Mary-Louise Hoffman
The Space Force seeks to ensure global connectivity for U.S. warfighter communications through the development of an integrated technology that could support both commercial and military satellite systems, C4ISRNET reported Wednesday.
U.S. Air Force officials proposed building a single enterprise architecture, dubbed "Fighting SATCOM," to help military users communicate even in contested, degraded or operationally-limited space environments and requested $43M in fiscal 2021 funds for the project.
Rebecca Cowen-Hirsch, senior vice president for government strategy and policy at Inmarsat Government, told the publication she thinks the service branch should allocate at least $60M to support research, development, test and evaluation of the planned architecture.
She added that the Air Force's new budget request reflects its intention to leverage commercial satcom.
The spending proposal calls for the transfer of comsatcom integration plans to the space modernization initiative under the Advanced Extremely High Frequency Program, the report noted.
Space Force will work to create a Fighting SATCOM road map to update space, network, terminal and ground infrastructure for satcom operations.
