26 août 2024 | International, Aérospatial
The company's CEO, Tony Frazier, said the firm now serves mostly defense customer in the U.S. and abroad.
22 août 2023 | International, Terrestre
The Netherlands will send Ukraine a thousand chargers for remote demining, Dutch Defence Minister Kajsa Ollongren said on a visit to Kyiv.
12 mars 2020 | International, Aérospatial
Space Force will ask for 2022 money for commercial satcom, but the funds will not be for buying services as industry would like -- rather for R&D. By THERESA HITCHENS SATELLITE 2020: The Space Force is drafting a new Transformative Acquisition Strategy for buying commercial satellite communications capacity, Clare Grason, the chief of the service's Commercial Satellite Communications Office (CSCO), told a panel here today. The new strategy is bouncing off of the new “Vision for Satellite Communications” signed Jan. 23 by Space Command head, and Space Force chief, Gen. Jay Raymond. It's designed to enable the creation of seamless web of communications capabilities to warfighters, even during conflict. David Myers, president of Peraton's Communications sector, told me in an interview that CSCO will likely replace it's current program, known as the Future Commercial SATCOM Acquisition Program, “with something unique to Space Command that better suits this mission of interoperability between between commercial and government.” Indeed, Peraton on March 3 announced they had been granted a $218.6 million contract to provide commercial satellite communications services for Africa Command (AFRICOM). According to the company's March 3 announcement, the “single award, blanket purchase agreement” is a first of its kind, whereby the company “will provide communications services leveraging satellites and emerging technologies from across multiple satellite fleet operators.” At the same time, Grason told me afterwards, the office is in the process of putting together a funding request for 2022 for a newish, congressionally-mandated program of record to buy commercial satcom directly from operators — although she did not reveal the sum. “We are POMing against the commercial satcom program of record,” she said. “We're going through that process right now.” Congress created the independent program element for commercial satcom within the DoD budget in the 2019, putting $49.5 million into the pot. It added $5 million to the program in 2020, although DoD did not ask for funding. There is no money in the 2021 budget request, Grason explained, although she is working on an unfunded requirements request that might be able to fill that gap. The program of record, however, will not be used — at least in the near term — to provide satellite communications services to military users in a manner similar to how terrestrial telecom providers like AT&T sell you a data plan for your phone, as a number of commercial satcom operators have been advocating. Instead, those congressionally appropriated funds would be used “for research and development purposes, to assess capabilities that are emerging,” Grason told me. Once proven, new capabilities might be fed back into the operational program. “Or we could do isolated projects in cooperation with others,” she said. “There's a lot of flexibility and potential for the arrangement.” CSCO is leery of crossing the working capital and congressionally appropriated funding streams, Grason explained. “It's key when it comes down to the program of record that those activities are outside of the scope of our core ... transactions,” she told me. “There are legalities there.” Currently, the CSCO buys commercial satellite bandwidth using a DoD working capital fund — a kind of revolving fund that works a bit like a checking account. CSCO negotiates one-on-one contracts between a satcom provider and a military customer, Grayson said. At any one time, she told the Satellite 2020 audience, the office is negotiating about 30 different deals. “Our office is responsible for connecting a customer to the marketplace,” she explained. Under that system, DoD essentially leases commercial bandwidth for short periods of time — an acquisition model that has been widely disparaged by commercial satcom operators. Indeed, Congress in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) shifted Grason's office from its original home within the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to Air Force Space Command. That, of course, has now been subsumed by the new Space Force. The goal of the new acquisition strategy, Grason said, is to streamline that process via a kind of bundling of current contracts with providers. “We do have a Transformative Acquisition Strategy under development now, that will evolve how we acquire and deliver commercial satcom on an aggregated basis through a smaller number of contracts,” she said, that will “centralize procurement with industry.” CSCO will then turn around and sign so-called ‘service letter agreements' with military customers that, in effect, make them subscribers to commercial services. “So in essence we'd become like a Direct TV with different cable plans,” she told me, and would managing the relationship between the user and the providers. “It's a challenging objective, but we believe the benefit lies in the fact that we're aggregating buying power, we won't have duplication, we'll have [broad] coverage, and the ability to shift resources without having to set up new contracts.” A first draft of which is due at the end of the year, she said. DoD currently contracts for satcom bandwidth with a number of providers, such as Peraton and Intelsat, which has been vocal in pushing the Pentagon to move to a ‘satellite-as-a-service' model. “There's going to be a very significant change required in the mindset,” Rebecca Cowen-Hirsch, senior vice president for government strategy and policy at Inmarsat Government, told the panel. But the bulk of DoD's satcom services and bandwidth comes via the Enhanced Mobile Satellite Services (EMMS) program, for which Iridium Communications was awarded a $738.5 million, seven-year, fixed-price contract in December 2019. The US military is heavily reliant on commercial satcom, given the fact that military comsat networks, such as the Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellites built by Lockheed Martin and the Wideband Global SATCOM satellites built by Boeing, have limited bandwidth to go around. In fact, Grason told me, access to milsatcom bandwidth is granted via a “prioritization scheme that customers generally speaking are highly dissatisfied with.” That said, she admitted that military users of CSCO's services are naturally a bit skeptical about a new approach.They want to know “how are you going to ensure that the capabilities that we're getting today are not degraded?” she said. “The linchpin is that the customer will pay for the capability in the form of a service level agreement with us.” Myer said one model DoD might want to think about is “buying a pool of capacity that gives them portability to move capacity around.” This would it to leverage buying power, he said. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/03/dod-drafts-new-acquisition-strategy-for-commercial-satcom
23 avril 2020 | International, C4ISR
Sen. Jim Inhofe, Sen. Jack Reed, Rep. Adam Smith, Rep. Mac Thornberry Right now, the coronavirus is rightly our country's most immediate concern. But the Federal Communications Commission has used the crisis, under the cover of darkness, to approve a long-stalled application by Ligado Networks — a proposal that threatens to undermine our global positioning system (GPS) capabilities, and with it, our national security. The FCC granted Ligado (formerly known as LightSquared) permission to repurpose spectrum adjacent to GPS frequencies for a terrestrial cellular network — framing this proposal as essential to “winning the race to 5G.” But what Ligado has done is conflate two different and important spectrum issues: the sharing of mid-band 5G spectrum by the Department of Defense and commercial industry, and harmful interference of Ligado's signal with the low-band GPS signals used in nearly every aspect of daily life. The result: some members of Congress, members of the administration, and the public are now confused about the real and immediate impacts of Ligado's proposal. So, we wanted to clarify things: domestic 5G development is critical to our economic competiveness against China and for our national security. The Pentagon is committed working with government and industry to share mid-band spectrum where and when it makes sense to ensure rapid roll-out of 5G. [Editor's note: C4ISRNET first broke the news that the FCC would move forward with Ligado's request on April 10.] The problem here is that Ligado's planned usage is not in the prime mid-band spectrum being considered for 5G — and it will have a significant risk of interference with GPS reception, according to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The signals interference Ligado's plan would create could cost taxpayers and consumers billions of dollars and require the replacement of current GPS equipment just as we are trying to get our economy back on its feet quickly — and the FCC has just allowed this to happen. Think of all the ways Americans use GPS each and every day. GPS satellites provide free precise timing and navigation that powers thousands of functions: making financial transactions at our banks, keeping the lights on in our homes, traveling around the country — the list goes on and on. Studies show GPS satellites contribute at least $1 billion to our economy every single day. GPS also forms the backbone of countless military operations and applications — to get supplies to our war fighters on the battlefield, guide unmanned aircraft and vehicles, target its precision weapons, and much more. It would be practically impossible to identify and repair or replace all of the potentially adversely affected receivers. It would “needlessly imperil [Department of Defense] GPS-dependent national security capabilities,” per Secretary Esper, putting the war fighter, U.S. Space Force, military readiness, and even the defense of our homeland at risk. American families and businesses would lose coverage or be forced to use systems from our strategic competitors, China and Russia, jeopardizing our global leadership in precision timing. We're not the only ones with serious concerns. Nine federal departments and agencies have completed extensive engineering tests and analyses on Ligado's proposal; and the results are clear: Ligado's plan would interfere with millions of GPS receivers across the nation. The Departments of Defense, Commerce, Interior, Justice, Homeland Security, Energy, and Transportation — as well as NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Coast Guard and the Federal Aviation Administration — all strongly object to Ligado's plan. What kind of precedent is the FCC setting by disregarding near unanimous opposition of federal agencies to this proposal? It's not just the government, either — industry leaders representing GPS, satellite communications services, automotive companies, commercial aviation, and weather data have also voiced concerns over Ligado's proposal. We would expect that the FCC listen not just to Ligado's privately funded research, but also broad-based, in-depth research from experts in national security and other fields. This makes it all the more confusing — why is the FCC ignoring all the evidence, especially now, at the height of a global crisis? The Ligado application highlights the need to use a technical, data-driven approach to balance the use of the spectrum between war fighter requirements and commercial needs, rather than strong-arming a proposal through the process like the FCC just did. We can expect this issue to be an ongoing national security challenge. If we want to strike a responsible balance moving forward, the U.S. government must modernize the infrastructure needed to manage and share spectrum efficiently, promote policy and technology innovation, and improve the ability of military systems to operate alongside commercial systems. Considering the risks, it's clear the FCC commissioners made the wrong decision regarding Ligado's plan, which will set a disastrous precedent while impeding ongoing work on spectrum sharing. The vulnerabilities to our national and economic security are not worth the risk, particularly for a band of spectrum that isn't necessary to secure a robust 5G network. We encourage the FCC to withdraw its approval of Ligado's application and take this opportunity to work with the NTIA and other federal agencies, including the Departments of Defense and Transportation, to find a solution that will both support commercial broadband expansion and protect national security assets. Moreover, we expect the FCC to resolve Department of Defense concerns before moving forward, as required by law. If they do not, and unless President Trump intervenes to stop this from moving forward, it will be up to Congress to clean up this mess. Senator Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., is the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., is the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., is the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, is the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee. https://www.c4isrnet.com/breaking-news/2020/04/22/fcc-and-ligado-are-undermining-gps-and-with-it-our-economy-and-national-security/