The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security

Episode 14: Space Domain Awareness Demands New “Operational Intelligence” Requirement

Host: Scott King 

Subject Matter Expert: Sean Kirkpatrick, PhD; partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy

00:02 – 01:44 

From satellite imagery to G.P.S.-guided navigation, intelligence gathered from space has long facilitated military operations. But after space was declared a warfighting domain, intelligence agencies are now shifting their focus to supporting operations in space.  

For the United States Space Force, this shift is exemplified by the evolving mission concept known as SSA – or Space Situational Awareness – which prioritized identifying and tracking space-based objects as an operational task. However, simply identifying and tracking space-based objects is no longer sufficient, as the DOD must now leverage intelligence to understand their purpose and capabilities as well.  

As a result, SSA has evolved into what’s now known as Space Domain Awareness – or SDA – an emerging imperative that is blurring the lines between two previously distinct military responsibilities – intelligence and operations – into a whole new, integrated mission requirement of “operational intelligence.”  

Welcome to “The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security.” I’m your host Scott King and today’s guest is Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy. 

With nearly three decades of intelligence experience, Dr. Kirkpatrick served in a variety of high-profile, no-fail capacities such as Deputy Director of Intelligence at US Strategic Command; Director of National Security Strategy at the National Security Council and the Deputy Director of Intelligence for US Space Command.  

Now, he’s here to share his perspective on the emerging operational intelligence requirement for Space Domain Awareness. 

Dr. Kirkpatrick, welcome to the show! 

01:45 – 01:46 

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.  

01:47 – 01:54 

We’re happy to have you here, Sir. Now, as we get started – can you describe the historical role intelligence has played in military operations?  

01:55 – 04:39 

So intelligence is a foundational component of all military operations, right? You can’t actually really do military operations well – unless you have a good grounding of information of what’s happening in and around the environment. 

Back in tall ship days, what would be considered intelligence was sending scouts out to see where the military adversary was posting, where they were moving, how fast were they moving, an estimate of the number of people that were on the armies that were advancing. Did they have chariots? Were they with spears? Did they have bows and arrows? Where were they and how long was it going to take them to get there?  

And this is what we mean when we say all-source. It’s all sources of information. All that information is then brought together to paint a picture of the entire landscape and environment upon which a military operation is about to be planned and executed. 

Now, interestingly enough, is there’s only two all-source intelligence agencies in the intelligence community and that’s CIA and DIA. DIA was stood up by Congress specifically to service the military. CIA, their principal customer, are the policy-makers, the White House and whatnot, but they also support the military operations as well. 

As time has gone on, technology has been developed and advanced that time-frame, that latency of that information has gone down and down and down and down and down to where it’s almost real-time. That time-frame has now got to be within the decision cycle of the machines that are now doing the decision-making and as we move forward into AI-enabled autonomous systems and weapons systems, that’s just going to get worse. Just the imagery analysts alone are being overwhelmed by the amount of data that’s being collected by the space and air platforms. There’s just not enough people to put eyes on all of that data in a time-frame that is relevant to the warfighter. 

I mean, there’s certain kinds of phenomenologies one can exploit. But what that means is I’ve got to train people how to exploit that data and verify that the answer they’re getting matches reality and then take that data and scale that and that becomes a new intelligence source and method. A new burden, if you will, on the intelligence community to now sustain that. So it’s not just a one-off thing. You now are institutionalizing that.

04:40 – 04:44 

And so what role does the space domain have in enabling the intelligence community to accomplish their mission? 

04:45 – 07:37 

Intelligence and military operations through space and intelligence and military operations in space. There is a delineation there. Space-enabled services that actually project a service onto Earth, the most common example is G.P.S. So G.P.S. is a space-enabled service that provides position, navigation and timing on Earth. 

ISR from space – intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance – that enables intelligence analysts to do GEOINT – where are things? What are they? What do they look like? Are they moving? What kind of characteristics do they have? Anything you can get from image or related imagery types of phenomenologies.  

SIGINT – same thing. I have big antennas. I point them at the ground, I listen to signals. I collect those signals and I exploit those signals for a variety of different reasons. So all of those are tools that are used by the intelligence community. All of that information comes together and then they fuze it in order to come up with an all-source assessment. That’s how the intelligence community uses a lot of that overhead architecture in space. 

Now I’ve got to start doing intelligence in space. Today’s space operating environment is really a culmination of technical and geopolitical and commercial factors and these are all being driven by a need for increased access to denied areas, development of commercial business cases. So to do all of that now requires us to have domain awareness in space, not just for military applications, but for all of those other factors. 

Attribution is another big thing. A lot of resident space objects (RSO) that we see. It’s just debris. It could be natural. It could be made. But then understanding the characteristics of that. What is it? Is it man-made? And if it is man-made, now, who owns it? What’s the intent? What’s the motivation? What’s the capabilities? Those are all questions now that we need to ask about objects in space.  

So now you’re in a transition period over the last, say, decade of, ‘How do we take our tools that we’ve historically been using on the ground from space and use those tools in space?’ And how do I marry all that data together? How do I exploit it in such a way that it’s timely? Because in space, latency becomes a problem, communications become a problem. If something is happening in cislunar, and I don’t understand what it is for several hours, it’s going to be way too late to actually do something about it. 

07:38 – 07:43 

That’s an interesting point, Sir. Can you expand on how latency complicates this operational intelligence requirement? 

07:44 – 10:08 

Yeah, so latency is more than just the transit of the electrons or the photons from sensor to the ground. But it’s also the collection of the data, which can often be defined by Kepler’s laws and my access options. So if I have a sensor on one side of the Earth orbiting in MEO, and I have a target on the other side of the Earth orbiting in MEO, I have to wait till I get alignment and then once I collect, I gotta get that data down or I got to process it on board. And then once I get it down, I’ve got to have humans understand what that means, put that with other data and fuze it and how can I do that quick enough so that I can say, ‘Hey, that object, that RSO that was on the other side of the Earth, it’s just a piece of junk or it’s a microsat that somebody dropped off, or it’s an asteroid.’ Being able to understand that quickly and feed that back into decision-making is where the latency comes in and it used to be very manually intensive. 

And then how do you bring in some of these other tools like AI and ML to try and get some of this into a machine decision space and come up with probabilities and tracks and characterization and predictive analytics. And that’s where I think you’ll find a lot of commercial data analytic houses, going down this road of trying to apply all of that. And then what the government has to do, what Space Force and Command and the IC need to do is figure out how to take those tools and provide verification and validation of the data in and the answers out so that you can provide the data assurance that what the answer you’re giving has not been manipulated or is not incorrect, and marry that with any of the classified data sources because commercial is outpacing what the government is doing and they have far greater capabilities from an analytic perspective, so it would be in everyone’s best interest to try to figure out how to deal with that from an acquisition perspective than try to recreate it.

10:09 – 10:21 

Thank you, Sir, can you describe how the changing space environment required SSA – Space Situational Awareness – to evolve into the SDA – Space Domain Awareness – requirement in place today? 

10:22 – 12:14 

Historically up until we stood up, U.S. Space Command, we didn’t really call it Space Domain Awareness. We called it Space Situational Awareness, because up until then, we hadn’t declared space a warfighting domain.  

So what was needed was an understanding of Space Situational Awareness, which is a subset of SDA. SSA is just the: how do I find, fix and track things? But that was about all that was needed and necessary in order to populate the space catalogue, make sure that we knew where we were – so from a friendly force tracking and we knew where adversaries were and that was about it. 

SDA – once we stood up the Joint Command, we had to start transitioning to Joint Doctrine and making everything consistent across all of the domains and so you had air domain awareness, you had maritime domain awareness. So we started moving towards, “Well, what is Space Domain Awareness?” 

And that is larger than just the SSA because now I’m factoring into that: what exactly is that object? I need to know what kind of payloads are on it. I need to know what kind of fuel it has. I need to know who owns it, who launched it, does it have anything else on it, what’s its spectral characteristics, what’s its thermal characteristics? 

And all of that becomes the purview of the intel community to go collect on, to analyze, to exploit, marry that information with the SSA data and then all of that information builds into SDA and this becomes complicated by the fact that it’s not just militaries that are launching stuff, right? I have a vast commercial enterprise that we didn’t have a decade ago and this becomes a very complicated picture very quickly.  

12:15 – 12:39 

Thank you, Sir. And so it seems that the Space Domain Awareness mission is blurring the lines between an operational task and an intelligence requirement.  

Traditionally speaking, military services and intelligence agencies follow what’s known as the “J Code,” a structure to delineate responsibilities across the DOD.  

Can you describe what the J code is, particularly as it relates to both intelligence and operations requirements? 

12:40 – 15:08 

The number structure actually is Napoleonic and we keep it today. It’s all of our Commands, all of our services use the same codes so that you know when you’re talking about a given code – it’s the same functions no matter who you’re talking to.  

The J2 is the intelligence directorate, the J3 is the operations. Those two are intimately linked and the effectiveness of any organization is defined by how well that organization links those two codes and space is even more so and here’s why: the J3 they oversee all operations and that includes air, sea, ground. 

In the space domain, everything is done via remote access, whether it’s satellite, robotics, remote sensing, and it all comes down to data and who can exploit that data and how is it operated? How is it collected? And what purpose is it used? The three runs the space operations. The two – the intelligence component – they run all of the intelligence collection apparatus. 

So, when it was just SSA: the find, fix, track, and ID, a lot of that was handled really via the three. When you start getting into characterization or intent behind an RSO or capabilities, predictive analytics, that really all comes on to the two. If you want to have a complete picture, the two and the three, they have to work together in order to do complete tasking, collection management, data exploitation and fusion on operationally relevant time-frames.  

When we stood up Space Command, we intentionally designed the two and the three to be co-located at all times and it was critical to carry that through in order to fuze that relationship because of the intimate connection between operations and intelligence and then the flip side around of that is you can’t actually do any of those operations unless you have that intelligence. You can only execute effectively when the two and the three are connected, and connected well.

15:09 – 15:21 

And so earlier you mentioned the role of commercial technologies – and commercial companies – in facilitating operational intelligence. 

Can you elaborate on how the Space Force and the DOD can leverage commercial partners to meet the needs for Space Domain Awareness? 

15:22 – 16:42 

Commercial is I think in the next 5 to 10 years are really going to drive what we’re doing in space.  

They need to understand domain awareness as well for their own purposes and they’re not going to wait for the US government or any other government to provide any of that information to them, because, frankly, the government’s limited on what they can do, who they can share it with and how quickly it can happen. So they’re going to build their own capabilities. The tools the commercial industry is trying to get the government and the services to adopt. They’re already using for their own purposes. 

They already have an ability to generate domain awareness in very close to that ideal situation of all-source and near real-time. Now, they’re not going to go down the road, likely of things like intent and geopolitical aspects of that. 

But they will have a lot of the rest of that information already ready to go. And so, at some point it’s going to be more beneficial for us to consider getting that information from them and adding to it whatever we need from a classified perspective to form our picture, as opposed to relying on us to try to generate all of that.

16:43 – 16:58 

Thank you, Sir, and considering the opportunity for military and commercial partnerships to meet the operational intelligence requirement for SDA – what role can Elara Nova and its team of partners serve in supporting the delivery of not only new capabilities, but new operational concepts as well? 

16:59 – 18:23 

Well, I think one of the biggest things is education and advocacy. Operational intelligence is the foundation for everything we do in space and if you don’t do that first – if you don’t ensure those requirements are there and if you don’t understand the environment in which you are operating you will be at a disadvantage – if not, outright fail.  

And to make that successful the J2 and the J3 have to work together seamlessly and all the intelligence agencies that support them – seamlessly. Especially on the acquisition side. You can’t build capability if you don’t understand the underlying foundational intelligence that drives it, and you can’t operate it unless you have the domain awareness under which you’re going to operate.  

So I think advocacy and education, making sure people understand all of that. And then some of these other questions that we’ve raised, whether it’s the role of commercial in intelligence, how can we get that data exchange, and there’s also the considerations of Allies and partners. There’s considerations of foreign adversaries. What can you share? How quickly can you share it? These are all questions that I think Elara Nova and its partners can help address to ensure that that understanding is inculcated into the culture.

18:24 – 19:02 

This has been an episode of The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security. As a global consultancy and professional services firm focused on helping businesses and government agencies maximize the strategic advantages of the space domain, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in space security. 

If you liked what you heard today, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a rating. Music for this podcast was created by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio. This episode was edited and produced by Regia Multimedia Services. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge.