May 19, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

Huge Deficit = Defense Budget Cuts? Maybe Not

The congressional calendar and strategic inertia may come together to keep the defense budget relatively high. The calendar helps because the fiscal 2021 defense budget will likely be passed while Congress is in a free-spending mood.

The current Washington consensus sees deep defense budget cuts in the face of soaring deficits driven by the emergency legislation to stabilize the American economy as it reels from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It may be wrong. The congressional calendar and strategic inertia may come together to keep the defense budget relatively high. The calendar helps because the fiscal 2021 defense budget will likely be passed while Congress is in a free-spending mood. The next administration — Republican or Democratic — will develop budgets beyond that, but the constraints of long-standing strategy will prevent major changes to force structure and acquisition that would drive deep budget cuts.

The Challenge

The conventional narrative holds that the defense budget will be squeezed as the debt level rises, and the public focuses inward on rebuilding the country's health and economic position. These are reasonable concerns.

The deficit in fiscal 2020, initially projected to be about one trillion dollars ― itself getting into record territory without emergency spending― is now projected to be $3.7 trillion, and Congress is not finished spending. Debt held by the public will rise to 101 percent of GDP, a level not seen since World War II. Even if the world is willing to take US debt, rising interest payments will squeeze the rest of the budget.

Simultaneously, the electorate is likely to focus inward. The pandemic is already the leading popular concern, not surprisingly. The economic devastation caused by restrictions on normal commercial activities has produced the greatest downturn since the Great Depression.

It would be reasonable to put these factors together and project a substantially reduced defense budget. However, the congressional calendar and the inertia of a long-held strategy will likely mitigate any downturn.

The Calendar

The calendar will help because Congress is likely to pass the 2021 appropriation this fall, when the government will still be operating under emergency conditions. Congress has already passed four bills for pandemic response and economic stimulus and is developing another in the multi-trillion range. There are a few voices for fiscal constraint, but they are overwhelmed by a sentiment to “do more.”

Indeed, some lawmakers and commentators are proposing increases to the defense budget to stimulate the economy, enhance deterrence of China, or protect the defense industrial base. Adam Smith, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has indicated his reluctance to do more than protect the industrial base, but a future stimulus bill could include such enhancements as part of a bipartisan deal.

Finally, last year's bipartisan budget agreement set levels for defense and domestic spending in fiscal 2021. Undoing that agreement would be a major lift, requiring a bipartisan consensus that does not seem to be occurring. Even if the Democratic left wanted to make such cuts, defense hawks in the House and Senate could block them.

Thus, in the near-term proposals for enhancements seem to be offsetting thoughts about cuts. As both the House and Senate consider their authorization acts, they seem to be aiming at roughly the level of the president's proposal and the bipartisan budget agreement.

Strategic Inertia

The United States has had some variation of the same national security strategy since the end of the Second World War (or perhaps more accurately, since the Korean War and publication of NSC 68, which enshrined a long term competition with the Soviet Union). That strategy involves global engagement, forward-deployed forces, alliances to offset global competitors, and commitment to maintaining an international system of free trade, human rights and secure borders. Scholars can argue about the details and how well the United States has implemented such a strategy, but the major elements have been constant.

President Trump has chafed at many of these elements but has generally gone along, however reluctantly. One would expect such reluctant continuity in a second Trump administration, should that occur

One would also expect strategic continuity in a Biden administration. Biden was, after all, vice president during the Obama administration, which, after the shocks of 2014, laid out a strategy of confronting five threats: Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and terrorism. One would expect Biden to implement something like that strategy if he were in office. That does not mean that a Biden administration would do everything a Trump administration would do. The left-wing of the Democratic party would push some level of cuts, perhaps 5 percent, and take aim particularly at nuclear modernization, foreign arms sales, and Middle East conflicts.

But this longstanding strategy of global engagement will put a floor on defense cuts. Remaining engaged with NATO, supporting our Asian allies like Japan and South Korea, and maintaining some presence in the Middle East, even if scaled back, takes a lot of forces. These need to be at a relatively high level of readiness to deploy globally and be credible. The all-volunteer force needs to maintain compensation and benefits at a sufficient level to compete for labor in a market economy. Competing with China and Russia requires investment in a wide variety of high technology―and costly―new systems, as well as the R&D foundation to support these innovations.

Other strategies are certainly possible. Members of the Democratic left and Republican right, as well as some elements of the academic and think tank community, have proposed strategies of “restraint”, whereby the United States would significantly scale back overseas engagements. Such strategic change would produce a substantial cut in the defense budget. However, neither major candidate has supported such a change, and the national security policy community (aka “the blob”) is adamantly opposed.

Despite this relatively optimistic assessment, the future is still cloudy. The president's budget proposal forecasts a level budget in constant dollars. That meant that the defense buildup was over, even if Republicans continued in office. Such budgets do not come close to the 3 to 5 percent real growth that defense officials had talked about to implement the National Defense strategy and would entail choices between readiness, force structure and modernization.

A Democratic administration, with a notional 5 percent cut in the defense budget, would not constitute the deep cut that a Sanders or Warren administration might have entailed, but the $35 billion that a 5 percent cut would entail is still a lot of money. Forces would get smaller, likely wiping out all the recent force expansion, and new programs would be delayed.

Bottom line: Defense may not be heading into a budget hurricane, but it is not heading into sunlight either. It faces the friction that occurs when expensive plans collide with constrained resources.

Mark Cancian, a member of the Breaking Defense Board of Contributors, was a Marine colonel and senior official at the Office of Management and Budget before he joined CSIS.

https://breakingdefense.com/2020/05/huge-deficit-defense-budget-cuts-maybe-not/

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October 21, 2020 | International, C4ISR

Are software-defined ground stations the next big leap? Kratos is betting on it.
Nathan Strout WASHINGTON — Software-defined payloads have revolutionized how industry and the government approach satellites. So why not software-defined ground stations? That's the question Kratos is asking. On Oct. 20, the longtime Pentagon contractor with experience building satellite support systems unveiled its new OpenSpace platform — a family of virtual products that applies the software-defined approach to the ground station. OpenSpace uses an open standards, cloud-based system that can be continuously adjusted to mission needs without having to install new hardware. Pentagon officials often complain that the nation's current satellite ground architecture is stymied by stovepiped, custom-built proprietary ground systems. The department has said it plans to move to an enterprise ground system, but it's not there yet. Kratos hopes that OpenSpace can at least be part of the solution. 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That means that the system you launch is the system you've got, regardless of whether your mission needs change or you want to do something new with your orbital tech. The Defense Department is investing in capabilities that could eventually allow physical access to operational satellites via robotic space vehicles, but that's still in development. All that is just to say, when the military builds a satellite, it builds it with the expectation that the space-bound payload will be largely static over the lifetime of the spacecraft. In other words, it will do the mission it was meant to do, and not much else. “When you look at the ground today, it's the one area where we're really stuck back in 2G-type technology,” said Phil Carrai, president of Kratos' Space, Training and Cyber division. “Systems are stovepiped. They're static. They're built with custom hardware. They have software-specific technologies that are dedicated to specific satellites. And that's really making them unable to play in the coming new world.” Building a new, custom ground system for each new satellite or constellation is not only costly, but it limits flexibility. The satellite-specific nature of existing ground systems makes it difficult to build third-party applications that can easily be installed across systems. Moreover, it limits the ability of operators to simultaneously connect to multiple constellations using the same ground system. However, industry has created a workaround. Satellites may not be physically inaccessible, but they frequently communicate with operators over radio frequency signals. If a given payload's functions are largely virtualized — meaning they are software-defined and not hardware-defined — then operators can alter a given satellite's capabilities and mission by simply installing new software. Hence, the growing interest in building software-defined payloads. 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According to Kratos, its OpenSpace platform is the first dynamic, software-defined ground system that will apply those lessons learned from the space layer to the ground layer. “What we did with OpenSpace is we actually started from scratch with an entirely new platform that is based on the fundamentals of network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN),” said Greg Quiggle, vice president of product management at Kratos, comparing the platform to the architecture underlying new 5G networks. “We took that same basic premise and we applied it to the way a ground system should be built to interconnect software-defined satellites, multi-constellation networks and a terrestrial network.” A key feature that enables OpenSpace is the digitization of the radio frequency signal as close to the antenna as possible, transforming that flow of data into what is effectively a large ethernet network. “Once you've done that — you move from [radio frequency] to digital — you now can process those subchannels, that bandwidth, in software through something called virtualized network functions,” Quiggle explained. The platform takes typical purpose-built ground station hardware — splitters, channelizers, matrix switches, modulators, demodulators and much more — and recreates them in a virtual environment. Once the radio frequency data is digitized, it can be processed through all of these virtual tools. One consequence of that is the software can be run anywhere — it does not have to be located at the antenna. Operators can run this solution in the cloud or in a classified data center, said Quiggle. That also means any ground station using OpenSpace can be quickly adjusted for different uses. For instance, take an operator who needs to interact with satellites. By using an OpenSource-enabled ground station, that individual can load his or her own software-defined solution into the system, connect with the satellite, download any data and cue the spacecraft for its next tasks. Once that satellite passes out of view, a second operator can take over the ground station, load an entirely different software-defined solution and interact with the satellite as it passes over. In this scenario, both users were able to use a single ground station to communicate with their own unique satellites. In another example, the first user is ready to use one ground station to interact with a satellite as it passes overhead, but inclement weather disrupts the process. Instead of waiting for the satellite to pass overhead again, the user simply needs to find the next available ground station on the satellite's course, virtually load software and then access the satellite from there. Military applications OpenSpace is clearly set to have commercial implications. In fact, Microsoft announced Oct. 20 that it will use OpenSpace as part of its Azure Orbital ground-station-as-a-service. Azure Orbital is Microsoft's answer to Amazon Web Services' Ground Station model, which allows customers to access their satellites by renting time on Amazon's ground stations and the AWS platform. It's a business model that could be attractive to small companies looking to field small satellites without building massive, cost-prohibitive ground systems to support them. But a product like OpenSpace could make an even bigger splash in the military space community, especially when it comes to satellite communications. In a statement released earlier this year, the Space Force laid out its concept of “fighting SATCOM.” The service envisions enabling war fighters to roam among satellite communications providers to ensure forces remain connected even if one provider is jammed or unavailable. 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