The new office is being set up in the coming weeks and is expected to help direct future procurements of commercial services. In the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018, Congress also ordered the Defense Information Systems Agency to transfer the responsibility for buying commercial bandwidth to the Air Force Space Command. Congress inserted funds for WGS 11 and 12 in the fiscal year 2018 defense budget and directed the Air Force to submit a plan for how it plans to provide wideband communications in the future. “Personally, the last wideband system I want to build is WGS-11 and -12,” Becht said. Unless vendors are willing to do that, the likely alternative will be the status quo: Leased bandwidth and additional purchases of WGS satellites.
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“We would be looking for a consortium view on how to supply DoD more commercial capability,” he said. The Air Force is aware of the array of satcom services that are available, “but we don’t want to have each company come up and say, ‘We can do this for a couple of hundred million dollars,’” he said.īecht suggested companies should team up and offer services as a group. Another objection to buying managed services is that DoD wants flexibility to buy from many vendors and does not want to have to commit to a single provider. One reason DoD is not sold on this idea is that commercial satellite services are typically not compatible with most of the terminals, antennas and modems that the military owns. Industry satcom providers have offered the Air Force different options for “managed services,” where the government would sign up for satellite connectivity like consumers buy internet and cable from Comcast or Verizon. DoD currently relies on the military Wideband Global Satcom constellation and leases satellite capacity from commercial vendors to supplement WGS. 7 at the 2018 Global MilSatcom conference, Becht said the Air Force has to figure out how to fill a projected gap in satellite communications capacity in the coming decade. “In the not too distant future, in the next couple of years, we are going to have to make a decision,” said Tom Becht, interim director of the military satellite communications directorate at the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center.
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Air Force has for years been trying to answer the question: How should the Defense Department acquire space-based communications and ensure it can meet future demands?Ī study the Air Force completed this summer, the Wideband Communications Services Analysis of Alternatives, didn’t provide clear-cut answers but suggested DoD needs a mix of military-owned satellites and commercial services.