ministry said the technologies employed between the two weapon systems differ.

Firing the DragonFire laser typically costs less than £10 a shot, with both the Army and the Royal Navy considering the technology for future air defense, according to the MoD.

The service on Dec. 4 activated United States Space Forces Japan as its sixth service component. The organization will provide personnel and space expertise to U.S. Space Forces Indo-Pacific. Brig. Gen. Anthony Mastalir, who leads the Space Force’s command in the region, said the establishment of the new component comes as Japan’s Ministry of Defense is prioritizing space in its national defense strategy — pledging to spend billions to improve on-orbit capabilities.

“To the extent that we’re able to shape and inform those investments in a way that makes working and fighting alongside allies more interoperable and more effective, I wanted to have an organization that could contribute to that solution,” he told reporters Tuesday at the Space Force Association Conference in Orlando, Fla.

The U.S. and Japan have been forging closer ties over the last year, with the Defense Department announcing in July it would elevate its command in Japan to a three-star billet that allows its leader to plan large operations with the country. And last month, the U.S. and Australia agreed to a more robust slate of exercises and trainings with Japan beginning with next year’s Talisman Sabre in Queensland.

Japan’s space endeavors include investments in space domain awareness — a top priority for the U.S. Space Force. In 2020, Japan agreed to host U.S. space domain awareness payloads on two satellites in the Quasi-Zenith Satellite System constellation, essentially its version of GPS. Those satellites will launch in 2025 and 2026.

Mastalir said the Space Force is also interested in Japan’s development of a deep-space radar and a standalone space domain awareness satellite slated to launch in the next few years.

“Having more space domain awareness capability, especially from a close ally like Japan, is only going to be helpful,” he said.

Since 2019, the Space Force has established service components to U.S. Space Command, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, U.S. Central Command as well as U.S. European and Africa commands.

For the last two years, the service has been conducting mission analyses of its operations at those components to forge a plan for how it will flow forces to combatant commands.

Mastalir said the document, known as a programming plan, is complete and awaiting final approval from Space Force leadership.

“Essentially this is a blueprint for how Space Force service components will contribute to combat and commands as we stand up other components around the globe,” he said.

Both companies were awarded $80 million prototyping contracts for the Advanced Electronic Warfare effort, or ADVEW, last year, following an initial competition. A final decision for production is expected in 2026.

The Boeing jet’s current jamming-and-sensing systems are piecemeal. The ADVEW endeavor aims to simplify components and incorporate a government-defined open architecture for easier fixes and upgrades. The plug-and-play approach is thought to reduce downtimes as well as overall costs.

“What this really does is it combines electronic attack and support measures into one integrated system,” Jen Lewis, president for advanced combat systems at L3Harris, said in an interview at the Association of Old Crows conference in Maryland. “Today, the F-18 struggles because it’s got a federated system. This takes everything and puts it together, so that the reaction time is much quicker, so that our warfighters are getting the information they need.”

Aircraft must navigate environments packed with radars, missiles and other threats. Penetrating — or zipping past, with the aid of electronic manipulation — is critical.

The Navy, alongside other U.S. military services, is pouring money into electronic warfare amid preparations for potential war with Russia and China. Both world powers have built up anti-access and area-denial arsenals meant to keep at bay attackers and restrict battlefield movement. The issue was less pronounced in the Greater Middle East.

Bryan Rosselli, president of advanced products and solutions at RTX business Raytheon, in a statement said the prototyping paves the way for “the next generation” of electronic warfare. The Navy last year identified non-kinetic effects, or attacks that may not be visible to the naked eye but wreak havoc on networks and other digital equipment, as a decider of future conflicts.

“We are completely replacing and consolidating the legacy systems into a one-box solution that will deliver a generational refresh to the electronic warfare capability for the lifetime of the Super Hornet,” Rosselli said.

RTX and L3Harris are among the world’s 10 largest contractors when ranked by defense-related revenue, according to the Defense News Top 100 study. The former earned $39.6 billion in 2022. The latter earned $13.9 billion.

While Moscow’s war machine dwarfs its neighbor, with more manpower and built-up materiel at its disposal, Kyiv has for nearly two years withstood bombardment in both the physical and digital worlds.

Maj. Gen. Borys Kremenetskyi, the defense attaché with the Embassy of Ukraine in the U.S., on Dec. 13 credited his besieged country’s endurance to an “asymmetric approach” that confronts volume and brute force with scrappiness and creativity. Hobbyist toys including first-person-view drones have been transformed into anti-armor and personnel weapons, and cellphones have become tools for detection of missiles and other overhead attacks.

“Innovation? It’s one of our advantages and our tools,” Kremenetskyi said at the Association of Old Crows conference south of Washington. “We in Ukraine do not have thousands of artillery tubes, thousands of cruise missiles.”

The U.S. and its European allies have sought to swing the balance in Ukraine’s favor, injecting billions of dollars of weapons, ammunition, combat vehicles and training into the fight. Norway on Wednesday promised to donate more National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems, or NASAMS, worth approximately $31 million.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, has committed Abrams tanks and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, among other high-profile and expensive technologies. Specialty unmanned aerial vehicles and jammers have also been earmarked for shipping overseas. The former has become emblematic of the Russia-Ukraine war as both sides try to spot, target and attack from relative safety.

What’s working for Ukraine is to combine this new-age weaponry with innovation and a thorough understanding of past continental conflicts, Kremenetskyi said.

“This is a type of World War I, World War II, full-scale artillery warfare — plus UAVs, unmanned surface vehicles, electronic warfare, cyber and all the domains we have now,” he said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this week visited Washington, meeting with Pentagon officials and defense contractors in an effort to unlock additional support, namely air defenses.

Continued assistance is snagged in Congress as lawmakers debate a $61 billion supplemental package. Though Ukraine aid still enjoys majority bipartisan support in both the House and Senate, a handful of Republicans who previously voted to gird Kyiv are skeptical of appropriating additional sums of money.

“The main lesson I have from his speech is: We are going to fight,” Kremenetskyi said of Zelenskyy’s stateside address. “We do not have another plan, rather than fight. With whatever capabilities we have now, with whatever capabilities we can be provided by our partners, we are going to fight.”

Defense News reporter Bryant Harris contributed to this article.