NATO Ankara Summit Creates a Call-to-Action for Defense Industrial Base

The Elara Edge

Host: Scott King 

SME: General (Ret) James “Scorch Hecker, Senior Principal Advisor at Elara Nova (JH) 

Brigadier General (Ret) Chad Radeuge, President of the Cyber, Data & Communications sector at Elara Nova (CR) 

Tom Goffus, Executive Partner for Global Security (TG) 

Brad Head, Executive Partner for Global Growth (BH) 

00:02 – 01:46 

Heads of State and Government from 32 nations will gather at this month’s NATO Summit in Ankara, Turkey, looking to accelerate progress toward the goals agreed to at The Hague Summit last year.The Hauge Summit Declaration pledged to strengthen collective defense by committing member nations to spend 5% of annual GDP on defense by 2035, while deepening transatlantic defense industrial cooperation and reaffirming the alliance’s support for Ukraine.  

But now, several factors are also heightening the stakes of the Ankara Summit: Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, recent conflicts in the Middle East and “NATO 3.0,” or the increased pressure on allies to take on greater defense investment and burden-sharing responsibilities. In response to these factors, there is growing momentum as NATO nations increasingly invest in their defense capabilities, which also presents a call-to-action for the defense industrial base to respond in kind. 

Welcome to The Elara Edge! Today we’ll be looking ahead to the NATO Summit in Ankara and the context and conversations that member nations and the defense industrial base should be paying attention to – both at the summit and in the weeks and months to follow. 

We have four guests today, each with a unique and qualified experience that reflects both the complexity of the challenge NATO faces, as well as the opportunities the alliance has to meet its growing demands. 

Our first guest is retired General James “Scorch” Hecker, a Senior Principal Advisor at Elara Nova. Scorch recently retired after a 36-year military career with the United States Air Force, culminating in roles as Commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe, U.S. Air Forces Africa and Allied Air Command at NATO.  

Sir, welcome to the show! 

01:47 – 01:58 

(JH): Well, it’s great to be here. I really appreciate the opportunity, Scott, to address this very important topic. I think it’s going to be a pretty memorable summit that we have, so I’m looking forward to the outcomes. 

01:59 – 02:19 

(SK): We’re glad to have you. 

Returning to the show is retired Brigadier General Chad Raduege, President of Elara Nova’s Cyber, Data and Communications sector. General Raduege previously served as the Director of the Command, Control, Communications and Computers Cyber Directorate, as well as the Chief Information officer at Headquarters, U.S. European Command. 

Sir, welcome back to the show.  

02:20 – 02:22 

(CR): Scott, great to be here. Thank you.  

02:23 – 02:38 

(SK): Our third guest today is Tom Goffus, Executive Partner for Global Security at Elara Nova. He is the former Assistant Secretary General for Operations at NATO, and previously served as the Policy Director for the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services.  

Tom, thanks for joining us. 

02:39 – 02:52 

(TG): Thanks, Scott.  

02:52 – 03:12 

(SK): And also returning to the show as a familiar voice for our audience, and that’s Brad Head, Executive Partner for Global Growth at Elara Nova. A retired Colonel with the U.S. Air Force, Brad has previously served as the Chief of Defense Planning at the U.S. Mission to NATO and later served as the director of International Affairs at Space Operations Command. 

Brad, welcome back to the show.

03:13 – 03:15 

(BH): Thanks. It’s great to be here. Looking forward to this conversation.  

03:16 – 03:39 

(SK): So let’s jump right in. We’re here to discuss some of the expectations, challenges and the broader environment surrounding this year’s NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, which will be held on July 7th and 8th, or shortly after we release this podcast. 

Now, Tom you just recently left NATO, from your post as Assistant Secretary General for Operations, so as the guest with the most recent experience at the alliance, I’d like to turn it over to you for some opening remarks.  

03:40 – 09:21 

(TG): Okay. Thanks, Scott. Let me just start with the framing from a NATO perspective. What I think most allies would tell you is that they see a more aggressive Russia, a more unpredictable America, and a more challenging China. And those are the dynamics driving allies to make decisions and take action. 

I should say first that the overall objective of the NATO summit is not to have a major blow up, not to have a fiasco. But overall, this year’s summit, if I summed it up in one word, would be ‘Implementation.’ The three big rocks at the NATO summit in Ankara, will be one: defense spending pledge implementation, two defense industrial production and innovation expansion. And number three, NATO 3.0 execution, also known as burden-shifting by another name. 

So, first: defense spending implementation. The 5% pledge is broken down into two parts, 3.5% on core defense requirements think planes, tanks, ships, and 1.5% on defense-related requirements such as critical infrastructure, defense industrial base and resilience. 

The 3.5% is very precisely defined, while the 1.5% is broad by design. That 3.5% aligns with the capability targets assigned to each ally as part of the NATO Defense Planning Process. And that process works as such: you ID the threats, that drives the building of operational plans, which in turn drives capability targets that are needed to execute those plans. 

The last targets were assigned and agreed in 2025. The next ones won’t be out until 2029. So I expect for 2029, several big new areas. For example, I expect space, autonomous systems, drones that is, and Arctic-specific capabilities. Those are just three areas that we expect to see new capability targets defined in.  

So back to spending for the summit. You can expect positive announcements. Poland and the Baltic nations could be at 5% as early as this year. Germany is shooting for 3.5% by 2029. Sweden is looking at 3.5% by 2030, and the other hard chargers that I expect will hit the line before 2035 are the Nordics and the Netherlands. 

Second, on defense production capacity and innovation: in order to actually translate money into capability, we have to have defense production capacity. And what has been clear is that increased defense spending without increased defense production capacity won’t result in more capabilities. It’ll result in more expensive capabilities. 

As the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine sharply underscore, our defense industrial base is currently not structured to produce what we need at the volume and pace required. And this key dynamic is why NATO has announced that the Defense Industry Forum that is connected with the summit in Ankara will be expanded into the largest industrial event in NATO’s history. At Ankara commensurately, I think NATO is expected to officially launch its front door for industry and that’s a single portal where contractors can upload their potential innovative solutions. Those solutions are then routed to the appropriate NATO point of contact, aimed at connecting industry directly with the alliance procurement needs at speed.  

And a third one – on the 18th of June, Secretary Hegseth brought this up with the allies – and it was called “NATO 3.0.” And what it means is that Europe and Canada will have capability gaps that they need and want to close alongside the money to do so. 

Now, here’s where I would offer a word of caution about rhetoric versus reality. The framing coming out of Washington is that America is forcing a reluctant Europe to finally carry its own weight. That is the political rhetoric. The data tells us a bit more of an interesting story. The Secretary General at that same defense ministerial said that European allies in Canada put in over $90 billion more into defense in 2025 than in 2024. That’s roughly a 20% single year increase. So the step up is not a future ask that the allies are resisting. It’s a present fact that they are already delivering on at a pace that has no precedent in the alliance’s history. 

Now, I want to be very clear that I’m not making a political argument here. I am making a market argument. Strip away the rhetoric and look at where the money, the capability gaps and the durable demand actually sit.  

So if America is generally stepping back from its conventional role in Europe, then Europe and Canada own the gaps and they also own the budget to close them. So your takeaway is Europe defense spending is rising faster than at any point since the founding of the alliance. And that demand is going to be met substantially through industrial production. So I’m going to stop there and conclude. Just a quick summary.  

First, avoid a fiasco. Make the event short and sweet. Second, allies are dealing with a more aggressive Russia, a more unpredictable America, and a more challenging China. And third, three big implementation rocks: defense spending, defense production and innovation and NATO 3.0. That is my framing for the Ankara Summit, and we’re hoping for a successful outcome there. Thanks, Scott. 

09:22 – 10:46 

(JH): Great opening there. Really appreciate you outlining the three big rocks and I think it’s important you mentioned some of the burdens-shifting. Getting an extra $90 billion over just a one year period is very important. But we need to make sure that we spend that money wisely in what I used to call an “integration by design,” and I’ll just use integrated air and missile defense as an example.  

 In the past, each country would buy their individual system. So we ended up having some systems, but unfortunately they didn’t talk to one another and that doesn’t work. So we got to make sure that there’s a force inside of NATO that can take this money, group it together, and buy a system for all of NATO that is interoperable amongst one another.  

Another thing that you talked about was shifting the money, the 5% and those kind of things. In some areas, that’s going very well. Let’s talk F-35. By 2032, we should have around 700 of them in NATO. What people don’t realize is of those 700, only 54 are going to be U.S. So that’s a good positive shift that we’re seeing.  

Now areas where we’re not seeing such a good shift is areas like tankers, AWACS, E-7 Wedgetaill, ISR platforms. So those are areas where we need to improve if we’re going to make this shift happen. So I’ll just pause there.

10:47 – 11:37 

(BH): One nuance that I would add. So I happened to be at the U.S. Mission and NATO in the run up to the Whales Summit, when the first investment pledge was agreed. And that pledge said that allies that were above 2% should stay above 2%, and allies that were below 2% should aim to move towards 2% within a decade, which was not particularly aggressive and hard to hold people to politically. 

And what we see in the updated investment pledge at The Hague Summit and what they expect to see at Ankara are investment plans. The nations are supposed to come with specific plans that show how they’re going to get to 5% by 2035.  

The other nuance in that investment pledge, the kind of why of the investment pledge was in order to fill their capability targets. But the whole point of it was to buy the types of stuff that we collectively need to meet our collective level of ambition, so we’ll unpack that in a little bit.  

11:38 – 12:18 

(TG): And I think really good point on the F-35, Scorch as well.  

The other thing that I emphasized before I left NATO, and this is more in Chad’s lane, and he’ll probably cover some of this later, but that’s a lot of data. A four ship of F-35s in an hour generally will produce four terabytes of data. If you can’t take that data and move it, process it and share it, then that’s a good chunk of your investment that’s on the cutting room floor. 

And so that’s going to be a big challenge is how to move big amounts of data, what gets processed at the edge and what gets pushed around the alliance. But I thought that was a perfect example of the shift in burden-sharing that is ongoing in Europe right now.  

12:19 – 12:41 

(CR): Tom, great point on the data-sharing. And what I would offer is the challenge for the alliance really is having an architecture in place that as you set up these things like a front door for industry to come in, that you don’t just buy a whole bunch of tools, but that you have an architecture that supports interoperability. If you don’t have that, then you’re not going to be able to communicate anyway. It’s a waste of money.

12:42 – 12:55 

(SK): Now, given the three priorities Tom laid out for us: there’s going to be a lot of different capabilities that NATO will be looking for moving forward.  

General Hecker, Sir, what do you see as the main capability gaps that NATO will have to address? 

12:56 – 15:28 

(JH): Yeah. Thanks, Scott. I think one of the ones that really stands out to me, that I struggled with a lot when I was the AIRCOM commander, was air defense  because ever since the Cold War ended, NATO has really kind of taken a knee when it came to investment in air defense. 

We would buy some things, but not near enough. And as an example of that, what we do when we kind of are putting together our air defense plan is we will take a look at what we call the Critical Asset List, and we would determine things that needed to be protected. These would be like airfields, oil production facilities, headquarter buildings, munition storage areas. 

And then there’s also another thing called the DAL, which is what you’re going to actually defend – the Defended Asset List. Well, there was a huge mismatch there. There was a lot more assets that we needed to protect than we actually could protect. 

And then you add the fact that the systems that we had weren’t always interoperable and then the third thing that really made the problem worse was when the Ukraine Russian war started, you had the introduction of these one-way attack vehicles. When I first showed up there, the war was just started about three months, and there would be a couple a day.

When I left, it was up to around a thousand a day from each country going against each other. And then the most recent attack that we just saw from Ukraine, they had basically a thousand of these things in one day, and the production capability has really increased in the country. So that compounds the problem that we have when it comes to defending these assets. 

 And the other thing that we need to think about is how are we going to sense these things? Because a lot of these are at low altitude. So a traditional radar on the ground doesn’t work as well. You know, once you get 10 or 15 miles away, they’re hiding at 500ft just because of the curvature of the Earth.  

So we need to make sure we can detect these things. And there’s capabilities that came out of Ukraine where they can do this with acoustics, which is basically putting up a microphone. And they got somewhere around 20,000 of these in their country now, and then they just take the acoustics that are coming from the noise that is emitted from the UAVs, and then they triangulate and they get a pretty good fixed position, and then they have mobile firing teams that can move out and shoot these things down. And they’re doing it in a cheap way, you know, with Triple-A and EW and things like this, that we just don’t have that capability near to what we need it to be in NATO.

15:29 – 16:24 

(TG): So on that Scorch, just curious, you’ve been watching both what’s been going on in Middle East and what’s been going on in Ukraine. Like you said, the threat is much more complex than we ever thought about before. I mean, in Epic Fury, you had two Iranian F-5s and they were just on Iran state TV. The pilots that got in and bombed a base in Kuwait. And to your point about curvature of the Earth, they were flying under power lines when they were doing that.

One of the things that I took away from both Israel and Ukraine is they don’t really do point defense, they do layered defense, thinning the herd, if you will. 

 And Ukraine, like you said, they don’t have all of their sensors around one particular city or one. It’s 20,000 of these things all the way across the country. So for me, one of the things is if you’re going to sit in your one point defense and hope that that’s going to save everything, that’s not how air defense works in the modern battlefield. But having said all that, what do you think, Scorch? What else strikes you that we should be taking away from the Middle East and or Ukraine?

16:25 – 17:30 

(JH): You know, number one is you can’t kill a threat unless you know it’s there. So we need the sensors, whether that’s acoustics, space-based, or radar on the ground or an E-7 Wedgetail up in the air, we need to be able to sense it in order to shoot it. 

And then we need the shooters. The ones that we have are pretty much exquisite ones that cost a lot of money. And we can’t be trading $3 million PAC-3 missiles for a $30,000 drone.  

Ukraine has figured out ways to shoot these things down at relatively cheap and now industry is definitely getting it. But we need to accelerate that to make sure that we’re prepared if something should happen, and then we need to make sure we have the command and control that connects all these things, so that the sensor detects the target, it gets to the shooter, and then the shooter shoots and we don’t want to waste missiles on it.  

So we got to make sure that the right shooter with the right probability of kill shoots that. And then we need operators that are trained to do it. And we need logistics to make sure that they get resupplied. So it’s not an easy problem, but it’s something that’s right in front of us and we just can’t look away from it.

17:31 – 17:45 

(SK): And taking that integrated air and missile defense example, you just spoke to a number of variables within that mission area alone. 

So as NATO looks to better field its integrated air and missile defense system, how does the alliance go about prioritizing which element goes first? 

17:46 – 19:10 

(JH): Yeah. Overall, when I look at the lessons learned from Ukraine and Russia war, the number one thing that stands out is neither side was able to get air superiority. 

So what we saw over the last three years is trench warfare, several casualties, bombings of civilian infrastructure and nothing that we want to be a part of. And if you contrast that with what Israel and the U.S. did against Iran, they were able to establish air superiority fairly quickly by doing counter anti-access aerial denial. So they were able to take those double digit surface-to-air missiles out and take other radar sensors that they had in Iran. And we could basically fly with immunity over Iran and take out high value targets, etc..  

What we weren’t able to do is take out all of their one-way attack vehicles. That’s just going to be a fact that we’re not going to be able to do that in the future, because they produce these things underground, they can set these things up anywhere, and it’s going to be difficult to get all of them. So that’s why we need to make sure that we invest in defensive capabilities for the few that actually get through. And we can’t do this for a long duration using expensive, exquisite shooters. We need to get way cheaper shooters to make that happen.

19:11 – 19:45 

(BH): And if I could add one nuance, Scott, to the way that you framed that question, I think a way a lot of people think about NATO. NATO is a collection of 32 nations that pool their resources to respond to a collective defense. NATO as NATO doesn’t actually own and operate most things.  

So one of the things that NATO can and should do is to provide that overarching framework that would allow countries to invest their resources in a coherent way so that those capabilities [that] come together, are interoperable and additive, and not that there’s gaps and seams. And that’s something I think we’ll talk about here in a minute, particularly as it relates to the space domain and the investments that are being made there.

19:46 – 19:50 

And as it relates to the space domain, what does interoperability look like for NATO? 

19:51 – 23:07 

(BH): Yeah, I think a couple things. One, NATO declared space an operational domain in 2019, but they’re continuing to struggle with defining what does that mean in practice?  

And so we see a lot of activity, but not necessarily the most coherent. For example, there are programs like the Allied Persistent Surveillance from Space, which is looking down like overhead imagery. 3SAS is focused on looking up. There’s a launch capability, there’s a SATCOM capability, there’s a group of nations that are getting together around these various mission areas and working on something.  

But there isn’t an overarching framework that is coherently driving those investments. Like I talked about. It’s not NATO as NATO investing in things. It’s individual nations investing in things. 

And when you get into something like space, which is very expensive and very complicated, that is ripe for these kind of multinational programs or even at the NATO level. Not that it would be a common funded, but the individual nations would be contributing to something. So there’s not a lack of programs, but there is a lack of coherent investment thesis. 

And so I think a couple of things that need to happen over the next period of time are in the NATO Defense Planning Process. In the last cycle, there was nothing for space, specifically. We need to get to a point very quickly that we are articulating those capability targets, which are the things that tell nations. Here’s what you need to go invest in.  

And I look at the Space Force. General Saltzman at the Space Symposium, rolled out the Objective Force baseline, clearly articulating by mission area, by geography. And there’s a classified annex that goes into more detail where we think we need to have those coherent investments.  

So that’s something even the US Space Force is still working on. So it makes sense that NATO would be struggling with that. But again, I think we need to get the right pieces in place, the right capabilities in place. 

And here a dynamic that we see a place is the commercial strategy. So there’s a team over there in the defense investment world that has created a NATO Commercial Space Strategy, which is largely in line with the U.S. strategy. But there’s an acknowledgment that in the same way the U.S. talks about e’ploit what you have, buy what you can and build only what you absolutely must,’ because it will cost billions of dollars and take decades to build capabilities and we have real operational challenges today.   

I think we’ve got commercial providers that are chomping at the bit to provide that. And so as this increase investment comes from the Hague Investment Pledge, and we have individual nations saying, “Hey, I’ve got X many millions of euros that I need to go spend and I’ve got to spend some of that on space, but I don’t have the first idea what is worth investing in.” NATO could help provide that framework so that we are investing those dollars in a coherent way to field real no kidding capabilities.  

And I think the last bit of that is the command relationships. And so once you get those pieces and parts together, NATO and Scorch can talk to this better than literally anybody because he owned that as the AIRCOM commander. He also owned the space function.  

There isn’t really a coherent way to command and control space capabilities that flows back through the U.S. under Operation Olympic Defender. We’ve got Space Force Space out at Vandenberg, which is the operational headquarters that actually deliver space effects on behalf of the U.S. And we coordinate with other nations under the Olympic Defender umbrella. But NATO as NATO does not really have much of an ability to command and control a space fight right now. 

23:08 – 23:45 

(JH): Yeah, Brad, information sharing when it comes to space is so important. The problem is a lot of nations, including ours, don’t share the information with the other countries, or in my case, the commander who is out there. So if I didn’t know what the capabilities were, it’s kind of hard to command and control it.  

So we were starting to tackle that and we released some things from the U.S. that previously we hadn’t released to NATO countries before, and I think that started the ball going, but I think we still got a long ways to go when it comes to information sharing, particularly when we talk about space. 

23:46 – 24:40 

(BH): Absolutely. I remember I went to the space ops commanders conference two years ago when you were still in that position and you said, “Hey, if I don’t know it exists, I can’t ask for it. So if you just want to whisper to I think it was Johnny Stringer. If you just want to tell one guy, tell Johnny, and he’ll be the keeper of all the information. You don’t even have to disclose how you would do stuff.”  

And then I understand. In the last year they actually put out a survey to try and get nations to in a more formal way to provide that input. And I think that that’s still a gap in the knowledge that’s missing. 

I know certainly from a U.S. perspective, that’s something that they’re interested in. And I think from a NATO perspective, the same thing: this idea of like, ‘Hey, what do nations have? What are they in the process of buying? And what would they be willing to do? From a trade-off perspective, would they be willing to invest in this capability as opposed to that capability, if they understood that in the aggregate everything was going to get taken care of? 

And I think that’s still something that we’re struggling with both from a NATO perspective and a U.S. bilateral with all the different nations’ perspectives. 

24:41 – 25:14 

(TG): Yeah, and I’ll just throw in on that. There’s an old policy from 2019 that misses the whole space revolution that basically says, “A couple of us big allies will take care of space for you – don’t worry about it.” But allies are moving out right now with or without capability targets.  

The Bulgarians have two nanosats doing Black Sea overwatch. They have their own satellite manufacturing company there in Bulgaria. So nations are going to move out one way or another in the next three years before those capability targets are there. And we do really need NATO to structure this so that we do it in a logical and effective way. 

25:15 – 25:45 

(SK): And on Brad’s point of NATO facing real operational challenges faced today in the space domain. We have a telling example from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when one hour prior to the invasion, Russia deployed a cyber attack on a commercial satellite that Ukraine was depending on for their command and control. 

So here is an example of a country that was leveraging a commercial space service, which was then disabled in the context of a pending invasion. So to tie it back to the coming Ankara Summit, what conversation needs to happen today to make sure that NATO, or a NATO nation, doesn’t find themselves in a similar position? 

25:46 – 26:59 

(BH): If I was going to kind of reinterpret that question, I would kind of frame it in the terms of: Can we rely on commercial? If I have my own sovereign national system, I can protect that, and I know it’ll be there in the time of need. A commercial provider, whether it’s they say, “Hey, we’re not comfortable with you using that in a certain way, or they’re vulnerable to things that I’m not responsible for or able to defend them from those sorts of attacks.” 

It does present vulnerabilities. That is a challenge that has been acknowledged, and we’re actively working through that. But I do know that commercial providers in space are doing things that 5 to 10 years ago were the exclusive remit of a handful of nation states. 

And nowadays, if you’ve got a commercial provider who’s going to do on-orbit servicing and refueling, that is the equivalent of what is considered orbital warfare. If I can get up close enough to your satellite to touch it, fix it, refuel it, I can break it and take it where it doesn’t want to go. 

And so now we’ve got commercial providers doing everything up to and including that. It is unrealistic to think that we’re not going to rely on commercial, but there are challenges and risks, and we’ve got to ensure that we’ve got those systems available to us in a time of need. 

So that part of that is the agreements that we put in place. And part of that is, frankly, the agreements between those commercial providers and the government to go, “Hey, to the extent that you rely on these things, then there’s an obligation to protect those assets.”

26:60 – 27:14 

(SK): Thank you, Brad. And so NATO also has their political guidance window coming up in 2027. 

What opportunity does that present the alliance as far as taking a meaningful step towards ensuring NATO has space capabilities available to them at that future time of need? 

27:15 – 28:23 

(BH): This is a critical moment in time, right? So we mentioned the fact that in the last cycle, there wasn’t a demand signal from the political level of NATO to force the system to produce these capability targets that brought coherence to the space domain. 

The 2027 political guidance. If you look at the way the NATO Defense Planning Process operates, the guidance gets signed out that says, here’s what I want you to go do. Here is the level of ambition. Do these two big kind of conflicts, these 5 or 6 smaller conflicts, different geographies, different domains that results in what’s called the minimum capability requirement. 

So the guidance articulates that. And then there’s operational plans. And out of that we come up with here’s how much stuff we need. If there isn’t guidance in this cycle that says you will go develop some space capability targets, and we’ll figure out how we apportion those and how we hold people accountable to those and their kind of effects-based, not specifically platform-based. 

Then you’re going to miss the window of time. And if you miss this window of time, your next window is 2031, which won’t produce capability targets till like 2032-33 timeframe. So NATO has got to figure out in this next round of political guidance, a coherent approach to creating that demand signal for space, which includes the commercial stuff that we’re just talking about. 

28:24 – 28:49 

(SK): Now, moving this conversation forward once more, having 32 nations provide different systems and platforms to the alliance comes with an inherent integration problem that General Hecker referenced earlier. 

And going back to the F-35 example, there’s expected to be over 700 coming available to NATO through its member nations that will have to collect, process, and share massive amounts of data interoperably.  

So this question is for General Raduege. Sir, where does NATO begin to address this challenge? 

28:50 – 30:19 

(CR): Yeah, NATO begins with this by creating a framework of some sort of digital architecture to figure out how to connect those platforms. This modernization challenge where we have these digital assets and capabilities coming in and not having the reliant infrastructure associated with moving those capabilities, that information sharing that General Hecker talked about, it’s really a systemic problem and not the exception of today. 

What we’re seeing is really advanced platforms that are trying to operate on legacy networks, and they’re dependent on communications infrastructure that’s not designed for the contested environment that we’re asking it to fight in. And the big question is why? Well, I would say the digital backbone is harder to fund than the platforms themselves, and that’s simply because it’s a kinetic, non-kinetic discussion. 

What sells – that’s aircraft. What doesn’t sell is investing in your infrastructure. What we’re seeing is that innovation and modernization is indeed happening, and industry is, frankly, leading the way with many cross-cutting and great capabilities. But there’s no funding to put those capabilities in place. 

We can’t afford to just buy those capabilities and hope that interoperability works. So our biggest operational consequence, and really the threat to the alliance, is that every investment is dependent on the digital foundation that has not been proven under attack. If you summarize it in a meaningful way, the comms infrastructure is the limiting factor in this case. 

30:20 – 30:50 

(SK): And so, how does that also factor into the expectation that any system or platform leveraged by NATO is not going to be operating in a benign environment? In any modern day operation, there’s going to be a contested environment where every system is going to be facing jamming, spoofing, and electronic warfare attacks. 

So this question comes back to the command and control aspect, which we saw Russia directly target when it first invaded Ukraine. How does NATO ensure its command and control and the foundational networks you were referring to is resilient to this myriad range of attacks?

30:51 – 32:43 

(CR): Yeah. Resiliency, the word that we often utter, but quite honestly, sometimes misunderstand. When we talk about resilient command and control, we’re talking about having multiple pathways, whether that’s satellite, terrestrial, airborne, HF, what we would call our PACE Plan or Primary Alternate Contingency Emergency communications. It requires some sort of zero-trust architecture that always assumes that the network is compromised. 

It requires that cross-domain solutions allow for appropriate classification sharing at speed, and that there are pre-delegated authorities to allow commanders to act when that connectivity is degraded. And what I would say is that there are indeed pockets of excellence, but there’s an alliance-wide architecture that really remains a very fragile environment. 

The hardest part is not the technology itself, and it’s not the integration of that technology. It’s really the culture. It’s a cultural decision that must be made where we accept that the network is degraded and we design and train to that reality rather than optimizing for some sort of peacetime efficiency.  

The cyber command gap is real and Brad talked about some of that command gap on the space side. But frankly, NATO’s Cyber Operations Center provides coordination and situational awareness right now. They do not have the same authority to employ integrated cyber effects across the allied networks in times of crisis.  

NATO, what they really need is an exercise series that specifically designs to break the command and control under attack, not to test the architecture when it works, but to find where it fails when the crisis begins. Frankly, the days of assumed and exercised exquisite comms is over. We must practice resiliency in this place.

32:44- 33:27 

(JH): Yeah, Scott, I can just throw in when I would do my exercises. There is nothing more frustrating than if I had a team at a certain base and they didn’t even have a classified network, and there’s several bases that don’t. 

So then we built some teams that could go up and set up a classified network and then there’s different levels of classifications. Like when we were talking with space, some it’s just at the secret collateral level and then you need some that go beyond that and that needs to be a lot greater in the NATO countries.  

And I think there’s some good progress being made there. But we need to improve that even more, and then we need backup plans on top of that.  

33:28 – 34:22 

(CR): Yeah. General Hecker, that’s a great point. I had the privilege of serving with you in the European theater under the command of General Cavolli. General Cavolli at the outset of some of the Ukrainian operations, had an observation when he would go into some of the coalition C2 centers and at times there would be 80% of the environment was set up for U.S. secret and above operations, and the remaining 20% was all behind some plywood walls. 

And we’d say, go and do all the Coalition and Alliance comms over there. But never could the two speak. And so he would come to me and he’d say, “Chad, really what we’re looking at is the future fight is not 80% U.S. secret and above. It’s really 80% alliance coordinated activity where we can talk amongst ourselves and maybe you have that exquisite 20% that’s off in the corner, but we need to switch the model of what we currently have in place. 

34:23 – 34:56 

(SK): And another follow-up question for you, Sir. Earlier Brad spoke to the opportunities to leverage the commercial space industry for NATO’s space needs. But what about commercial opportunities in the cyber realm? Things like commercial cloud, commercial communications, data service exchanges, things of that nature. 

So, my twofold question here is this: One – what opportunity exists for NATO and NATO member nations to leverage commercial opportunities in cyber and cyber-related technologies? And two – how does NATO, to Brad’s point earlier about commercial space, ensure that resiliency, in its cyber systems? 

34:57 – 35:54 

(CR): It’s a great question. And what I would offer is that you start with the bottom line up front, which is asking yourself two important questions. 

 First, which commercial services are so operationally critical to your entire operation that their loss would degrade the mission execution? Question two is what is your plan to fight without those capabilities? You ask yourself those two questions and you start building in opportunities and resiliency.  

 There is continued opportunities for commercial providers to integrate into our live operations, and whether that’s some sort of stress testing exercise, simulating attacks, working through physical disruptions, having our commercial partners that are there, providing those capabilities from a cloud environment to cyber tools and techniques, having all of those things in place, I think creates a more realistic environment for us, and it also allows for that resiliency to be learned together.

35:55 – 36:14 

(SK): Thank you, Sir. Now as we look to close our conversation today, I have three remaining questions and I’d like each of you to respond to.  

The first is, given our discussion around the likelihood of the threat coming at the seams, what is the biggest seam NATO should be cognizant of and be prepared to protect against? And how does the alliance go about doing that? 

36:15 – 37:21 

(TG): Scott, I’ll go first on seams. Where Iran in Epic Fury, where we had the leakers come through our air defenses were generally along the seams. One of the biggest ones were the air pictures between the Army and the Air Force and I talked to the Ukrainians who went down with their system to go take a look at it. And they were like,”This is crazy.”  

There are 23 or 25 different air pictures, and they’re not all shared. And to Scorch’s point earlier, when you’re not sharing the air picture, either one you’re going to miss and you’re going to get leakers like what happened, or two, you’re going to fire more weapons at what you’re shooting at, then needed in an already adverse cost-ratio exchange.   

So the seams go right back to what Chad was talking about which is the exchange of information in the most seamless way is necessary. And in missile defense, one of those seams as Scorch brought up is the air and space seam that’s going to get bigger as space plays more in missile defense. 

 We’re going to have to sort that out before we spend the more than 100 billion on Golden Dome, because otherwise we’re just building on a rickety foundation and that’s not going to go well. 

37:22 – 39:31 

(JH): Yeah, Tom, let me talk about another one. This is more on the offensive side, but we do not have the capability to produce in the quantities available of offensive one way attack vehicles that are launched from NATO toward our enemy country that we’re fighting, and they’re cheap. So it’s easily the capability to get some of the nations that can’t afford F-35s, for instance, to buy a bunch and build the capacity to build a bunch of these one way attack vehicles. 

And those one way attack vehicles are not necessarily just going to be used like they are in Russia and Ukraine right now, but they will be part of a larger, coordinated attack for counter anti-access aerial denial. So you’re going to have space providing intel and EW and those kind of things. You’re going to have F-35s with stealth going in. 

You have to have the tankers to refuel all of this. You need your AWACS and those things going in as well. And we saw that they were able to make it happen in Iran with Israel and the U.S. But we need to practice that a lot more and then integrate these one-way attack vehicles at the same time, because that just creates a lot of confusion and the success rate will go way up if you can do that. 

And not only does it do that, it empties the enemy’s magazines. So now they are on the wrong side of the cost curve. They’re spending SA-10’s going after $30,000 drones as opposed to vice versa. So I think that’s a seam on the offensive side that we really need to get after and NATO has the capability to do that, particularly with some of our smaller countries. They would be perfect for doing that. 

And when I would talk to them, they’re more than willing. The biggest thing is when they go ask their defense minister to do it. There’s not a requirement, or at least there wasn’t when I left, I was trying to make it a requirement on the list of what NATO needs for equipment. 

There was nothing in the way of one-way attack vehicles. I don’t know, Tom, if that ever got through in that they’re on the list now. But defense ministers aren’t going to buy something that is not on the list that NATO needs.

39:32 – 40:35 

(TG): It’s a great point. And Brad, chopped down this road with the new political guidance that’s coming out in 2027. They didn’t make the list as far as I can tell. And it’s going to be a hard list because what kind of drones do you want or do you need? Do you specify a number of drones?  

It’s really about the effects. So where they’re going is effects-based kinds of things. And actually what they’re sitting on for 2029 is a disposition that is like if normally your country got told you need four fighter squadrons and you can come back to them and go, really, all I need are two fighter squadrons and four different squadrons of drones, and I can achieve the same effects. I’m just giving you a hypothetical.  

Nobody knows how to do that yet. And basically what NATO has done is go, “We’re open. Give us the argument, prove it to us, and we’ll accept it. More than likely.” 

So there’s going to be a real need for operational analysis to kind of come up with that and figure out what those capabilities are to do that. So it’s a really good point on the drones. And you’re right, it’s a big gaping hole in what NATO capabilities we have right at this minute.  

0:36 – 41:25 

(CR): Scott, I’d come in and talk about the digital seam. When we think about NATO communications architectures, faced with simultaneous jamming, cyber intrusions, physical attacks, and that those information sharing gaps between the Allied networks, that’s where we need to invest our time and our resources. 

We should be celebrating the fact that we found gaps, and that we’re closing those gaps through technology or processes. We should not be white carding these exercise environments. We should be recognizing that finding those gaps is exactly what the future fight is all about and we have to figure out a way of fighting through that.  

So it’s no longer a lost training environment because you can’t send the email. It’s no longer that the network is down and so everybody goes home. Now you have to figure out how to work through that and fight through that at the digital seam.

41:26 – 42:20 

(BH): And I think so I’ll end this off with sounding like a broken record. But on the space side, I think clearly articulating what the collective set of requirements that we need so that we have coherence in the investments that 32 individual nations are making, and then having the ability to command and control those effects. 

I mean, space is critical to any future battlefield in the same way cyber is. And so they’re going to have to figure out how to command and control those effects, particularly in the space domain. You think about like electromagnetic warfare capabilities, who’s doing PNT and SATCOM jamming, and what can I do about it? If I had some systems in the same way that we have like Patriots that do defense, we’re going to have those sorts of systems.  

And so even if it just starts with that regional EW kind of capability, getting those capabilities chopped to NATO and then having somebody with the authority to command and control those on behalf of General Grynkewich, as SACEUR, and then having the actual tools and systems that are able to do that kind of work, I think is something that needs to be sorted out over the next period of time.

42:21 – 42:30 

And as far as the Ankara Summit itself, what will you be looking for both at the summit and in the weeks and months to follow? What will be your metrics for success coming out of it? 

42:31 – 45:41 

(TG): I’ll lead off again on that. I’m focused primarily on the defense production and innovation follow through. And then on NATO 3.0, the only way that’s going to get fixed is by producing a lot more capabilities for European and Canadian allies. 

And I’m looking for two aspects out of that. You know, the cost exchange ratio of a $3 million PAC-3 against a $30,000 drone. This came up with the Ukrainians interestingly enough.  

In 2023, at the Munich Security Conference, he was the minister of Strategic Industries Commission. The Ukrainian asked to see me. And so I walk up and I say, “Hey, what’s going on?” And he goes, “Well, because here’s my issue. I have three different anti-tank weapons. I know how much each one of them cost by going on the internet. And I know from the battlefield how many it takes on average to kill a tank. So I’m doing cost-ratio analysis.” 

And he said, “Tom, I’d like to talk to the people at NATO that are doing this.” And I said, “Yeah, I’d like to too.” It’s not how we thought before, but it’s what we need to get at. So I’d like to see some progress on cost-ratio analysis. We’re talking about it more, but something needs to be done there. 

And then the other piece is on the acoustic sensors that Scorch mentioned, 20,000 of them. I talked to the guy that put that architecture together, and I said, “So was this some kind of requirement that the Ukrainian government gave you to fill to put acoustic sensors out here?” He goes, “No, there was no requirement when we saw that our friends and our relatives were dying and getting hurt and so we wanted to do something about it. So we made this up as we went to figure out how to do that.”  

They did not wait for an RFP and a full blown set of requirements to move forward. And it’s a different ecosystem than what we’re used to and we got a lot to learn from commercial. 

And one of the things that we were trying to and Chad will appreciate this. I was trying to get cloud solutions for NATO before I left and they said, “Oh boy.” Well, if you started tomorrow to get approval to pursue one of those kind of things, by the time you go through all the committees, it’s 54 months before you can spend the first euro.” 

54 months. That’s the process to get all the approvals done. And I said, “You got to be kidding me? Everything will be in a rearview mirror by then.” And they said, “Nope, that’s how the process works.” So we need to fix the process. And the folks at NATO headquarters know that. And this is the process of acquisition and what I think it needs to go down is there are a couple things that the Ukrainians do. 

They don’t let the perfect be the enemy of good. They have the operators talking directly to the innovators. When I went to Ukraine in March, I talked to one drone manufacturing company and she said, you know, “We set up 1-800 hundred number for the operators.” I go, “What do you mean?” She goes, “Well, you know, the guys on the front lines every night flying the drones. We gave them 1-800 fix it number so they can call in 24/7 directly to the engineers to get a patch made on the drone. When they see something not work, they just pick up the phone and call. And that next day they have a patch that tries to fix whatever they highlighted.”  

That’s not how our system works, in general. So if we’re going to get somewhere operators talking to innovators, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of good. Build it, try it, fix it, and rinse, lather, repeat. It’s more of the commercial operation than waiting on an RFP and doing a 30-day campaign to try and get a program a record going.

45:42 – 46:38 

(JH): What I’ll be looking for is, you know, last year they had the five-fold increase in IAMD commitment. What are they going to do this year to follow through with that? Because there needs to be a named force package review with measurable readiness standards to push this thing forward or otherwise we’re going to be here on this podcast next year talking about the same thing, right? So that needs to happen.  

How much we talk about the 5% GDP? That is 100% necessary. And the system that we need, needs to be integrated by design from the get-go. So everything’s talking to everything else, and we need to take advantage of all NATO countries capabilities, whether it’s exquisite capabilities like a Patriot or a simple triple-A on the back of a pickup truck that can shoot down a one way attacks, we need all of them. So we just need to get after it. So that’s what I’m going to be looking at, at the outcome of this.

46:37 – 47:06 

(CR): Well, I’m going to be looking to see whether a coalition digital backbone initiative is in fact directed with the specific architecture requirements that we’ve talked about, or whether the cyber and comms resiliency efforts will remain at the 1.5% category level. 

We do have a precedent for this in the alliance. We have NATO interoperability standards. On the communications protocol side. We need the same on the digital and data side as well and that’s what I’m going to be looking for.

47:07 – 47:53 

(BH): Yeah. And I think I would say the specific concrete plans for getting to 5% and investing those things in a coherent way, particularly as it regards the space domain, getting those capability targets in the NATO Defense Planning Process and the political guidance agreed, and then providing that coherence, updating the NATO space policy. When you talk to people over there, they go. “It’s still fit for purpose because it doesn’t keep us from doing anything that we want to do.” That’s certainly one way to look at it, but it also doesn’t tell you where you’re going and what you need to be able to do.  

So I would prefer if it was much more aggressive and forward leaning and driving things, as opposed to just looking and go, “oh, it doesn’t keep us.” That would be my pitch, is that we have a much more coherent way forward on the space domain to take advantage of the increased resources that are coming in as a result of the political moment that we find ourselves in.

47:54 – 48:11 

(SK): Now, our audience is made up of leadership across government and industry, who will also be paying attention to the conversations and actions coming out of the Ankara Summit. 

Can you share a little bit about Elara Nova and how the strategic advisory firm is positioned to support them as they respond to NATO’s needs?

48:12 – 49:02 

(TG): I think that what we’re seeing in Europe right now, the desire to grow the defense industry production pie means partnerships are going to win, despite the political shin-kicking that’s going on, companies still want to work with American companies. American companies have a lot that they can do with European companies. 

There’s a real opportunity here. And one of the things that Elara Nova can do is help companies navigate the partnership landscape. Who should you be partnering with? What countries are most forward leaning in the areas that you want to work in? 

That’s something that Elara Nova can be really good at helping companies in a bit of a matchmaking regime in order to get to the point where we can produce enough to, as Scorch said, to spend that money smartly rather than just spend that money. Scorch? 

49:03 – 49:32 

(JH): Tom talked about the 90 billion increase. Hopefully we get another 90 billion next year, and it looks like we might be on the U.S. side to 1.5 trillion. So there’s lots of money out there.  

And what Elara Nova can do is help you get partners and make sure that we spend that money wisely, like Tom said. So that’s with the operational backgrounds that we have with a lot of the folks that are on board, they can make that happen and we can do it smartly and your company can make money out of it as well.

49:33 – 50:05 

(CR): What I would offer from an Elara Nova perspective is that our value proposition is working at those seams. And we talked about seams in this conversation quite a bit, but what takes place in space and aerospace and cyberspace and how those things are interoperable together, that’s where Elara Nova is built, is to have these remarkable people that we have an opportunity to work with, with the relationships that we have around the world to integrate all those in a very meaningful way and so it’s that integration between multiple domains.  

50:06 – 51:16 

(BH): And I think I would say a couple of things. One, as we see nations going through these transformations, helping nations navigate those institutional capacity building, we have an unrivaled team of experts who have been there and done that at the very highest levels that can come alongside our allies, partners and friends and help them to navigate those transitions to say, “Hey, we learned lessons and you don’t want to go down this road. Here’s something you need to start thinking about early.” So we have the ability to kind of help in that regard from a national perspective.  

And I think with our commercial clients, whether it is European providers in this case who are trying to penetrate the U.S. market, or U.S. companies who are trying to penetrate the NATO market, the days of waiting for an RFP to then compete for a program of record and then be the company that wins that, and you’re going to have that business for the next 10 or 20 years. That moment is passing.  

And so understanding where the requirements are emerging and skating to where the puck is going. We’ve got the ability to provide some very unique insights in that regard, because we have deep understanding at the highest levels of where those enterprises are moving. And so I think we can help clients on both sides of that house understand where they should be going and where they should be investing that would be something that Elara Nova is fairly uniquely positioned to help with.

51:17 – 51:54 

This has been an episode of The Elara Edge. Elara Nova is the trusted global security partner delivering decisive advantage.  

As a strategic advisory firm, Elara Nova builds expert teams uniquely tailored for client needs to deliver actionable results. With the trusted insight to deliver your decisive edge, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in global 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. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge.

Episode 40: From NASA to the Pentagon, Commercial Space Takes Center Stage in “Rocket Dreams"

The Elara Edge Podcast

Intro/Outro: Scott King, Strategic Communications Manager, Elara Nova (SK) 

Host: Mike Dickey, Founding Partner, Elara Nova (MD) 

SME: Christian Davenport, Author, Rocket Dreams (CD) 

00:02 – 01:30 

(SK): When the Artemis II crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after their record-setting mission around the moon – America was watching. Just over 27 million peopleacross the nation’s largest television networks tuned in to follow their re-entry.  While the Artemis II mission was a precursor to America’s actual return to landing on the moon – it was aptly timed for Christian Davenport’s new book, Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race, which chronicles the commercial dynamics and geopolitical tensions defining the modern day space race against China. 

Welcome to “The Elara Epilogues,” a special edition series of The Elara Edge podcast where the space industry’s leading journalists and authors join Elara Nova partners to discuss their published work covering today’s ever-evolving space environment. Founding Partner Mike Dickey, the former Chief Architect of the United States Space Force, is returning to the host seat today.  

Mike will be joined by Christian Davenport, the former Washington Post reporter and author of the 2025 book Rocket Dreams. Together, they’ll discuss how Rocket Dreams continues the storyline from Christian’s 2018 book The Space Barons, which we previously covered in the inaugural episode of “The Elara Epilogues.” A link to that conversation will be in the show notes.  

And on one additional note for our audience, this podcast was recorded prior to the SpaceX IPO. 

Thank you for joining us and onto the show… 

01:31 – 01:34 

(MD): Okay. Christian first, welcome back to the Elara Edge. 

01:35 – 01:38 

(CD): Hey, it’s so good to be back. Thanks for having me back a second time. I really appreciate it.  

01:39 – 01:53 

(MD): Yeah, that first time was over a year ago. And we were talking about Space Barons, which was your first space book. And in this interim period, it’s been long enough for you to have written and released another book, Rocket Dreams. 

I think September of 2025. Is that about right?  

01:54 – 02:48 

(CD): Yeah, that’s right. Rocket Dreams came out late last year. It’s something of a sequel of sorts to The Space Barons. I mean, the Space Barons, as you might remember, covered the early days of the commercial space industry. Elon and SpaceX and Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic and Richard Branson and Paul Allen and you know, Mike, after that book came out in 2018, I thought at some point there would be enough material for another book. 

I just didn’t realize it would be within seven years or so. I thought it would be at least a decade. But there’s so much going on in this little industry of ours, and it’s moving so quickly that I looked up, called my agent. I said, ‘Hey, I think we have enough here for another book, because so much has happened and Rocket Dreams came out – and it comes out right before the Artemis II mission. And it seems like before too long there might be enough material for a third, so we’ll see.

02:49 – 02:59 

(MD): No, that’s right, it is definitely a dynamic time in this business. It’s not your first series of books that you wrote. Your first book was not about space. Can you maybe tell? I think our audience would like to hear about what you did there. 

03:00 – 04:29 

(CD): Yeah. So that was a book called ‘As You Were: To War and Back with the Blackhawk Battalion of the Virginia National Guard. And, you know, at the time, I was a metro reporter at the Washington Post after 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I was watching citizen soldiers, you know, service members from the reserve component, you know, the guard and reserve being called up in extraordinary numbers. 

We’re talking about firefighters and police officers and teachers and paramedics. And I was watching this strain that was putting on local counties and municipalities having so much of their workforce deploy. And we have big Pentagon reporters who were covering that. And we had reporters who were embedded with the 101st Airborne and 82nd Airborne and some of the big Marine units. 

And I was looking at it and was curious about the reserve component. So I embedded in Iraq with a unit from Virginia, they were a Blackhawk unit, and then toward the end of their tour and then came home with them and wanted to be sort of the first reporter to embed on the home front and to watch them transition back from being – we were in Anbar province at al-Asad Air Base – and then you process out through Fort Dix in New Jersey, and then the next day you’re civilian again and you’re not at some big Army base like Fort Campbell. 

They’re just home and trying to resume their lives again after just leaving Iraq. And so I wrote about that experience, which it was very rewarding. I’m still in touch with a lot of those soldiers to this day. 

04:30 – 04:36 

(MD): Oh, I bet. I mean intensely personal and not an easy ‘I’ll just jump back in and do my day job right.’ 

It’s not an easy transition psychologically.  

04:37 – 05:29 

(CD): No. And I wanted to highlight that particular sacrifice. And then also one of the bigger themes is the role of the citizen soldier. I mean, that goes back to the Revolutionary War and the citizen-based militia and the National Guard being part of the country’s fabric. And, you know, the 29th Infantry Division, which is the unit I was embedded with, fell under the 29th ID. 

And those units stormed the beaches of Normandy at D-Day. And we got away with that because they didn’t call up the guard and reserve during Vietnam, which was already a very unpopular war. And they had the draft. And then we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan, and without the draft, they kind of needed the guard and reserve component. And at the time, people remembering Vietnam was kind of like, hey, what’s going on? Why are we relying on these citizen soldiers so much? And the fact of the matter is that’s the way the founders actually created it. So it was done on purpose.

05:30 – 05:54 

(MD): Awesome. So then you go to the business desk, your financial desk at the post, right? And this is where you end up kind of getting into this space business. And so now you write Space Barons. You are a consulting producer on two TV shows, one of which won an Emmy. 

Congratulations on that. Not too many authors win Emmys. And then Rocket Dreams? So I personally am not a medical professional, but I think you have caught the space bug. So what gets you excited about this topic?

05:55 – 07:14 

(CD): It’s funny that, you know, I’ve covered the military. I had done a stint in covering politics and editing and the space thing really just grabbed me from the moment, the way it just does. 

And I use this quote, it’s a Jeff Bezos quote, and I use it with my kids. And I say, “You don’t pick your passions, your passions pick you. But you have to have your antenna up.” And, you know, I didn’t grow up a big space fan. I was born in 1973. So after the Apollo program, I don’t think I was riveted too much by the shuttle. 

Actually, my first space memory is Challenger exploding, and so I didn’t grow up a space nerd. But started watching what was happening in the commercial sector, and rockets that would fly to space and then fly back to Earth and land, and the space baron billionaires getting into it and the rivalries and just how NASA was changing and relying on these companies. 

And I thought, ‘You know, there’s something really here.’ And as a journalist, they say that old adage, ‘Follow the money.’ And I thought if the richest people in the world were putting their money into this, we should be paying attention to it. And it’s just really grown and expanded to the point where you have room for not just one book, The Space Barons, but now this other one, Rocket Dreams. 

And of course, others have written books as well. And we’ve seen, you know, a little bit of a boom in that, and it’s spreading now into national security space is something that’s become very, very important.  

07:15 – 08:06 

(MD): Yeah, no doubt this is where Elara Nova has at its roots is continuing to mature space security on a U.S. and a global scale. 

So if we go back to Space Barons and to our listeners who haven’t done their preparatory homework for this podcast, you should go back and listen to that podcast, in April last year, we talked about it. But Space Barons introduced us to four billionaires who all wanted in some way to drive a space agenda, really for their own reasons. 

Right? It wasn’t all the same. They all had their individual motivations. But now we get into Rocket Dreams, and it looks like it’s come down to a two person or two company race. Blue Origin and SpaceX, Bezos and Musk. And so 2018 is where the book starts. And there’s been sort of a lot of hype, but maybe not a tremendous amount of progress. 

So take us back to the start of the book and where we are at that point. And then what are some of the arcs in the story as you go through Rocket Dreams?

08:07 – 11:44 

(CD): Yeah, so I think the Space Barons, you know, which covered the early days of the commercial space industry and their interaction with NASA, I think it posed a question. 

The question was, you know, ‘is this sort of commercial paradigm for real?’ The public private partnerships that NASA was using — is this a viable industry? Is this going to have any kind of growth, or is it a flash in the pan? And the answer comes in Rocket Dreams and it’s clearly a yes. And you can see that manifested in the fact that you are putting astronauts on rockets and spacecraft that are owned and operated by the private sector and not by the government, then that’s a big deal. 

And NASA is obviously outsourcing human spaceflight to the commercial space sector. You’ve seen the growth of space tourism. We’ve seen a proliferation of the space industry beyond just the Space Barons. I mean, I focus on Blue Origin and SpaceX, but there’s a proliferation of that. And then third, what you see carrying through the theme of Rocket Dreams is, for the first time, NASA really having some momentum of building the Artemis program to return to the moon and having that program survive subsequent presidential administrations. 

And we haven’t had that since Apollo. We haven’t had a deep space human exploration campaign survive one administration to the next since the Apollo era. And so I tell a lot of that story here in Rocket Dreams. But yes, we revisit SpaceX and Blue Origin, aligning themselves to move forward with NASA on this moon program. And that’s where the story begins. 

It begins with the transition team. President Trump has just won the election, and he is meeting with various companies. And they’re telling them, ‘Hey, we want to go to the moon. And what can you do to help us go to the moon?’ And Blue Origin, which had been left behind SpaceX, had moved so far ahead and Jeff Bezos tells his team like, ‘Hey, we need to compete. 

Everything SpaceX goes after, we’re going to go after.’ And so as Blue Origin’s executives are meeting with the Trump transition team and they’re saying, ‘We want to go back to the moon,’ they say, ‘Okay, well, we’ve just landed our suborbital space tourism rocket, New Shepard, in the West Texas desert. And well, we can build something like that and land it on the moon. 

And the executives, they completely made it up. They did not have a moon program. They did not have a lunar lander. But they knew that Bezos and the leadership really wanted to align themselves with NASA and start winning government contracts, start bringing real revenue. So they make that pitch to NASA, and then they have to go back and tell their boss. 

At the time, it was Rob Meyerson, the president of Blue Origin, ‘Hey, you’re not going to believe what we just did. We just pitched NASA on a lunar lander.’ Rob calls Bezos and says, ‘You’re not going to believe what the guys just did.’ And Bezos loved it and went all in, even helping write the proposal for a lunar lander himself and then pitching it himself. 

And so you see that the lunar lander competition is sort of the central tension, I think, of the narrative, because of course, SpaceX bids on it as well. Everyone thought Blue Origin was going to win this contract, but they ended up losing it to SpaceX. But it really brings us to today, where now they’re opening it back up in this competition, and we’re seeing them compete. 

So the book really sets that up. And there of course, some subthemes about it with this space race with China and the role of NASA and others. But I think that’s sort of the general arc of the story. 

11:45 – 12:30 

(MD): So let’s pull on the NASA thread a little bit, because that culture has had to evolve a lot. And a lot of the agency’s energy in the human spaceflight program. They have people living and working in space on the International Space Station 24/7, 365 and getting resupply and crew back and forth, obviously, was their focus for many years. 

And now they find themselves sort of pushed by these companies instead of the government pulling and wanting to do things. These companies want to do things bigger. They want to do things faster. And so how do you see the evolution of the cultural piece of NASA and their willingness to embrace the private sector influence?  

There’s a great story in the book about the astronauts. They want a stick, they want to fly the spacecraft, and they don’t get a stick because it’s a private enterprise. So tell us about that.  

12:31 – 15:55 

(CD): Yeah. No. And that’s the story I was going to tell that here’s Elon and SpaceX trying to build a more futuristic spacecraft. And there’s no stick, which a lot of the astronauts that NASA has are former fighter jet pilots. 

They fly with the stick. Boeing, the other contractor that had the contract to fly humans to the ISS, their Starliner spacecraft had a stick. The lunar lander that Neil Armstrong piloted down to the lunar surface had a stick. And on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, there’s  mostly it’s done by touch screen. 

And the very first time the astronauts went to SpaceX headquarters to fly it in a simulator and they’re flying it on the touchscreen, it did not go well. I mean, the software, it was sort of the first generation, and it wasn’t working very well and all but one of the astronauts crashed in the simulator. They crashed into the ISS. 

So a little bit of an ego blow there. And they turn around and they’re complaining to Garrett Riesman, who is a former NASA astronaut who at the time was working at SpaceX, and they’re telling him, like, ‘Hey, this doesn’t work, and you got to get it better.’ But over time, the SpaceX engineers just kept working on the software, and they went to 2.0 and 3.0, 4.0 and took all the input from the astronauts, and it just got better over time. 

And the astronauts just got more comfortable flying that way. And it worked. I mean, because the whole idea is that you don’t have to have all the skills to fly on a fighter jet that everyday people should be going to space.  

The other story I’ll tell real quick about NASA and the relationship with particular space and the commercial space sector was here SpaceX is vying for the contract, a very prestigious contract, to fly NASA’s astronauts to the International Space Station. And NASA goes to SpaceX and said ‘you’re going to dock your spacecraft on our space station, our $100 billion space station. They’re six people living there at any time. We don’t want you crashing into it. We want you to have a nice, soft park and docking. 

We built the docking system. We’ve tested it. It’s robust. It works. We’re going to give it to you for free. Just bolt it onto your spacecraft. And please use that.’  

And there’s a young engineer whose job at SpaceX was to review it. And he takes one look at it and it’s like, ‘Yeah, it’s actually not that great.’ It’s pretty heavy. 

There are these six mechanical arms. Each one has their own motor. Each one has their own software system. It’s heavy. You got six individual points of failure. He built something much simpler using springs. He actually used the springs in the prototype from the shocks of a mountain bike. And they called it the M(CD)ocker. And it’s pretty rudimentary and simple. 

And his boss loved it and immediately took it to Elon. And Elon studied it for a little bit, asked some questions. It was like, ‘Yeah, do this instead.’ And so now this poor young engineer has to turn around and tell NASA, ‘Yeah, hey, that docking system that you wanted us to use to dock to your space station. Yeah, we’re not going to use it. We’re going to reject it.’ And had to overcome their skepticism.  

And it was that more than skepticism. I mean, there I think their frustration and anger and say, ‘Why would you not do this? And you remember SpaceX had not yet even won the competition.’ And, ‘Oh, by the way,’ they were going up against Boeing, which was the big legacy contractor. But again, over time they were able to show that their system worked. It was reliable and won them over.

15:56 – 16:24 

(MD): So, at this time, the first NASA administrator that President Trump picks is Jim Bridenstine and you talk about him quite a bit, too, because, you know, he’s the first politician to take over the helm, and a lot of people had some concerns about that. 

But to your point about maintaining some sort of thread of continuity and being able to move forward and then being able to message in and tell the story about why this is important and then ultimately to embrace this continued move towards the commercial world. It seems like he had a real steadying influence there. Is that your outcome?  

16:25 – 18:19 

(CD): Yeah, he did and he was interesting for a couple of reasons, because, like me, his first memory of space was Challenger and imagine he’s the NASA administrator during the Commercial Crew program, where SpaceX now is at the point where they’re going to fly astronauts from U.S. soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. So this is a very big moment. 

President Trump goes to the launch. Vice President Pence is there. The pressure is on and all Jim Bridenstine can think is ‘What happens if something goes wrong.’ And so for the first part, he actually goes out of his way to hold SpaceX and Elon Musk accountable and really is concerned about the parachutes. He’s concerned about problems they had with their abort system. 

They had a spacecraft blow up, and he ordered a safety review of SpaceX. And he did try to treat them with respect. but also to hold them accountable. And then with respect to the Artemis program: here, he knows that George W Bush says ‘We’re going to the moon.’ 

Obama comes in and says, ‘Oh yeah, the moon. We’ve been there, done that. We’re going to go to an asteroid. We’re going to go to Mars.’ And then Trump comes and says, ‘No, no, we’re going back to the moon’. And the metaphor he used was like Lucy and the football. That every time we get it, we pull the football away and there’s no momentum and we can never get a clear shot. 

So he wanted to create a program that, even if a Democrat was elected, would survive. And he did that by numerous reasons. But creating the Artemis Accords and bringing in international partners and making it so much harder for any other subsequent presidential administration to kill it, and really casting this as a space race between the United States and China. So there’s a geopolitical influence in there as well.  

18:20 – 18:52 

(MD): So the book also briefly introduces us to a new billionaire, Jared Isaacman, Shift4 and, you know, makes it his own pile of money and buys from SpaceX a couple of commercial astronaut missions. 

The first time that’s ever been done. Inspiration Four and then Polaris Dawn a few years later. And now we find that he’s a NASA administrator. So how does his presence on the scene influence all of this, to have him come from that sort of dynamic Silicon Valley type of world that the rest of the gang does and now be in charge of this government bureaucracy that’s taking us back to the moon? 

18:53 – 20:49 

(CD): Yeah. And I think you see, in some ways, a lot of similarities between Jim Bridenstine and Jared Isaacman. I mean, they’re both great speakers. They do a lot of interviews, a lot of media that are out there really telling the story of NASA, telling the story of Artemis, telling the story of the next space age, and just very good at that. 

But you may remember that it was a little bit of a rocky road for Jared at first because he was nominated, then because of his ties to SpaceX chartering those two private astronaut missions. He sort of was collateral damage when Trump and Elon had their breakup. And then he lost it and then he came back. But he’s had a huge impact. 

And, you know, I’m grateful for him. I joked to him a few months ago that what NASA has done was a great set up for the book because initially SpaceX won that moon lander competition, which is such a prominent scene and storyline in the book, and then they beat out Blue Origin. But then, because of concerns about SpaceX’s timeline with their vehicle Starship, they opened it back up so that the Blue Origin can compete, and it’s just sort of the book sets that up so perfectly, but I think he’s a great champion for NASA and has a lot of credibility and has been able to win over people on both sides of the aisle, which I think is really important now.  

And you see it that space has always been not just bipartisan but nonpartisan. And I thought it was very telling that from Trump. 1.0, into Biden. President Biden lay waste to so many of Trump’s programs and policies, except for two and then the Artemis program and the Space Force, because they were able to see the importance of those programs. 

And now they’ve continued, obviously, under President Trump again, and they’re putting an emphasis on getting Artemis. The dates have slipped, but has had some momentum in the sustained focus from the White House ever since the first Trump administration.

20:48 – 21:16 

(MD): So, Chris, I’m sure like you, I was glued to the TV during the Artemis launch and the landing and many hours in between as they swung by the moon and I was getting texts from family and friends that don’t pay attention to this stuff normally. 

And it’s obviously sparked excitement in the public about space, again. There is some attention span issues sometimes with the American public. Do we have staying power this time and will this help accelerate the efforts?

21:15 – 22:47 

(CD): No. It’s such a great question. And I would say, first off, that NASA was so smart in who they picked for the Artemis II crew. 

That was an all star crew. I mean, they’re all good on TV and they had their huge media tour and I thought their staying power actually did last a little bit and made a lot of sense. I think to have the first African-American go to the moon, the first woman, the first non-U.S. citizen, and they clearly just gelled as a unit. 

And I think we saw at a time that’s very politically divisive, you know, real unity there. But we saw during the Apollo program that after the Apollo 11 moon landing, the American public’s attention soon faded away. And this is not going to be followed up soon with a landing on the moon. We now know that the next mission will just be a docking of Orion, with one or both of the lunar landers in low-Earth orbit, and then that mission would be followed by a lunar landing in 2028. 

Hopefully, but maybe not, since it doesn’t look like the next mission will happen until the end of 2027. So that’s a lot of time. And the American public they do have a short attention span. And so I think Jared Isaacman, the NASA administrator, is going to have to really do everything he can not just to keep the American public engaged, but to keep Congress engaged, to keep it funded, and to talk about the significance of the program and the space race with China while months go on in between these very important missions. 

22:48 – 23:18 

(MD): So now I’m going to ask you to put on your crystal ball here a little bit and think about: the architecture now has a little bit of the old, and a little bit of the new. 

We’ve got the SLS, the Space Launch System, traditional government run program using technology from the space shuttle program and Orion, which which came out of the previous version before where we’re at now, coupled with Starship and New Glenn and the landers that we’ve been talking about – how do you see that unfolding over the next couple of years? 

Is there still going to be this two part solution, or are we going to go all one way or the other? 

23:19 – 24:55 

(CD): I think in the near term, there’s going to be a two part solution that they’re going to use SLS and Orion. But over time, I think there will be more of a shift toward commercial. I mean, particularly away from the SLS rocket, I could see Orion existing in some fashion, but as you mentioned SLS is built on 1970s technology. 

It uses the RS-25 engines, which were literally developed in the 1970s for the space shuttle. They’ve been upgraded and modified and modernized since then, but it’s a very expensive vehicle. It’s not reusable, but right now there’s not an alternative. I mean, Starship isn’t ready. New Glenn has flown just a few times, [but] has had problems in and of itself. 

But Jared Isaacman has said that when there are commercial alternatives that are less expensive, reusable, more efficient, that NASA would go toward those. So I think he’s made that pretty clear.  

Jim Bridenstine and this is a scene in Rocket Dreams at one point, tried to sideline the SLS. Senator Shelby, who’s a big champion because it’s headquartered out of Alabama, pulled him into his office after Jim tried to do that and gave him a dressing down and threatened his career basically if he tried to sideline the SLS. 

But now, SLS doesn’t quite have, you know, Senator Shelby’s not there. And you’ve seen, I think, a shift politically where everyone is on board, that we are really in a space race with China. We need to move fast. We need to use the resources that we have. Especially if they’re limited and do everything we can to beat China. 

24:56 – 25:22  

(MD): Now, let me put a pin in that. I want to come back to that point in a couple of minutes. But one or two more questions for you on this. If we go back into Space Barons, there was a metaphor throughout that book about the tortoise and the hare, right? Blue Origin was the tortoise to SpaceX’s hare. 

In terms of who is going slow and steady? Who’s going fast? Does that metaphor still hold? Is it coming closer together? We talked about the lunar lander being opened back up to both companies. Where are we there?  

25:23 – 26:51 

(CD): Yeah. I mean, I think it still holds in the sense that SpaceX is far, far ahead. But Blue Origin is catching up. 

SpaceX is launching the Falcon 9 once every two or three days. They’ve had enormous success with that. They’ve shown that reusability is for real. That’s not even sort of a new novel thing anymore. And now they’re moving on to Starship, which is a big, complicated vehicle. They’ve had some problems with it. They’re now in version three. They’re going to have to show rapid reusability where it lands back at the launch site, they’re going to have to show that the spacecraft can be refueled in orbit. 

They’re going to have to show that they can launch a fleet of tankers to be able to refuel it within a short amount of time, 24 to 48 hours. So we’ll see. And meanwhile, yes, Blue Origin’s had some success with New Glenn. They are set as early as this summer or later this year to land their Mark-1 lunar lander on the moon’s surface. 

There won’t be any people on it, but that will be a big deal. We’ll see how they do. But we need to see: can they get their launch cadence up? They just have an anomaly, a problem with their second stage engines. Can they fix that? Can they get back to flying? Can they fly the lunar lander and can it land on the moon? 

Those are all big steps and those are all big question marks. So we’ll see. But now NASA has specifically pit Blue Origin against SpaceX. Whichever one of you is ready, you know, with your lunar lander to fly astronauts to the moon, you get the honor of doing that. So we’ll see.

26:52 – 27:13 

(MD): So one more kind of look back to Space Barons, because there was a couple other billionaires in there, right? 

There’s Paul Allen and Suborbital Tourism. And then Richard Branson took over after Paul Allen unfortunately passed away. Robert Bigelow wanted to do hotels. So that tourism in these commercial space stations is not as prominent in Rocket Dreams, but is it still prominent in the reality of our space program?

27:14 – 28:55 

(CD): Yeah. So for the suborbital space tourism, we’ll see. Virgin Galactic has paused. They are building, a whole new vehicle that was more economically viable and make for a sustainable business to be able to fly more frequently, fly more passengers. 

They’ve yet to fly. It’s been a while. We’ll see how they do. A lot of people are skeptical of it, but we are seeing the commercial space stations having some momentum, and there’s incentive for them to move forward because the International Space Station has been up there for 26 years continuously. It’s not going to last forever. NASA says 2030 or maybe a little bit longer, and they’re going to need to be successors. 

So you see companies like Axiom Space or even Blue Origin or Vast. And others, Voyager, building these next generation space hotels, if you want to call them that. And I do think those will ultimately be successful because it’ll be a national priority. And if the United States doesn’t have a presence in low-Earth orbit, we would cede that to the only other country that has a space station in low-Earth orbit and that’s China. 

So there will be a national priority for that. I do wonder Blue Origin, which had been up until several months ago flying its New Shepard suborbital tourism vehicle with some real frequency, actually put a pause on that so that they could focus on New Glenn and on their deep space and lunar programs and ambitions, which I think tells you how serious they are about all of that. 

I think a lot of people hope they come back to New Shepard, because I think they still have a lot of people who have signed up to fly on that thing.

28:56 – 29:43 

(MD): So that’s the second time you sort of talked about China and that competition and the space age nationally, as you were going to cast in that light, right? For prestige and then economic and other reasons as a new space race. 

And so the U.S. government’s primary stated objective is to want to beat China to the moon. But the military component of that, there’s also something a lot closer to Earth, right? Is the ability of China to make their military more capable through the use of space, like the U.S. has, to be able to do precision and lethality and communication and all those things that have made the U.S. military so effective and lethal. 

So how do you see the private sector part of this then leaking into the military and how the national security sector is capitalizing on that or not?  

29:44 – 31:46 

(CD): This is a great question, and I think it’s a very important one and I think the significance can’t be overstated that right now, as there you are obviously familiar with the term space superiority. 

 And then in order to achieve that, the Space Force and the Pentagon are going to need to rely on the commercial space sector for the kinds of technologies that we need. And ten years ago, when I was writing The Space Barons, the big breakthrough, the big innovation in space was the reusable rockets having the rockets come back and land so they could fly again. 

I think now it’s satellites and spacecraft that can maneuver in space. And when the satellite goes up, it’s moving very fast, but it stays on a fixed orbit. So you know where it’s going to be in an hour or a day or three weeks from now. But if you have spacecraft that can maneuver and can be refueled and have the propellant to be able to do that, so they can essentially dodge and weave and hide and sneak up or go high, go low — that is significant. 

And that’s necessary for space superiority. And I think there are a lot of companies that are working on that. I think also just the weaponry that we’re seeing and yes, we’re using the ‘W’ word now. I think more in space you’re seeing Space Force officials use that, that we’re talking about weapons. And I think a lot of it was Earth to space: firing missiles, these anti-satellite tests, which obviously were problematic because they created a lot of debris. I think now you’re seeing maybe more subtle attacks, you know, using high energy microwaves or laser or other kind of spamming or spoofing and jamming sensors, you know, again, space to space. And that’s the real change that it used to be satellites in space for all their purpose to look down. 

And now they’re looking up or they’re staying in space so their whole mission is in space. And the question is, can the Space Force really leverage and incentivize? And to really be clear with industry, this is what we need. This is where we’re going this is what we need to focus on and to build is an open question. And Golden Dome will have a huge impact on that, I think.

31:47 – 32:09 

(MD): Well, that’s right, because the idea is to use a lot of that things that are being funded and capitalized in the private sector to bring into military. It’s probably not a perfect analogy, but where NASA on the civil side, had a culture that needed to shift and begin to adopt a sort of private sector approach. Space Force was kind of in that role on the military side, where do you see the service in the adoption of the things that you’re talking about?  

32:10 – 33:33 

(CD): Yeah, and that we saw that in the beginning of the Space Force that they said we got to start from scratch. We should be more nimble, be more efficient, and avoid the kind of government procurement debacles that Senator McCain used to turn into theater in the Senate Armed Services Committee, and they didn’t want to have those. 

And I think there’s been some success. There have been some frustrations, some people are concerned that they haven’t been as successful in working with commercial, but they say the right things. I know that the motive at least, is there. But one of the things that I point to that I think is significant is talked about that, some of the war gaming scenarios, and they’re doing four of them, I think, this year that are focused in large part on that threat that we heard about from a couple of years ago of Russia developing a space-based nuclear weapon and the Space Force wargaming that, but bringing in the commercial side and making them part of that so they could see what are the challenges, what are the threats, what is the adversary doing and what are the technologies and the capability that we need? 

You know, I also think of Even Rogers from True Anomaly Space, being in the Air Force and the Space Force, and realizing that nobody in the commercial sector was building what the Space Force ultimately would need, so leaves and starts a company in order to do that. So I think we’re beginning to sort of see that nexus there.

33:34 – 34:09 

(MD): Yeah, I agree that this military doesn’t get to stop doing other things that they were doing right, and shift gears. So there’s a lot of things that the Space Force has to cover down on. We’ll see if you don’t want to say that, you know, money’s the answer to everything, that is definitely not. But, you know, the big jump in the Space Force budget coming in fiscal 27. You know, ultimately, whatever Congress appropriates, but it’ll be a boost.  

Can they then start moving a little bit more aggressively into some of these new areas that they’ve been a little slow to do in my opinion. So again, another metaphor, is there a tortoise and the hare metaphor between the U.S. and China on on the military side, national security side? 

34:10 – 35:38 

(CD): ‘Yeah, as much as I hate to say it, it sounds like China is really moving fast and far ahead. I saw a presentation at the satellite conference that the Space Force’s Chief Lurch gave about the number of satellites they’re putting up. We’ve seen China do, docking and geostationary orbit, a possible refueling there with the satellite that. Oh, by the way, a couple of years ago grappled a dead Bieduo satellite and pulled it out of GEO and moved it into a graveyard orbit. 

He talked about China developing satellites that use stealth that can’t be seen. They’re lunar and cislunar ambitions and the proliferated architectures that they’re putting up. By the way, the moon program, maybe not specifically, for the U.S. side, not a military program. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a national security program. And they’re moving toward the South Pole, the moon, and in cislunar space, they’ve got a rover on Mars. 

They may be able to return samples from Mars before we can. All of which spans from the hard core national security side and combat-like operations to the diplomatic soft power things that if they’re on the moon and we’re not, they’ll attract our allies. If they’re bringing back samples from Mars, the scientists from other countries will want to be allied with them. And so we see a comprehensive space program that they have. And it’s, in my opinion, a real race and the stakes are very, very high.

35:39 – 36:20 

(MD): And so some of that is scientific, some of it’s economic and the security piece. Actually, General Saltzman, the chief of space operations, I just heard him talking and say that making a historical analogy that everywhere that economy has gone, right? The U.S. Navy, it ended up protecting lines of communication and making sure those things could happen in a reasonable, normative way instead of just county option. 

Okay, so you were a business desk writer at The Washington Post. Big business news coming up in that SpaceX is headed for an IPO. And the numbers are incredible, right? $1.82 trillion valuation coming out. So what impact do you think that might all have on all of this? I mean billions of dollars getting freed up that might go somewhere else. 

36:21 – 37:34 

(CD): Yeah, and it just shows the the evolution and just the SpaceX is one of the biggest stories of American entrepreneurship of the last 100 years, moving from just being building rockets and spacecraft to a constellation of 10,000 satellites to now talking about orbital data centers and compute and working with artificial intelligence and xAI. You know, so, again, not just a rocket company, but an artificial intelligence company and internet provider, all of these things driving that. 

And I remember the old adage from it was only really like ten years ago when nobody wanted to invest in space, or the only people investing in space were just sort of hobbyists or very passionate people. And the saying, of course, was ‘the quickest way to become a millionaire in the space sector was to start out as a billionaire.’ 

And we’re seeing them drive enormous growth and attention – as to whether what are the downstream effects of that? Who can replicate it? We’ll see. SpaceX has shown that it is singular in a lot of ways, and that its success has not been able to be repeated. So yeah, it’s a fascinating time and then we’ll see what the stock does once it goes public. 

I mean, if there’ll be a spike or a drop or if it sustains over time.

37:35 – 37:46 

(MD): Do you think that the investor, the institutional, retail investors will rush to that stock, or will there be sort of a rising of all boats as people come to the space sector and pay more attention? 

37:47 – 38:37 

(CD): I do believe in the rising of all boats in that. I also think that as SpaceX has become so dominant from the U.S. government’s perspective, and this is NASA and the Pentagon. And the Pentagon, of course, has a much, much bigger budget, that there is a real desire for alternatives – that we cannot place all of our eggs into the SpaceX basket, and that we need New Glenn to work. 

We need Neutron from Rocket Lab. We need Stoke Space to stand up and all of these other companies to come to fruition. And SpaceX is just like I call it SpaceX University where they’ve graduated so many engineers who then go off and start their own companies or go to work for other companies and bring some of that SpaceX secret sauce with them and it’s proliferating. So I do think it’s the tide rises all boats.

38:38 – 38:51 

(MD): So we’ve already established that I am not a medical professional, but I think I know the answer to this question. Has the writing of these books and your TV shows, has that immunized you from the space bug or do you still got it? And if you got it, what are you doing next?  

38:52 – 40:04 

(CD): Yeah, no, I still have it. I am trying to broaden my horizons a little bit. I think it’s the Elon-Jeff stuff, which was sort of a theme of space barons or rocket teams. I’m moving on. I took a buyout from the Washington Post, as I know you know, but was able to stay on through the end of last year to finish a story about the Space Force and national security space. 

 And I’m really interested in delving into that deeply. I just don’t think the American public fully understands what the Space Force does, the importance of it, the great service that it does for our nation, the threats we are facing in space and the fact that this – it’s not new, it did not all of a sudden appeared in 2019 when President Trump created the Space Force. 

There’s a long history and I think it’s only going to accelerate in the years forward. I mean, you mentioned the huge increase that the Space Force budget is getting. I think there is going to be an acceleration of the threats, the proliferation of spacecraft, our reliance on them. And then, as you said, that next frontier, if we’re going to the moon or into cislunar space, we’re bringing American assets and the American economy and American values that the United States is always going to defend, and it will always defend all of that in any new frontiers. What it’s always done. 

40:05 – 40:46 

(MD): This allows me to close with and this is the origin story of Eara Nova, right? Those of us who were in this national security space world for decades and have been through all the changes and all the threats, as you rightfully talk about and when, when we are here to try to to help companies, to help the financial markets, to really all come together and continue to accelerate our capabilities and our ability to protect the nation and to be a leader on the global stage in space and the space economy. 

So I really appreciate you as an author and having read your books, they are very engaging and really easy reads because of the storytelling that you obviously from this podcast are so good at. Thank you for coming on the podcast again. We look forward to the next time we can do this. And I’ll leave you with the last word. 

40:47 – 41:12 

(CD): And I would just say that in the past couple of years, I think what you’ve done at Elara Nova is incredibly important. It’s a great service to the American industry, to the Pentagon and to the nation as a whole. I don’t think I was fully aware of that. Even a couple of years ago when you started out on this journey. 

And now that I am, you realize just how significant it is. So I would just turn back to you and say thank you for everything that you’re doing. It’s a great service and we’re grateful. 

41:13 – 41:53 

(SK): This has been an episode of “The Elara Epilogues,” a special edition series of “The Elara Edge” podcast. Elara Nova is the trusted global security partner delivering decisive advantage.  

As a strategic advisory firm, Elara Nova builds expert teams uniquely tailored for client needs to deliver actionable results. With the trusted insight to deliver your decisive edge, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in global 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. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge. 

Episode 39: Space Force Initiates a “Campaign of Learning” to Develop its Objective Force

The Elara Edge

Host: Scott King 

SME: Mike Dickey, Founding Partner at Elara Nova (MD) 

Lt Gen (Ret) Bill Liquori, Executive Partner at Elara Nova (BL) 

00:02 – 01:12 

This past spring the United States Space Force published two highly anticipated, forward-looking documents: Future Operating Environment 2040 and Objective Force 2040. When Chief of Space Operations General B. Chance Saltzman unveiled these documents at this year’s Space Symposium, he declared the service’s intention for them was to “drive questions, not provide answers.” 

Now, the Space Force wants not only its guardians, but its international and industry partners to engage, debate and provide feedback on the ideas laid out in these two documents — in what can be deemed a ‘campaign of learning’ — to evaluate what the future space domain might look like and help define the Space Force’s future force design requirements needed to operate and succeed in a rapidly-evolving and unpredictable domain.  

Welcome to The Elara Edge. We have two guests today, here to share their perspective on how we got to this pivotal moment, the driving force behind these documents, and where the Space Force’s international and industry partners should go from here. 

First we have Mike Dickey, Founding Partner at Elara Nova and the former Chief Architect of the United States Space Force.  

Mike, welcome to the show!

01:13 – 01:17 

(MD): Hey! Thank you, Scott. These are always great fun and hopefully of great use for our audience.  

01:18 – 01:33 

Yes, thank you, Mike. And then also joining us today is retired Lieutenant General Bill Liquori, an Executive Partner at Elara Nova and the first Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Strategy, Plans, Programs and Analysis for the United States Space Force. 

Sir, welcome back to the show.  

01:34 – 01:44 

(BL): Hey, it’s great to be back, Scott. And it’s even better this time to be partnered up with Mike. He and I have done many partnering across our time in government, and we get to continue to do it in retired life. 

So this is good.  

01:45 – 01:57 

Great. Well, before we get into these two forward-looking documents, let’s take a look into how we got to this moment.   

Where did the need to look at the future operating environment in space – and make force design plans accordingly – first begin? 

01:58 – 04:40 

(MD): You know, if I had to put a stake in the ground of when this all started, Scott, I would pick April of 2015. Because in April of 2015, General Hyten, who was the Commander of Air Force Space Command at the time, where most of the military national security space activities happened.  

He went on 60 Minutes and he talked on that 60 Minutes program to the American public and to the world about the threats that were emerging out of near peer adversaries at the time, Russia and China, how important space was to the American military and American society and what the impact might be if those things collided. 

And it really brought into the public consciousness the place where we were at, which is now really needing to consider how to operate a national security space architecture in the face of a threat. So that kicked off this small group of people that went off and did a study. 

And in April of 2016, which coincidentally, is at the Space Symposium, ten years before the release of these documents, the 2026 version, they released something called the Space Enterprise Vision. And the Space Enterprise vision was a product of this small group of folks who thought about the threat and thought conceptually about how the military space architecture would need to evolve to continue to operate in the face of that threat. 

And that was really the start of what is a robust effort now, and has been increasingly robust across the previous decade. So the space enterprise vision set that tone. And really in the fall of 2018 was the first big programmatic change that really changed one of the legacy programs. And it was a missile warning in this case and changed it to a different architectures for the future to be more resilient to that threat. 

It was all based on how the architecture that is used to support the joint force, which is, you know, things like communications, position, navigation and timing, missile warning, how all those things that were being fielded would stand up to the counter space offensive threat that the adversaries were building. So that analysis then started to inform force design for the future. 

And in December of 2019, when the Space Force was formed after the president signed the National Defense Authorization Act, that force design activity became organizationally institutionalized. So there’s an organization called the Space Warfighting Analysis Center, and it’s got a partner organization called Space Security and Defense Program. And they became the center of doing the force design analysis for the new service. 

And one of the documents that you mentioned is first designed for 2040. In this document, then is really a compilation of the work they’ve been doing over the last several years in all the different mission areas that they describe.

04:41 – 07:56 

(BL): If I was to add anything to what Mike said, I mean, he captured it very well. These two documents could be described as a natural evolution of where we have been, but with an eye towards how different the environment is today versus if we go all the way back to when Mike talked about in 2015, the early force design work that the new service did. 

As the Space Force’s 5 and 8 on the staff. I had teams that were part of informing the inputs to those on the requirements side, and then certainly the budget teams that were working to build our first independent budgets used the analysis from those force designs to feed our early budgets. But I would say those early force designs were by mission area. We couldn’t do them all at once so the Chief of Space Operations prioritizes which ones to go after or our national leadership prioritizes some of those.  

But I would describe them as heavily hardware focused. In other words, what were the on-orbit and ground system capabilities required to deliver a certain mission area? I think what was unique in that era was that not only were we looking at capability and effects delivery in the mission areas, but also what is the cost to do that and what is the most resilient way to do that?  

These two new documents are now that forward looking natural evolution. They take a look at where will the threat and technology evolve? The objective divides it into three areas. Conceptually, General Saltzman talks about routinely. We have our fielded force. That’s all of the people in the hardware that are fielded today delivering capability on behalf of the nation. Then we have the programmed force, which is informed by the program objective memorandum that my old office develops now, and that’s where the president’s budget has said we will put money. But if you leave it at just that, that doesn’t meet all the requirements. 

And so these two documents combined together are helped to get us to that objective force. And that is, you know, the force that we need, we have the force that we have, we have the force that we’ve budgeted for, and then we have the force we need. That’s that objective force. And that’s kind of how he broke them out for purposes of moving forward with the service. 

The other thing that I think these documents do even better than we have done in the past, I mentioned the force designs by design, they were heavily hardware focused. What was the hardware both on orbit and on the ground, required to deliver these mission capabilities? General Saltzman, as the chief, and General Raymond before him and all of our senior leaders, even before a separate service, had to wrestle with, ‘Okay, those are the widgets, but it takes more than just widgets to deliver an actual effect to a warfighter or to the nation.’ 

What these documents do is really spell out, ‘Hey, it’s not just those widgets. They also focus on what is the infrastructure required to make those things successful? What is the staffing required? What is the test and training capability required to bring these to fruition?’ And so I think it’s a way for our second service chief as he benefits from what the first chief did to really tie all of these together in one place.

07:57 – 08:09 

General Saltzman openly solicited feedback from the Space Force’s international and industry partners. 

What will the process look like as the Space Force looks to incorporate the feedback it receives into future iterations of these documents? 

08:10 – 10:29 

(MD): Yeah, the Space Force, just in the last month or so, has made a move to institutionalize organizationally how they think about this future force in the way they’re going to do that is they’ve created something called the S9, which is the Force Design and Analysis group. It’s a directorate on the space staff. And what that S9 director is going to be made up of three parts is really sort of the life cycle of how you develop these force designs. 

And there’s already a group in the Space Force that thinks about lessons learned and military doctrine and concepts that are out in the future. And one example that comes up that I’ll just use to sort of illustrate the point is, what is the Space Force’s role as our nation and many nations head out to the moon? Should we be paying attention to the things that are happening there from a space domain awareness perspective? 

Is there a role to set up position, navigation and timing infrastructure out beyond the earth? Like can we have a GPS? Is there G.P.S. for the moon? So the concepts group thinks about these sort of big things and futuristic types of issues and make some recommendations, and maybe they’ll conclude that there’s a role for the Space Force. Maybe there’s not. 

But let’s presume they think there is a role. So now we start to think about what that role might look like. And it’s tested in war games and tabletop exercises. And that’s really the second part of this life cycle of the future force design. So is to do that experimentation. And before you’re spending a lot of money on it, you’re doing these tabletop exercises and games. 

Maybe you’re using computers and doing simulations to look at these different futures and different force structures, how they might help you satisfy the concept that you came up with. And then you get through that and then you’re at step three. So now we have a concept that we believe in and that we’ve tested through these war games. And now it goes to a force design activity in the Space War Fighting Analysis Center in the SWAC.  

And that’s really the third part of the lifecycle. And that’s to say what would that look like from a hardware perspective? What types of capabilities you need in space? What types of systems do you need on the ground? And once that’s complete, then we push it over to Bill’s old office and programing. And the programing folks then have to work the budget and put money in across the years to move towards the force that’s envisioned from the force design. 

So the S9 new organization on the space staff, made up of three subordinate activities that feed this life cycle of thinking about the future force. 

10:30 – 11:34 

(BL): Yeah, I think I would amplify the S9 certainly seems to be a likely place that will have a big hand in the assessment of how things are going, if you will. Specifically, in the intro to the documents, General Saltzman talks about how I’m paraphrasing. 

These aren’t the be all, end all answer, but they’re designed to posit what the future will look like and what the Space Force will need to succeed in that future. But ultimately, they’re designed to start a campaign of learning that the service will go through with its partners and others to truly shape what does that objective force look like? How does it modify over the years? 

Certainly the S9 team in those different sub elements will have a hand in that, but the entire service will have a hand in how is this going? Where do we need to evolve? As a matter of fact, there’s part of the document that specifically calls out for our planners, this is what you should be doing with this document. For our programmers, think about these things when you read the document for our capability deliverers and on and on and on.  

11:35 – 12:27 

(MD): And if I could amplify General Liquori’s amplification, these questions the document asked, and this campaign of learning and putting that out in the public for everybody to read and to see is not just for inside the service consumption. It’s also a signal there to the industrial base is going to have to create these things and the ability for industry to see what the service is thinking about, where they’re headed, and start to think themselves about where they want to put some research dollars, where they might want to involve capital markets, which of course is super prevalent now in the space industry, where they might need that capital come in and help create the capabilities that would achieve the concepts that are underpinning this. Look at the future in 2040. So those are super important questions that involve everyone that’s associated with bringing a future force to reality. It’s not just a service, it’s all the services. It’s a defense industrial base. It’s the capital markets and everything that goes into that. 

12:28 – 12:41 

Now, let’s dive deeper into each of these respective documents, starting with the Future Operating Environment 2040.  

What are your take-aways from this document? And how does the Space Force prioritize its needs based on the emerging threat environment in space? 

12:42 – 14:59 

(BL): I’ll start at the Future Operating Environment. Very well described. It’s designed to be forward looking out into 2040. But holy cow, what’s going to happen between now and then? I don’t think any of us has the exact crystal ball. And that’s kind of the challenge that every military service wrestles with is: how is the environment going to change for my specific domain?  

And the Space Force is no different. Our environment has been changing at a very rapid pace of late, and so that does make it a challenge. I think probably the most insightful line in the combination of the two documents, is in the intro that General Salzman wrote to the Future Operating Environment, and that was, “[t]he inability to predict the future does not relieve the Space Force of the requirement to plan for it.” 

I think that was a message to all of the people that will read this document to say, ‘If we wait for the future to be here, it’ll be too late and our government processes to be able to be prepared for it will be behind the power curve. right?’ 

So then you think of, ‘Well, gosh, there’s so many different things out there that could change between now and then. The threat continues to grow. Technology is changing. The political environment is changing.’ All of those things. And so what’s interesting here, they allude to it in the beginning of the document and it says that the service used this methodology where they looked at four alternative futures out there and had groups of people wrestle with each of those four alternatives and then go through and look at all the publicly available data that would inform the different elements of those alternatives. 

They tested the theories of each alternative, the limits of technology defined in each alternative, and then used that to identify trends both from a technology perspective as well as how the military may evolve. And then they workshopped each of those scenarios with a group of people. And those people included, as we were sort of talking about earlier military, civilian and commercial representatives, to get the full spectrum of how will the space domain evolve over time? And so I think that’s how the service has decided to tackle this uncertain future, but with an eye towards ‘Okay, we need to make some decisions now. What’s the best way to do that?’ 

15:00 – 16:22 

(MD): It’s interesting that in the document it talks about some of the future threats, you know, the machine learning and AI. There’s also a discussion about China having a 21,000 satellite constellation. Well, we talked about the history of where all this started. And ten years ago in the space enterprise vision and some of that early work, those two things were not part of the conversation. 

That was not on the threat picture. And so, you know, in ten years, it’s changed quite a bit. And then the next 15 years out to 2040, it’s going to change again in ways that you can’t predict. So what General Corey says is absolutely essential. And it’s why I think the Space Force has created this organization to really be able to think about the threats as they evolve and to make changes on a more frequent basis to the architecture that they field into the forces that they need to support that architecture. 

So, Scott, you asked about how do you begin to prioritize? And really, I think you have to prioritize with time. What’s the most pressing threat? What do we see right in the near-term future that we have to deal with? And that’s typically not a force design conversation, because the force designed by its nature, is supposed to be looking out into the future beyond the current 3 or 4 or five year time frame. 

But that is the lens you have to look at from the start, you know, what are the things coming up like? We’ve mentioned, like, I like large proliferated Leo constellations, and now we have to start bringing into these force design conversations. And so if we need to change the force structure or tactics or we have to shift where we’re investing our money. 

16:23 – 16:36 

Let’s turn to the Objective Force 2040, which was essentially presented as an answer to the Future Operating Environment 2040 document. 

What are some of the mission areas described here and are these mission areas an appropriate starting point at this point for the objective force? 

16:37 – 18:52 

(BL): Yeah, sure. I mean, I think the short answer is we’re doing missions today. Those are the missions that make sense to capture here as a starting point. So yes, but they’ve pinned them by the Space Force’s core and enabling functions.  

So the Space Force core functions of space control that has the mission areas of orbital warfare, electromagnetic warfare and cyber warfare. Then we’ve got global mission operations which has satellite communications, space based sensing, and targeting, missile warning, missile tracking, navigation warfare.  

And then there are the access mission areas as well, like satellite control. The requirement to be able to talk to your satellite and get data from it. Lift obviously, to put any of our satellites in orbit. And then in order to do that lift, we’ve got to have a launch range that we can control. And so all of those fit in there.  

But then it also captures the enabling functions of intelligence, cyber operations, command and control and space domain awareness. So we’ve got quite the huge subset of missions that the service has got to tackle and I do think this is the right place to start.  

I think one of the things that stood out to me is not so much mission area by mission area, because who knows, in 2040 we may have additional mission areas, but in the objective force design document, I think one of the things that stood out to me are the actual design principles that cut across all of those mission areas, right? 

And so things like warfighters first, hybrid by design. That’s some of the work that the early predecessors did that guided us into this hybrid approach for many of the current force designs and that continues. It’ll be interoperable by design, integrating partner and the advantages of commercial. We’ll get to resilience in multiple ways. But one of those that’s called out specifically is by distribution. 

Competition is kind of the new norm – that was another one that’s in there. Also, I’d flag something that we’ve been talking about since the service stood up and we said we were going to be a digital service first. Well data as a warfighting advantage is that next natural evolution of a design principle here and then distributed command and control, modularity and cyber resilience fits right back into that digital by design as well. 

So I think those design principles called out that are cutting across all the mission areas – that stood out to me. 

18:53 – 21:08 

(MD): I would say that this hybrid architecture approach is key and it comes across in both documents, especially in the objective force document of how diversifying missions across different orbits and different constellations, bringing in partners, bringing in commercial. That is a significant shift. And it’s one that is not easy to do, right? 

When you’re talking about interoperability, which raises issues and concerns about cybersecurity and how do you connect different networks to each other? But that is a key force design principle going forward that the Space Force and everyone that supports it is going to have to figure out: the idea of hybrid architectures with interoperability and command and control across that hybrid nature. 

And the other important thing that comes across is that this new proliferated Leo constellations. I mean, this is something, again, ten years ago, we weren’t really thinking about. So one of the mission areas that’s talked about is space based sensing and targeting. And that’s kind of a new area for the Space Force. There was always some element of environmental monitoring. 

But now we’re talking about moving missions that typically had been done in the air domain up into the space domain. So airborne moving target indicators. You think Awacs is the air version of that ground moving target indicators and J stars. These are things that have been done in the air domain historically, but the air domain is also more and more at risk and difficult to operate in the face of all the threats that that they have to worry about, too. 

And so those missions are coming to space and those proliferated constellations do the things that are best served by being close to the Earth. And those things are new to the Space Force. So that’s going to be an interesting evolution to watch. And really, I think the focus in a lot of these areas as it moves from the conceptual into acquisition is the military component, right? 

So the understanding of the information is not necessarily flying the satellite, but understanding information, the use of that information for targeting in this case less important is the management and day to day operating of constellations and keeping them in the right place. That’s something that’s done in the commercial sector. It’s done in the military. But I see a more and more a connection between industrial partners with letting the commercial market do those types of things, fly the constellation while the military people sit on top of that and make the military decisions that are based on information coming out of the constellations. 

21:09 – 21:34 

Now, the Space Force has made a clear and concerted effort to incorporate commercial partners and capabilities into its architecture over the past several years, namely through efforts like the Commercial Space Strategy and the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve. 

So what does this hybrid architecture – made up of both government and commercial systems – look like in practice? And how does the service go about delegating which mission areas commercial partners can focus on first?

21:35 – 22:29 

(MD): Yeah. Good question. I think one of the most important things that you have to do is think about military essential functions. What are the things that have to be decided by military people, people that are in under a chain of command all the way up to the commander in chief, which is things like pulling a trigger. You never give a commercial provider the ability to pull the trigger on any kind of a weapon system. And that analogy fits here in space too. 

So what you’re going to do with that information, what decisions get made with that information. Those military essential functions have to be pieced out before implementing the things that you’re talking about of commercial can do some of this stuff. So commercial now provides a lot of information through electro-optical sensing and radio frequency spectrum sensing and that information is provided to the military and then military people decide what to do about that information.  

So it’s a well-worn path here. This is not something that is brand new. We just got to make sure we know where those bright lines are. And then aportion accordingly. 

22:30 – 23:54 

(BL): I would say my hope with the two documents, the forward looking nature of them and how they specifically speak to different partners, if you will, across the government and industry side of things, is that by publishing these and putting them out there and General Saltzman even talks about it in his introduction. 

He wants not only his guardians to wrestle with these ideas, debate these ideas, and argue these ideas. But he wants all those other audiences to do the same thing. And my hope would be that by publishing these, it enables those other partners external to the service, if you will, whether they be in government, in the joint force, in other parts of the executive branch, the legislative branch, commercial partners, allies, to wrestle with those things, so that ideally, when they come to engage with the service, they do it armed with the information that’s in these documents and knowing what the service is wrestling with, so that it’s earlier in our process that we begin to say, ‘Who’s got the best fit for this piece of a particular mission? How can we provide resilience or redundancy, or how can we be complementary? And I’ll do a piece of this mission and you do a piece of this mission.’ 

We’ve been getting better over the years, but I think by publishing these two documents and the level of details that are in them, it will enable us to do that even better and I think that’s required for success out in the 2040 timeframe. 

23:55 – 24:12 

Earlier we spoke to the forward-looking nature of these documents and how General Saltzman explicitly stated these documents are meant to, “drive questions, not provide answers.” 

What do you see as those major questions that these documents are driving towards? And what’s the value in posing questions, rather than just delivering answers? 

24:13 – 26:49 

(BL): Ultimately, the first one is written to define the environment, right? The second one is written to describe what is the force that we need. What is that objective force? So that’s the ultimate question it’s trying to answer.  

But as with many of the strategic level documents that both General Raymond and General Saltzman have published, again, the desire is that the workforce and our partners wrestle with the ideas, debate the ideas, because generally speaking, when you do that, you come out with a better answer than just a single person taking a look at something and saying, ‘Here’s the answer.’  

And I think the other thing General Saltzman wisely realizes is if he published a document that says ‘this is the answer.’ It was good for when he reviewed what he was doing when he wrote it. But then people just challenged the document. Well, he wrote a document so that that could happen and didn’t say, ‘This is the answer.’  

He does specifically call out some of the questions, like: What organizational constructs would best help the service deliver on these mission areas. It goes back to the point I was making earlier, that our force designs originally were highly focused on hardware and software, and now these documents recognize, ‘Hey, we’ve got to have organizational constructs that are going to be best set up for success in these mission areas.’ 

We talked about hybrid architectures. One of the questions that gets spelled out in here is: what are the hybrid ground architectures look like that give us our best set of resilience and how would we manage those? Is it a combination of government and industry architectures and who operates which parts of those?  

There’s another question on: how does the Space Force validate its readiness in each of these mission areas?The more diverse, the more hybrid a mission area becomes, the harder it becomes to define readiness. But that doesn’t relieve us from having to capture. Are we ready in this mission area in a contested environment? Or are we not? And so that’s a question that’s out there as the service continues to wrestle with these documents moving forward.  

And then the other one that is flagged in there specifically talks about what emerging concepts will offer the highest value opportunities for this service? This goes back to something Mike was alluding to earlier within that S9 directorate. And this idea of a concepts and technology arm of that organization, there’s probably a limitless number of concepts that people could come up with as they look at these documents and how the environment will unfold.  

Unfortunately, the budget is never limitless, so the service really needs to wrestle with, okay, if we have ten concepts out there that we’re tackling right now, which ones are going to be the most value added to our end user and to the nation when it comes to securing our nation’s interest?  

26:50 – 27:13 

(MD):Yeah. And by putting these questions out there in the public, you sort of unleash all of the think tanks and industry and practitioners in this environment who are going to have great ideas too, and who hopefully can pull those ideas into this campaign of learning and then the conceptualizing and the wargaming and the force designing or it it just becomes a flywheel and it just makes the answers that you get better and better. 

The more people that can provide input. 

27:13 – 27:24 

Now Mike, going back to the hybrid architecture approach that you talked about.  

Can you elaborate on the significance of having these types of conversations with commercial partners this early in the process? I mean, we’re talking 15 years in advance? 

27:25 – 28:28 

(MD): When you finally come to the point of wanting to apply taxpayer money against the problem, the more mature you’ve brought the concept and the technology, the better off you always are. And fielding a combat effective system. So as the industry thinks about what it means to be hybrid, what it means to be interoperable, there are technology things involved in that. 

There are policy things involved in that. There are things like intellectual property and business models that are involved with that. And those debates and conversations don’t get resolved overnight.  

And those debates and conversations don’t get resolved overnight. These are things that, again, you have to pressure test, debate and work through a number of different processes and then as the concepts mature, then you start feeling more confident that you can start to apply money against actually now building prototypes and building systems.  

So I think that’s an important aspect of this hybrid world is really understanding across all of those different vectors, the challenges that are involved in bringing dissimilar things together, things that are owned by other people together, you know, crossing international boundaries. This is all hard. 

28:29 – 30:07 

(BL): If I could build on what Mike was saying. So two groups of people that routinely engage with our Space Force, certainly at the senior levels, our allies and partners internationally and industry, and those conversations often start with on the Allied side, it’s, ‘Hey, if I could spend €1 more or one pick your currency more on a space capability that would help the United States and us together as an allied force be better. Where should we spend that money? That’s a question that comes up often. 

On the industry side. Hey, if I was going to spend some of my own internal dollars from the company, where would it be most beneficial to you as a service for me to do some research? Or what is the toughest problem you have as a service so that I know as an industry partner what capability to go build? 

Well, now there’s a set of documents that you can review before even going into those conversations, so that it starts that conversation in a more informed place and ideally gets us to the heart of the matter, which is, ‘Well, if we combine the Space Force capability with this particular allied capability, now we might really be somewhere, ‘Hey, let’s get some of our teams together and wargame this. Let’s get some of our teams together and explore this concept multilaterally. Or hey, let’s get a few industry partners together as we do this next force design, informed by the objective force and informed by the future operating environment. And see where the combined government industry solution can get us.’  

Does it put us in a better spot?  

30:08 – 30:32 

And Bill, you mentioned these documents get into some of the organizational steps the Space Force needs to employ to deliver on its mission.  

The Objective Force calls for the Space Force to double its personnel over the next ten years. But given the Space Force was originally designed to be intentionally lean and digital first from the beginning, is this doubling of personnel a contradiction of the founding vision for the Space Force? Or is that more of a natural evolution as the service matures? 

30:31 – 31:37  

(BL): I believe it’s absolutely a natural evolution of the force as it matures. There’s a lot of things that went into why that service was stood up as a lean service. I mean, I think for the foreseeable future, we’re still going to be the smallest service in the Department of War. But this idea that we need to double the force over the next decade is a natural evolution from the fact that of all the things that we talked about and all of the things that are posited in that future operating environment, there is going to continue to be increasing demand for space capabilities. 

There are going to be an increasing and more diverse number of threats, which means we’re going to need to have an increased amount of resilience and capability in those types of things.  

You don’t get those for free. And so there’s a natural evolution that we’ll need additional capabilities. We’ll need additional organizations to operate those capabilities, which will mean we’ll need additional personnel to be able to do that. We’ll need additional personnel to be able to train those capabilities. We’ll need additional personnel to be able to test those capabilities. So yeah, I look at it as a natural evolution.  

31:38 – 33:01 

(MD): And the country is asking the Space Force to do more than the country was asking the Space Force to do in December of 2019. There are new missions. 

 We’re talking about bringing airborne moving target indicator into space, ground moving target indications in the space. Golden Dome has a space based interceptor layer in space that has to be managed and operated.  

So a lot of new missions are coming to the Space Force. And sort of it at the base is also this counterspace mission, right? The ability to fend off adversary hostile actions and protect US assets and as that threat matures, that gets more complicated, that requires additional capability and additional force structure. 

So yes, absolutely. A natural evolution of what the country is asking the Space Force to do. And, you know, I’ll say it, you know, doubling the size of the Space Force still makes it the smallest service in the military, right? So it doesn’t relieve the service of doing things in manpower efficient ways. So there’s still absolutely an element of the digital piece, right?   

And so cyber is a huge part of this. The modeling and simulation, live virtual constructive training, the interoperable architectures and being able to design those in model-based ways before you actually start bending metal and committing big dollars. All those are still at the core of what the Space Force is doing. But the missions have expanded and therefore the personnel, resources and other resources have to expand. 

33:02 – 33:28 

There’s also the prevalent and well-known challenge of bureaucratic inertia that can bog down government agencies, including military services and the Department of War as a whole. 

So if the Space Force is actually able to scale and double in size over the next decade. How can General Saltzman, and his eventual successors leading the service, make sure they do so efficiently and effectively while also mitigating the risk of adding bureaucratic inertia and slowing down what the service can actually do? 

33:29 – 34:24 

(BL): That’s a great follow up question, Scott, because we talked about, ‘Hey, this service started as a lean service.’  

We still need to be a lean service. The Secretary at War has started a couple areas throughout the entire department that the Space Force has absolutely got to be a key piece of. And that’s acquisition transformation, transformation from the old JCIDS system. So requirements transformation. Those are all designed to get leaner, not just from the perspective of having less people do it and do it cheaper, but it’s about speed. 

The adversary is evolving their threat capabilities at incredible rates. We need to stay ahead of that. And the only way to do that in the 21st century and the threats that we face, is to be able to iterate on requirements faster, to iterate on capability delivery faster. And so we still need to be lean. But that doesn’t mean we have to stay at the levels that we were at when the service was founded. 

34:25 – 34:59 

(MD): Some of this is about empowering people in positions of leadership, too, right? And one example I’ll give is the Chief of Space Operations. That position has been named by the Department to be responsible for space requirements across all of the joint force. And so the CSO can break ties and make decisions on what’s going to happen to support the joint force from a space perspective. At some point somebody has to move that decision forward and in this case, the CSO has the ability to move space decisions forward in that role that’s been given to him by the Department.

35:00 – 35:24 

There was another recent announcement that will factor into how these documents move forward. The Department of the Air Force has submitted a record-setting budget request for the Space Force for Fiscal Year 2027 at a total of just over $71 billion — more than double what the service had in the prior year.  

What does that number, if fulfilled and appropriated by Congress, do for the Space Force in developing its objective force for the future?  

35:25 – 36:29 

(BL): As the former budget guy, I guess first I would start this answer with, I don’t think you will find a service chief or a service programmer that would ever say, ‘That’s all we need. Thank you.’  

Now, is that a great down payment on moving forward to where we need to go? Absolutely. And as the Space Force, very appreciative of that budget increase, whatever the final amount ends up being in the appropriations side.  

Absolutely. And then they know they have a responsibility to make the best use of that money going forward. But to the point Mike made earlier, the nation continues to ask the service to do more than it did originally, and I would anticipate that will continue.  

And therefore, in the future versions of these documents and the objective force that gets defined in the future, I would anticipate there will be a need for increased budget. Just like the Department of War’s budget has continued to increase over time based on the threats that are out there and the security that the nation requires.  

36:30 – 37:29 

(MD): I would say that the budget request is exactly that. It’s a budget request. So it’s the administration asking the Congress to appropriate this money.  

These two documents are key to that conversation. These two documents allow the Space Force and the Department of War to message to the Congress and to the appropriators what we’re facing in our space security arena, right? And the resources that are going to be required to really get ahead of the threat and stay preeminent in space security.  

So I think we can tie those two things together. These documents really sort of are laying out the challenges. And you can read it. There’s a couple hundred pages of material here, and you can see the challenges being faced and the decisions that have to be made, and the force structure that’s going to have to be created to achieve what the nation is asking the Space Force to do. 

So it’s absolutely a down payment [for] incorporating all these new missions and these threat challenges are going to require the Space Force to grow and they will have to grow and be sustained at some higher level than it is today. 

37:30 – 37:38 

What do you think is unique about the transparency underlying these documents? 

What does that do for facilitating engagement between the Space Force and its partners? Both in scope and in scale? 

37:39 – 38:29 

(MD): There’s a line at the end of the objective force document, I think that says that this set of documents need to now be sort of put into action. And I think that the conversation with international partners is a really important part of that. 

Combatant Commands, you know, live in geographic regions and are with their international partners all the time, but I think there’s an opportunity to make these international conversations more robust, more meaningful, more impactful that I hope the Space Force will grab on to and take that opportunity. Because there is, you know, with NATO committing additional resources to future space sovereign capabilities that they have or capabilities they can contribute to this coalition. 

We need to take them up on that and I would really encourage the Space Force to use these documents to have those conversations in a more robust way than they’ve been able to in the past.  

38:30 – 40:54 

(BL): Yeah, I guess my comment on the transparency, I think, like everything else with these documents, my guess is that was malice of forethought. It’s an acknowledgment that in today’s era, in the 21st century, there is far more information available than ever before. 

And so you combine that with – it was really only March of 2018 – is the first time that in an unclassified setting, we would talk about space and warfighting. Prior to that, prior to the publishing of the National Space Strategy in March of 2018, the conversation of space and warfighting had to happen in a classified setting. The challenge with that is it makes it hard for some of those that need to provide support to understand what it is actually that you need. 

Now, obviously, there are several members of Congress that are cleared, but the entire Congress isn’t. The general public obviously doesn’t all have a security clearance. But in 2018, we made the decision to say, ‘This has happened. We need to acknowledge it so that we can have a more fulsome discussion about the benefits that the nation gets from space, as well as the threats that are out there to contest that.’ 

And I think by publishing these documents to the level of detail that has been done, it’s a natural continuation of that, so that the support from the general public is there. So that all of our members of Congress understand the complete and comprehensive picture of exactly what our nation’s vital national interests in space are, as well as what are the threats that are out there to counter them? 

And therefore, what is the objective force we need to be able to succeed in that environment? As Mike alluded to, it’s infinitely easier to have conversations with allies if you’re in at least to start with in this unclassified setting.  

Industry – the same thing. Some of industry has clearances and some don’t. And so the starting point that I would imagine that the service wrestled with and said the compilation of information that we’ve captured here is unclassified, and we’ll move forward with that. And that will give us a very good baseline to start our conversations with.  

There will still be a need for classified systems, capabilities and conversations, and those will happen in the appropriate spaces. But these two unclassified documents give a great baseline to really move forward in this allied and partnered and hybrid fashion.

40:55 – 41:07 

So if you were to put yourself in the shoes of an executive at an industry partner or even a senior leader for an allied or partner nation — what are your takeaways from these documents and the messages and questions posed within them? How would you move forward from here?  

40:08 – 42:47 

(BL): Yeah, I think if I’m an allied, a senior leader that’s engaging with the Space Force in whatever forum that may be, if it’s an individual one on one meeting, if it’s a group forum. If it’s a series of workshops. 

I now have, at least again, as I described it, a really good baseline of how the United States Space Force thinks about the space environment and how it will evolve into 2040. And I also have a really good feel for what is the Space Force focused on in this objective force design on what they need to be successful in defining that objective force. 

So now if I’m an allied partner, I can take a look and I can say, ‘This is what they’re going after in the navwar area, or this is what they’re going after in the orbital warfare arena. What capabilities do I have that could either augment or help improve the resiliency, the redundancy, the ability to reconstitute those types of things?’ 

And so it’s: I’m not guessing any more about what I think the service is looking for, based on combing through every speech that’s given by every senior leader in the Space Force, they have now documented it for me in a baseline document, and I know they’re going to be updating it. So I have an opportunity to inform that. They specifically asked me to wrestle with the ideas and come forward with thoughts. 

So I just think it provides for a much more informed discussion. And I think you could make the same case for industry senior leaders as well. You’re much more informed going into the conversation so that it doesn’t start with two people across a table saying, so what do you need from me? What do you have to offer? It starts in a much further place down the road.

42:48 – 43:46 

(MD): If I’m the CEO of the startup, or mid tier or prime – it doesn’t matter, right? The document helps me to go to my investors, to my board of directors and to say, ‘Look at where the Space Force is headed.’ I need to put my company in front of that wave and here’s how we intend to do it.  

They’ve written down their challenges. They’ve written down their questions. We’ve got an answer to some of these questions. And we’re going to put some money against this. And then in the context of that document, in the context of the things that they said they need. Go back and talk to the Space Force about what it is we can provide. So many times, especially sort of in the tech world, they come up with a widget or a technology and say, ‘I have this technology, right?’ 

Well, okay, help me understand how you’re going to use that technology to solve one of my problems. Well, here’s the list of problems in these documents. And so you have a better chance of putting your solution in the context of something that solves a national security problem as you bring it forward and hope to get it adopted in some force design.

43:46 – 43:55 

Now that the Space Force has laid out this vision and looks ahead to iterate on the five, ten and fifteen year mark to 2040 — what does success look like for the objective force? 

43:56 – 44:58 

(MD): As I look back having been at the beginning of this ten years ago in 2016, I’m encouraged by what I’m seeing happen now. We’re starting to move in that direction. The things that we talked about in the Space Enterprise Vision, you can see being unfolded through some of the systems that are being deployed today, you see proliferated LEO architectures. You see  disaggregation of putting everything on one satellite that’s a fragile architecture. But breaking those functions up amongst a number of satellites, that’s more resilient, that’s happening.  

So some of these concepts and principles have begun, and that’s rewarding to see. Well, today, actually, you know, if I look up, I still basically see the same architecture we’ve had for a long time. But I think that is starting to move. It’s starting to pivot. 

And I think five years from now, if I can look up and see a more hybrid architecture, things that are dissimilar, things that are connected as we’ve talked about in this conversation. Solving that problem I think it gives us a step up in resiliency and capability and that’s one of the things I’ll be looking for five years on. 

44:59 – 46:08 

(BL): I would add ideally success means we continued this journey a few steps further. I don’t think any of us at the era that we were in the military space business was completely satisfied with where we were. And so these documents are a good indicator of continued progress, but success in the future years takes several forms. 

I think whoever the senior leaders of the Space Force are in 5 or 10 years from now, ideally, they’re enjoying more fulsome conversations with their allies and partner  and their industry counterparts.  

Ideally there will be some proposed answers to some of the questions that are posed in these documents. I say proposed because that’s the idea, right? Propose some answers, develop some concepts that go with those answers. Wargame them. Test them out. Maybe the first proposed answer isn’t the last one but ideally we’re moving forward and trying some things out.  

And then lastly I would say to the point of these documents being unclassified and out there for everyone. I believe success will be that our guardians continue to be more informed, more capable, and more recognized for what they do to secure the nation’s interests in, to and from space. 

46:09 – 46:22 

And where does Elara Nova factor into this?We have these documents that are now publicly released and available for the world to see.  

You’ve both already put yourselves in the shoes of international and industry leaders. So where does Elara Nova fit into this path forward? 

46:23 – 47:53 

(MD): Well our team at Elara Nova is chock-full of the leaders who have been involved in these conversations and debates and decisions since the conversation started a decade ago. I use as exhibit A my friend and colleague General Bill Liquori, who got his street cred as a weapons and tactics officer. Flew satellites for the intelligence community. Was responsible for space operations of basically the entire military space architecture. Helped write that National Security Space Strategy in 2018 from the White House and then was responsible for all the first independent budgets of a new military service. 

So these are the kind of people and people that have been in all of the six mission areas and the enabling functions and led those areas. Those are the people that we’ve surrounded ourselves with at Elara Nova and have all the scar tissue and the successes and the failures that they are ready to pass on to other people who are doing this work. 

And we continue to stay engaged in all aspects of this as we go about our work. You know, I’d say we’re all personally invested through our individual 20 or 30 or 40 year professional careers in the direction that the country is taking in space and how important it is for our security and our economy to get this right. 

So we can help our friends in the government. We can help strengthen and focus the industrial base, and we can help international partners contribute their own space capabilities, as we’ve talked about here today. And we can talk to the capital markets about where their investments ought to be focused to really be most impactful. So that’s how we founded Elara Nova that we can continue to contribute and we love doing that every day.

47:54 – 48:20 

(BL): Yeah, and all I would add is obviously the four co-founders, as they said, there’s a need for a space consultancy company and now even evolved beyond just space. They had the foresight to go out and find and hire a workforce that has an incredibly diverse skill set and set of experiences that certainly help inform the way forward, specifically with documents like these two as well as many others.

48:21 – 48:57 

This has been an episode of The Elara Edge. Elara Nova is the trusted global security partner delivering decisive advantage.  

As a strategic advisory firm, Elara Nova builds expert teams uniquely tailored for client needs to deliver actionable results. With the trusted insight to deliver your decisive edge, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in global 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. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge.

Episode 38: New Enterprise Command and Control Program Office to Enhance Commander Decision-Making

The Elara Edge Podcast

Host: Scott King 

SME: Air Vice-Marshal (Ret) Mark Chappell, Executive Partner at Elara Nova  

00:02 – 01:20 

As emerging technologies like artificial intelligence are increasingly leveraged to streamline and enhance command and control, the Department of War is expected to announce a new program office that will coalesce and coordinate information and communication pipelines that will empower commanders to make more timely and effective decisions.  

While an official announcement from the Department of War is still forthcoming, DefenseScoop recently reported that the new Enterprise Command and Control Program Office will oversee current AI and data platforms like Maven Smart System and the Edge Data Mesh technology stack as part of a pending program of record for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2). Collectively, this “Enterprise C2 Suite” will provide the latest iteration of technologies and tools available for commanders to implement their command and control responsibility. 

Welcome to The Elara Edge! Our topic today is the Enterprise Command and Control Program Office and how it fits into the broader evolution of command and control systems. 

Our guest today is retired Air Vice-Marshal Mark Chappell. After serving for 36 years with the United Kingdom Armed Forces, he retired as a Senior British Military Advisor to U.S. Central Command.  

Sir, welcome to the show!

01:21 – 01:22 

Thank you. Scott. Great to join you.

01:23 – 01:33 

It’s great to have you.  

As we get started, there can be some misconceptions around the term “command and control” or C2. So can you start us off by first defining what we mean by “command and control?” 

01:34 – 04:11 

Yeah. Of course, Scott. So through my career, I’ve been able to witness the evolution of C2 systems on both sides of the Atlantic and how they are increasingly helping warfighters in what is an ever complicated battlefield. So I think you hit on a really important subject to just talk about straight away and that is understanding what we mean when we say ‘command and control.’ 

I still witness lots of people confusing what C2 is, mixing it with communication systems and domain specific distractions. I always joke that a day without an argument about C2 is a day wasted. So it’s important to break the two words I think. Command is the authority given to somebody to execute the mission. And it’s usually passed to the commander by a higher, often political level authority. The next bit, the control bit is the direction given by that commander.  

I don’t know why it’s so difficult. People do have a habit of over complicating this. And it depends – nation to nation. But, as I said, people confuse the definition of a commander giving direction, command and control, with the systems that carry the data. So I’ve seen papers written on command and control, but really they’re talking about the communication barriers. 

It’s nothing to do with the authority in the person and the direction that they’re giving. And sometimes that confusion between what C2 is and the systems around it, which enable command and control, can make for a blurry gray conversation. And as always, if you don’t agree with what you’re talking about at the start, you can go off in slightly different directions. 

Colonel John Boyd, who we’ll all be familiar with, primarily of the ‘Ooda Loop’ fame. And his command thesis thought, though, that the phrase C2 was unhelpful. 

He preferred to frame the concept as “analysis and leadership.” In essence, look at what’s going on – the analysis part and then give some direction – the leadership part. And really, what we’re talking about with this command and control is just another articulation of his famous ‘Ooda Loop.’ So within that, the JADC2 strategy is phrased almost in a similar sense as sense, make sense, decide, and disseminate, which is pretty much the same thing. 

And while these principles all still hold true, the proliferation of modern tech and the associated vast lakes of data that we’re seeing now, when that’s harnessed and processed effectively give the potential for first improving real-time understanding. And second, with the blend of improved training for commanders.And that’s really important. We need to talk about that a bit later on. With machine learning and AI advancements, the potential for better and faster decision-making is what’s emerging from this.

04:12 – 04:17 

And how has the practice of command and control evolved over time, particularly as technologies have advanced?  

04:18 – 07:21 

Yeah. So, I think history would tell us that, for example, before World War Two, wars tended to be fought within a single domain. So tanks fought tanks, ships fought ships, and aircraft fought aircraft. And that was partly due to a commander only really having awareness within their own domain.  

With the advent of blitzkrieg tactics. Arguably, this is where we first saw it. We saw the beginnings of a command and control change, and that was a blending and a morphing of multi-domain operations.  

First time, really, where we were using systems, sensors, radios, if you like, to help direct across domains such that we could exploit potential advantages that we may or may not have had, or in those cases that the German forces had. 

And that increased during the Cold War. Soviet forces presented us with a new problem, which was effectively being outnumbered. And to address this, the Army and Air Force proposed a new approach that truly combined air and land power for the first time by developing new technologies to identify enemy locations.  

This concept was known as the air-land battle, and its three dimensional approach sought to use the advantages in ISR. So intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance to see deep into the battle space and direct firepower onto potentially reinforcements.  

Those deep strikes then complemented the ground forces’ ability to concentrate firepower at critical places, and that limited the adversary’s numerical advantage. However, in order to execute this, you need to know what’s going on to a higher level of information or fidelity.  

The best way to visualize this is to break it down, really. And you can’t fight what you can’t see. That sounds quite simplistic, but our ability to sense what was going on in more than one domain and more than just with the eyeball became fundamental. So all of a sudden, the ability to see in different spectrums, different elements of the battlespace was key to this. 

It was the start point. Often in this world, whenever you have a system, it won’t often give you a clear yes or no answer. It’s always something gray and it’s always something difficult. So there’s a degree of analysis required even now in modern day systems based on contradictory results on whatever interrogation that’s been done.  

And then once you’ve got all of that together, it needs to be processed such that a commander or an individual can use that information effectively. And so to answer your question, our ability to see more and to process it, allowed the commander to make better, quicker decisions. 

And this resulted in the development of new systems just two are JSTARS and [sic]. And that brought with it the need for improved communication networks, which in turn brought the space and cyber domains into the fight for the first time.  

So with these systems, when they were combined, commanders were able to gain a quicker understanding of the battlespace and then improve the response time to direct fires onto the enemy forces.

07:22 – 07:34 

And so how did this changing operational environment create a need for the Joint All Domain Command and Control (or JADC2) strategy, which was released by the Pentagon in early 2022?  

And what progress has been made since the JADC2 strategy was first introduced? 

07:35 – 11:06 

Yeah, sure. So given the advances and changes in how we fight, it’s critical that all domains and services can communicate and interact with each other effectively. 

Unfortunately and likely through a fair chunk of sod’s law, each of the military services set off and developed their own tactical network, which was in part or completely incompatible with those of the other services, i.e. the Army couldn’t talk to anybody else, and neither could the Air Force and neither could the Navy. 

And with that in mind, the Joint All Domain Command Control JADC2 system, or concept, was brought together in the Pentagon to connect sensors from all of the military services into a single network across the 11 Combatant Commands while also using artificial intelligence algorithms to help improve decision making.  

So what we’re really talking about here is a matrix. For this to work then, numerous activities need to take place and they’ve been broken into some five logical lines of effort. 

The first one being the Data Enterprise. We talked about the large volume of data which is available now. Well, joint force and mission partners must be able to discover and access any data and information from all warfighting domains at all levels of warfare and this alone brings with it a significant standardization challenge.  

The second one, equally important, is the Human Enterprise. Militaries, and particularly the commanders within those militaries need to be trained to fully harness these capabilities. And this includes what, where, when machine learning and AI can assist, plus, very importantly, where these aspects may add risk. There’s a whole large debate going on now about where AI and humans should play within a targeting cycle, particularly when we’re talking about lethal force. 

The next one, I like to think of this one as the glue, is the Technical Enterprise. This is enormous. And it holds JADC2 to together and makes it work in the real world. And this LOE enhances, for example, the shared situational awareness, global collaboration, joint planning, visualization, which is usefully  termed sometimes as the single pane of glass, predictive readiness and logistics, and then finally, real time synchronization of targeting. Within the targeting LOE, commanders require secure world wide communications in a degraded and contested electromagnetic spectrum. 

And so LOE3 addresses the transport infrastructure of JADC2, and it provides the essential minimum features necessary to ensure continuous command and control – really.  

Four is nuclear command and control and communications. You know, if we’re going to build an all singing, all dancing system, it’s certainly sensible to include the nuclear enterprise within that. 

And then finally, number five, mission partner information sharing. If a war is going to be fought within a coalition, which it traditionally is, then all of that combined force will need to sense, make sense, decide and disseminate at the same pace. It would be farcical, really, to have some of the combined force making decisions from the single pane of glass on highly accurate information, while others are, potentially using PowerPoint slides with information on it, which is 48 hours old. It wouldn’t make any sense at all.  

And that would probably force us down a de-conflicted way of operating rather than an integrated – which is where we’d rather be. So I would much rather be fighting in an integrated fashion rather than a de-conflicted fashion. 

 11:07 – 11:15 

Now Sir, you used the expression ‘single pane of glass.’  

From your perspective, how do you define that single pane of glass in the context of this conversation? 

11:16 – 12:13 

Yeah. So the single pane of glass is interesting. I find it a really useful phrase to visualize what we’re talking about here. Often people can consider 3D holograms with things flying around. That’s not really where we are just yet with the tech. We’re talking about a computer screen or computer screens. But the fuzing of all of this, all domain, all source data onto that screen such that it makes immediate sense, is accurate and allows quick comprehension about what’s going on such that better decisions can be made. 

So within that, we might be talking about unclassified social media feeds right the way through to national technical means and everything in the middle. So really, how would all that information be appropriately presented? Not yet on a 3D hologram, but maybe in the future, how might that get presented? And the phrase ‘single pane of glass’ is there to sort of frame around: What are we talking about here? It’s really about how do you get it on screen or screens.  

12:14 – 12:36 

Can you elaborate on the role that AI and ML technologies have in JADC2? And can you bring us up to speed on the U.S. military’s historical relationship is with these emerging technologies? 

12:24 – 14:26 

The new clubs in the bag are certainly AI and machine learning. The background to this is it’s widely available on the web, but around 2017, a small team was put together under a Marine Colonel in the Pentagon. And he was tasked with accelerating AI adoption through what is known as or widely known as Project Maven. 

The central motivation for all of this was, being out-thought at a quicker pace by adversaries who also embraced AI-enabled warfare. So China would be the best example for that. So the mission was to use AI where possible, to process the massive volumes of applicable data that we have all gathered, and we continue to sense quicker than a human could do that. 

I can give you a fictitious example, where if there was a square of unprocessed ground which we needed to target, arguably it has to be ten kilometers by ten kilometers just for argument’s sake, and we put a team of analysts on it. It would take them a certain period of time to derive the majority of the targets within that ten by ten kilometer square. 

With the advent of AI and machine learning, it’s possible to do that task in a much, much faster time. It is, however, really important to understand, and it’s improving every day. But where the AI and machine learning is liable to make mistakes, can make mistakes. And so the blending of the two goes into human oversight into the much greater and faster processing capabilities of AI and machine learning. Together, there’s a real synergistic effect just there. 

Like I say, the AI is getting better, as is the machine learning aspect of that as well. But at the moment, it’s the ability to put the two together to make sure: one, we’re targeting what we think we’re targeting, but two, to harness the capabilities of the system. So AI is able to process information at a much clearly a vastly quicker rate than anything a human can ever do. And so that was the start point of all of this, Scott. 

14:27 – 14:35 

Now what are some of the ways that we can ensure that human oversight is there so that the data that the AI is running on is accurate and secure?

14:36 – 15:54 

I mean, that’s a great question, Scott. There are numerous policy papers have been written about the moralistic issues surrounding AI and the implementation of lethal force. What is important, though, to understand, is it sort of depends, as it does always. And it depends on the type of fight a country is in. 

Again, hypothetically, if one was in an existential fight for survival and time was everything for that fight, one might consider allowing machines to make more of the decisions than in a separate scenario where the fight wasn’t existential and we needed to ensure that what we were targeting, was therefore, exactly what we thought it was rather than what we thought it probably was. 

And so that leads you to where do and how much input does a human have from within the loop? So, the targeting loop as it’s called, and sometimes it’s referred to a human in the loop, and sometimes it’s referred to as a human on the loop.  

And that’s sort of semantic. At some point within the decision-making before lethal force is employed. Then in some scenarios, it’s wise to have a human to provide oversight over the decisions or the proposals is a better way to describe it that the AI is making, in this instance, a targeting suggestion. 

15:55 – 16:13 

There are two AI-related initiatives being developed by the Department of War in collaboration with its industry partners.  

The first you’ve already mentioned, Project Maven, which today is now known as the Maven Smart System.  

Can you explain how Maven Smart System became the next iteration of Project Maven and what does it do differently today?  

16:14 – 17:22 

Sure. Yeah. I mean, and it’s all related, isn’t it? The Maven Smart System, came from a development, where Maven itself was using an AI tool that detected objects, really? So stuff on the battlefield, vehicles, people, structures, and then it tagged and triaged huge volumes of that data to support human INT analysts working in the targeting flows. So effectively using AI to process vast amounts of data. Whereas today, Maven Smart Systems is a scalable and deployable AI system which works across multiple missions and data types. 

So MSS or Maven Smart Systems has embedded AI across the entire kill chain now. So rather than just be an assistant to an INT analyst, it now embeds artificial intelligence across the whole enterprise.  

A good example might be for example, in that logistics space, it’s possible to use artificial intelligence now to predict where logistics challenges might become apparent and therefore give suggestions that might help us get ahead of that problem before it actually materializes.

17:23 – 17:28 

And Sir, just to clarify your use of the term “kill chain,” what does this mean in the context of command and control? 

17:29 – 18:41 

Yeah. I like to see them as separate in that – going back to our definitions of what we understand command and control to be, the commander is given that authority, the control is the decisions that he is making. Some of the decisions that he is making, maybe, to use lethal force. 

So really, command and control is way broader than the use of lethal force. But it’s certainly something in modern warfighting where mostly commanders will be engaged in. But it won’t be the entirety of what he or she is making those command type decisions upon. So it’s a significant part, but they’re not one in the same. There’s sort of, lethal force is a subset of the authority placed in a commander for the job he’s doing.  

So, for example, it might be a commander is not delegated the authority to execute lethal force. And that might be a high level commander is given that authority, but he hasn’t chosen to delegate that down. 

That doesn’t mean that the subordinate commander isn’t executing command and control, it just hasn’t been delegated in this instance for our discussion, the ability to employ lethal force. Sometimes that’s held right at the top and sometimes that’s delegated a long way down and it usually depends on where we are in the spectrum of a particular conflict.  

18:42 – 19:00 

Thank you, Sir. 

And the second initiative is the Edge Data Mesh technology stack (or EDM). The Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI office completed the first successful demonstration of EDM in an exercise last year.  

Can you share more about this technology and its relevance to command and control in a modern warfighting environment? 

19:01 – 21:01 

Yes. This is really important. So for the system to function properly at all levels and particularly at the tactical frontline is referred to as “the edge” more increasingly at the moment. So when it says ‘edge,’ it means the frontline really.  

The warfighter needs to access all of this great AI/ML and the derived, much vaunted single pane of glass. It’s all well and good having it in a headquarters, for example, a CoCom, but at the edge where the warfighter is potentially engaging with the enemy, they need that as well.  

What we’re talking about here is access to a cloud-like environment where the processing and the results of the processing is available. And in order to make it resilient, that cloud has got to be accessible through multiple routes.  

For example, there’s no point having it purely on a Satcom link, because if the Satcom link gets taken out, you’re no longer using the benefits of it. So we might consider a Satcom link, a 5G link. A low frequency transmission, but a whole different selection of transmission systems to allow us to get around the likely jamming and disruption of passing the information backwards and forwards.  

And given the sensible assumption, though, that warfighting is going to be conducted in a heavily degraded environment, the Edge Data Mesh or the EDM is experimenting on how that might be delivered. So sending the single pane of glass, as an expression all the way down to the edge, in an environment where it’s likely to be significantly degraded and it’s being done at the moment using multiple nodes, hence the phrase, meshes. 

And it’s through multiple mediums and multiple formats and that provides the redundancy and scale, which in turn provides the necessary resilience. That’s really, really important because otherwise, I think we would be in danger of building a system, which is fine in theory, but it doesn’t actually function in the real world, which will be contested and degraded.

21:02 – 21:13 

Let’s dig into the contested and degraded environment a little bit.  

In what ways does electronic warfare, to include jamming and spoofing, complicate the threat assessment and decision-making process for a commander? 

21:14 – 23:13 

Yeah, I would say, Scott, that’s certainly not new. And that’s probably gone back since people started fighting each other. I think what we’re talking about here is the principle of deception. And really jamming and spoofing is using that principle, but putting it not just in this instance in an electromagnetic environment. 

So electronic warfare is using, the principle of: if we know the signal that’s being used, how it’s being used, how it’s being transmitted, how it’s being received, then it’s entirely possible to either mimic that signal or overpower that signal or give it a spoof signal, such that, it makes either the picture unworkable or actually not exactly what it really is. 

Now, in the basic sense, that can be a simple modulation of the signal altered and sent back to whatever’s transmitting it. But in more contemporary times, you can see electronic warfare taking far more subtle forms, spoofing, mimicking, making things appear where they shouldn’t appear, where they’re not, or increasing the size of something which isn’t there. So it’s much more complicated than it was originally. But that makes sense because our processing and computing powers have gotten much better. 

And the danger with all of that is, you know, bravery and discipline will never compensate for flawed understanding at a command level, whatever that command level is. So because of a flawed picture based on, in this instance, jamming, a commander makes a decision which is a bad decision, then it doesn’t matter how brave or disciplined you are, you’re probably in trouble.

22:52 – 23:16 

Now recent media reports indicate that the Department of War is looking to launch the new Enterprise Command and Control Program Office. I’ll preface this by saying that this has not yet been formally announced by the Department of War. But some reporting has indicated that an announcement toward this end is forthcoming.  

But can you speak to the purpose behind the formation of an office like this? And how will this office bring about faster and better adoption of C2 technologies?  

23:17 – 25:18 

Sure. Yeah, I’ve heard about that, too. And in reality, it doesn’t surprise me at all, because despite what I would describe as yeoman efforts. To date, you know, we’ve struggled to put into place effective governance and architectures. They’re well-meaning that’s my point about yeoman efforts right, well-meaning formations, parts of the DoW have set their own path to deliver capability. 

It’s all entirely well-meaning and it’s all been done to great effect. But there’s a point where those fragmented, experimentations, prototyping of things, does need to be brought back to the central tent. Such that we can sort of structure these things properly. 

The danger is, we will almost go back a bit to the early days, where each service. Sort of for an analogy, we could find ourselves in a place where different parts of the all domain, military warfighting structure, they wouldn’t all be able to talk to each other if we don’t sort of bring this back to like a coherent start point. So with this new Enterprise C2 program office, I think the intent is to tighten down on the more fragmented elements of the program and therefore improve coherence in its outputs. 

It’s also going to place CJADC2 and AI-supported warfare strategies onto a program of record with what all of that entails: so structure, funding, etc. How will that bring it forward? So if we can consolidate the disparate elements into a cohesive framework, the military is going to be able to significantly enhance its operational effectiveness in what is an increasingly complex world. 

So the focus on real time analysis and AI integration sets the stage for a more dynamic and responsive military strategy in the face of what is a proliferation of more complex, more challenging modern threats. And if you like, that all takes us almost back to the start. This is talking about better decisions at a faster pace.  

25:19 – 25:27 

And how is the integration of AI technologies, combined with the consolidated oversight of this new Enterprise C2 Program Office, improve a commander’s decision-making process?

25:30 – 28:33 

It’s not an insignificant task to understand the complexity in all of those environments, and to understand what capabilities are available within those environments. And then to command and direct them effectively. And we still do, in part, delegate down to a domain command, depending on how we structure our forces, but it’s usually overseen by a Joint Commander and he or she has a big task on. 

So, training of that commander, his experience or her experience, the complexity of the task. And that’s where artificial intelligence really comes to the fore. It allows sensible proposals, if not decisions, to be taken based on that really broad landscape of disparate bits of data. So it’s not an insignificant task, anything that can be done to allow the commander. 

And this is central to the whole discussion, really. Anything [that] can allow the command to make better, faster decisions is really what this is all striving towards. A part of that is how AI is going to assist that commander, but part of it is who that commander is and what experience and what training and truthfully how good that commander actually is. 

But I think he’s going to have a better tool at his disposal. My assumption is, and quite rightly, if the program office can resolve some of the challenges within this, then back to our single pane of glass, what’s on that pane of glass? 

The distillation and dissemination of all domain information is going to be better, faster, of a higher quality and will give the commander better proposals about courses of action available to him. One of the challenges is it’s not always immediately apparent whether or not a certain course of action in the commander’s mind is still available to them. There could be, for example, a fuel contamination incident could occur to take out a whole base somewhere. 

That will eventually filter to the commander.  

But if he doesn’t know that, he could be assuming that that particular air wing is available to conduct a particular tasking and it’s not, with AI very quickly that would be brought into play. And indeed, it might be able to make new suggestions about how to overcome the temporary reduction because of the fuel contamination. It is a simple example, but it gives you probably an example about how broad this thing can be, but also how AI can really assist in making the commander make better decisions. They’re not easier decisions. But they’re going to make better decisions. 

And some of those decisions over time might be delegated to the machine. It would be fascinating to see how that develops. So whether, for example, in an air tasking order, if there is a better suggestion for a particular asset to take up a line within the ATO, then that might be something which is in the near term even delegated to a machine. And there’s just a human on the loop giving broad oversight to that particular decision or bit of execution.

28:34 – 28:56 

In recent months we’ve had a unique test case for what command and control means in the modern operating environment.  

As of this recording, there’s been a temporary ceasefire to what has been an active military operation playing out in the Middle East with Operation Epic Fury. 

Can you kind of speak to how the technologies and systems that we’ve been discussing today, might factor into the command and control procedures for the operations in Iran? 

28:57 – 30:06 

Sure. Yeah. I mean, it’s a really good one, isn’t it? You know, we’ve heard in the media about the rate of target development and the execution tempo, how quickly we’re prosecuting those targets. 

And in what has in essence, been? As I would describe as an air tasking order war or an ATO war. No doubt that artificial intelligence has been central to numerous elements that make this possible. The speed at which things are being completed, is a good indicator of where AI is helping at the moment.  

For example, decisions on where the targets are, how most effectively and efficiently to prosecute them and what asset is going to be a direct consequence of digitizing the battlespace and its C2 infrastructure. 

If we took it from the single pane of glass in the other direction, really, the amount of information which is being displayed on our single pane of glass, really, that comes from processed information. But we’ve got to collect that information first. That is the expansion, and the ability to process that has come from digitized data. So from the collection point right through to the visualization of it, that’s when digitized C2 has come to fruition and borne all of this fruit.

30:07 – 30:18 

And Sir, earlier you also spoke of the risks that may come with AI and how ensuring there is a human in the loop, or on the loop, can help mitigate those risks.  

Can you elaborate on that in the context of the operations in the Middle East? 

30:19 – 31:40 

Yeah, I think two that came to mind, were amongst many. 

But the first one probably being how and where we might put a human in that decision making loop. That’s certainly not resolved yet. There are times and places for different levels of involvement of a human. And we just have to be conscious of that. All the very benefits that come from automation and AI within warfighting as a whole, also comes with the degree of risk and we just need to make sure that we understand that and manage that risk properly. 

And the second one, again, we glanced off of this one Scott, but data integrity is key to all of this. I remember being in a lecture about the difference between the data, which might be kept by JPMorgan, which is broadly a bunch of ones and zeros, and the data which is going to be collected during Epic Fury. And that won’t be a bunch of ones and zeros. 

It’s going to be noisy there. There will be things in there which are sort of not quite right. And so being able to assure that the data is accurate is going to be one of the biggest challenges in that. And I think that’s going to be key within the program office to ensure that’s part of the whole. 

Because, I think that has to be built into the system as a whole. If we’re starting to make, again the same principles and if we’re making decisions on flawed information is usually a bad idea. And again, there’s a risk in that as we automate this increasingly.

31:41 – 32:11 

Now earlier, we talked about the inherent complexity of a Commander going from a requiring situational awareness within a single domain to now having to incorporate how other domains factor into their area of responsibility.  

But there’s also an added complexity of integrating allies and partners into this command and control process. And Sir, you may have a very unique perspective on this, having been the Senior British Military Advisor to Central Command.  

So can you share more about the opportunities and the challenges with integrating an ally or partner nation into the command and control decision-making process? 

32:12 – 34:33 

Sure. Yeah. The thing about fighting in a coalition or with a coalition is, as you’ve highlighted, it brings different challenges and facets with it. 

So there will be potentially different capabilities that are brought to the fight. There’ll be different policy permissions. And what I mean is that what are those assets are actually allowed to do as they get delegated by a government?  

One government might allow a certain type of activity, while another one won’t. And then there’s actually how we operate, actually, is there something completely different about how a particular military does a certain task compared to another task? 

So all of those things are essential to understand and the best way that we can address those issues is to exercise together to operate together, using the systems that we’re going to fight with because what that does, you can do as much theoretical work on this as possible if you like, but, you know, until we flush it out. 

And the best way to do that is as close to the real world as possible is in exercises. Then you can understand where people bring capability, bring limitations, so policy restrictions, scale issues, logistics challenges, all of those things really need to be understood.  

And it’s therefore I would suggest essential, that we keep exercising together and over time, the experience of the commander, not least of which he will be supported, for example, in CENTCOM with people like me who can advise him on where a particular nation might be able to bring something or have a limitation. Then the combination of the two is how that’s usually executed.  

It is difficult, and it takes lots of effort and lots of work to make sure that you can be effective working in a combined sense.  

But you will have noticed that over the course of the JADC2 journey, it’s morphed into Combined JADC2 because of the inevitability, of fighting as a coalition with other nations meant that whilst JADC2, when it was conceived, was quite rightly conceived as a US-only concept, it just changed its name slightly to to Combined JADC2 to give the nod to the fact that one of the challenges is about how you would integrate a different nation and that’s going to be the ongoing challenge of how we share releasable information at the speed of relevance. And if it’s not done properly, that can lead us down to some really inefficient ways of fighting.

34:34 – 34:48 

So given the need for command and control in a modern day operating environment, what should industry’s takeaways be from this conversation about the significance of command and control and the complexity of implementing new technologies into the command and control process? 

34:49 – 35:46 

We’ve always needed and will always need some form of system to assist the commander to make good decisions, right? It’s a fundamental requirement for how we fight – if you look at the principal challenges of that in a digitized world, then standardization is going to be key. 

If we, from an industry perspective, develop systems and products which can’t talk to each other, then we’re already starting, from behind the eight ball, really. So that’s something that would have to be sorted out. So key in all of this is to make sure that what’s being built has a degree of in-built resilience as well, because we aren’t going to be operating in a permissive environment. 

And I really think the Enterprise C2 program office is exactly the approach that is needed, because it’s going to provide the direction the industry wants and needs. And it will give the funding to keep the thing moving along as fast as possible. So I think that approach is exactly what is needed. We’re hoping that as more information comes out about it, it does exactly that.

35:47 – 36:04 

And Sir, you are an Executive Partner with Elara Nova’s Aeronautics & Mission Systems Sector. So from that perspective, what role can Elara Nova’s AMS sector serve in being able to bridge the gap between industry and government, as they seek to together bring these command and control capabilities to fruition? 

36:05 – 37:02 

Yeah, the team that Elara Nova’s Aeronautics and Mission Systems sector are uniquely placed to assist both industry and governments to maximize the potential that comes with digitized C2 and that vaunted ‘single pane of glass.’  

We’ve got a vast amount of experience operating in modern day, complex, all domain environments. And so we know firsthand, the challenges and often the opaque decisions that are being faced every day by that warfighter. 

So within AMS, we can guide industry partners in the development of their systems. And similarly, we’re able to assist governments in developing their digitized C2 policies, architectures, and ultimately the TTPs or tactics, techniques and procedures that go with it. So there’s a really experienced wrap-around package available within AMS to assist with the development of what is going to be the future or at least a significant part of the future in warfighting. 

37:03 – 37:39 

This has been an episode of The Elara Edge. Elara Nova is the trusted global security partner delivering decisive advantage.  

As a strategic advisory firm, Elara Nova builds expert teams uniquely tailored for client needs to deliver actionable results. With the trusted insight to deliver your decisive edge, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in global 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. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge. 

Episode 37: Foreign Military Sales Reform to Strengthen International Cooperation

The Elara Edge Podcast

Host: Scott King 

SME: Brad Head, Managing Director of International Partnerships (BH) 

Heidi Grant, Executive Partner (HG)

00:02 – 01:20 

When a foreign partner seeks military technology from the U.S. defense industrial base, there’s two ways for them to acquire that capability: Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) and Foreign Military Sales (FMS). In Direct Commercial Sales, the foreign country negotiates directly with the contractor. But in the Foreign Military Sales process, the United States government manages the sale and transfer of that technology with additional training and sustainment support in a way that strengthens international cooperation and the collective security of the United States and its Allies. 

However, a recent surge in demand for hardware and software technologies alike is challenging the current FMS process to keep up, resulting in two recent executive orders and a series of organizational changes to reform and modernize the Foreign Military Sales program.  

Welcome to the Elara Edge. We have two guests today to discuss the opportunities and challenges of the current Foreign Military Sales process and the motives driving the effort to reform the program. 

First is Heidi Grant, Executive Partner with Elara Nova. Heidi is the former Director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency and the former Director of the Defense Technology Security Administration. 

Heidi, welcome to the show!  

01:20 – 01:21 

(HG): Thank you.  

01:22 – 01:40 

Also joining us is Brad Head, the Managing Director of International Partnerships at Elara Nova. Brad is a retired colonel with the United States Air Force and previously served as the Chief of Defense Planning at the US Mission to NATO and later served as the Director of International Affairs at Space Operations Command.  

Brad, welcome to the show! 

01:40 – 01:41  

(BH): Great to be here. 

01:42 – 01:50 

Let’s begin with the traditional approach to Foreign Military Sales, or FMS. What purpose does it serve? And how is it designed to work? 

01:51 – 03:03 

(HG): Yeah. So I’m going to give a little more background so people know why I’m interested in doing this interview. So I was in the Pentagon on 9/11. Shortly after that, I went and worked at CENTCOM, and that’s where I first met all these international partners that were there to support the U.S. operations. And I learned then that a lot of countries around the world, while they would love to be a valued partner, they didn’t have the capability or capacity to be a strong military partner with the U.S. 

Following working at a couple of combatant commands. I went on to be the Deputy Undersecretary of the Air Force for International Affairs, and as you mentioned, kind of culminated my career in the government with the Defense Security Cooperation Agency. 

But a lot of people don’t have a clear understanding of what is Foreign Military Sales? A lot of people think it’s the US taxpayer dollars financing. That’s not what Foreign Military Sales is. Oftentimes, nations pay every penny of the cost of a sale. It’s a government to government process that’s used and it’s administered by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency and you have U.S. government experts managing the sale with a foreign government.

03:04 – 03:51 

(BH): Yeah. I mean, so I’ll add one job that I’ve had in my life that you didn’t highlight in the opening was I ran the Office of Defense Cooperation in Brussels at the embassy, supporting Belgium, Luxembourg, the European Union and NATO. 

And I think part of the conversation we’ll have is about that system. But that’s really the front lines interacting with the foreign nation’s military. So, for example, when I was in Brussels supporting the Belgian military, they bought F-35s and MQ-9’s and we did some space cooperation with Luxembourg. 

So space security cooperation is a fairly new thing. And I think that is part of the conversation we’re going to have today is understanding the overall Foreign Military Sales process and procedures and then kind of where some of the challenges are that make it fit for purpose for doing the space security cooperation mission in particular.  

But yeah, so just I think that’s a good context. We’ll get started. 

03:52 – 04:53 

(HG): One other thing I wanted to highlight about Foreign Military Sales, because I always get this question like: ‘What’s the difference between Foreign Military Sales and Direct Commercial Sales?’ And it depends on several things. The maturity of the country, whether they can manage the sale on their own, and maybe they don’t need U.S. government involvement in the sale. Or if there’s technology security reasons where they’re required to go through Foreign Military Sales.  

But one of the advantages of Foreign Military Sales is the US government looks at it as a package approach. So it’s not just a sale of the equipment, but when they do the sale in the package, they’re going to ensure that the training is in there, the sustainment is in there. 

So for the lifecycle of that capability, where oftentimes if you go Direct Commercial Sale with a U.S. company, they’re not required to do the sustainment piece of it. Oftentimes they do, but it’s not a requirement where this is a requirement that the U.S. government has is this total package approach is what they call it for Foreign Military Sales.

04:54 – 05:23 

(BH): That’s a good point. I mean, this isn’t just about selling specific pieces of equipment. It’s ensuring that a partner nation has the capability that they’re really trying to get after. And the totality of that, including the sustainment over an extended period of time. There’s a lot of countries we could sell things to that would be interested in buying those things, but they may not be able to use them, sustain them, or operate them. 

And so this total package approach, which the government insists on as part of the Foreign Military Sales process, is really focused on that, making sure that we’re delivering capabilities to our allies, partners and friends.

05:24 – 05:34 

So say that I’m a representative from an Allied or partner nation. And I want to buy a certain technology or capability from a U.S.-based defense contractor. 

How do I go about doing that?  

05:35 – 06:35 

(HG): In each of our embassies around the world, the U.S. has trained security cooperation officers that are located there in the embassy in their country. And that is their first point of entry, is to go and talk to the person locally there about their interests, and they can then connect them into the company or into the U.S. government and help advise them which way is the best to go. 

But it’s not going to stop them from talking directly to industry if they want to go and learn a little bit about the technology, direct to industry or direct to one of the services. But oftentimes a country isn’t sure: is it Army? Navy? Air Force? Who would manage the case for them? Our country’s unique that we have such a broad defense base here that there might be several companies that offer the same capability. 

So that’s why I would say it’s best to go into our embassy, who has a broader view of all of the capabilities out there and which U.S. companies offer what they’re looking for.  

06:35 – 09:42 

(BH): Yeah, the Security Cooperation Office is the office that I ran in Belgium and other Combatant Commands called them different things. Now they’ve all solidified around the term ‘military group,’ but at the time I ran the Office of Defense Cooperation and that office was responsible for Foreign Military Sales and then the Commerce Department, would be working if it turned out that you wanted to pursue something through the Direct Commercial Sales route. 

So you didn’t want the total package approach with the U.S. government involvement, and you just wanted to go buy the piece of equipment directly. Now there are certain times that that’s not a viable option for restrictions on certain types of technologies. But those two offices, again, the Commerce Department, if you’re looking for a Direct Commercial Sale or the Security Cooperation Office now called, ‘milgroups’ for the Foreign Military Sales. 

And here I’ll just highlight one of the challenges that we face right now when the space security cooperation enterprise in particular, is the lack of guardians or even space-smart people in a lot of these positions on the front lines. So if you look out at various embassies around the world that are having heavy conversations with their host nation, that’s responsible for building their air and space force team but they don’t have a guardian or even somebody who has any deep experience with space on their team, which makes it challenging. I think it’s even more complicated because the U.S. doesn’t have a catalog of things that they’re actively trying to sell.  

So, for example, when I was in Belgium and Belgium was in the process of replacing their F-16 fourth-gen fighters, they were looking for something more advanced and potentially a fifth-gen fighter. And it just so happened to be that the F-35 was the primary option that was for sale in the world, and they evaluated a couple of different options, but that’s the one they went with.  

But because I wasn’t a fighter pilot, an F-22 pilot or even a real subject matter expert, I think one of the challenges that we’re running into right now, as nations are looking to the U.S. and trying to buy those sorts of capabilities and build those sorts of forces, is that in the absence of those trained experts on the front line and a list of things that we have for sale in the space world, we’ve got WGS, which is a satellite communication network that some countries have decided to partner with us to build for their satellite communication needs. 

But other than that, we have a couple of systems that we can talk to other allies, partners and friends about. Everything else is kind of a handmade wooden shoe. You have to sit down with somebody, have an informed conversation to define very specific requirements that would then get translated through the system to DSCA and then on to the implementing agencies, whether that’s SAF/IA on the Air and Space Force side or other services. 

And so you either need a list of things that you’re actively selling or you need experts on the front line. And we currently don’t have either one of those. I know Deanna Rhyalls and her team in the space division of SAF/IA are actively working on what does that list look like that we want to sell allies, partners and friends? And I know DSCA is working on the human capital side to make sure we’ve got trained experts out there, whether they’re on the front lines at the embassy or on the C field com and their S five teams or the combatant commands, even at that level in the J five teams. So that’s one of the challenges that we’re kind of working through during this period of time right now.  

09:43 – 11:16 

(HG): Yeah. So I don’t see it actually any different than other domains that we have. I think it starts with from a U.S. perspective, what kind of capabilities would be helpful to strengthen the coalition for our international partners to step up to make our capability capacity together stronger? 

Talking about the wooden shoe that Brad just brought up, it’s very similar to fighter jets – where if you look at F-16s around the world, you probably don’t find two that are exactly alike, because countries have the right to ask for unique things based on their sovereignty. 

So that’s one of those things where it’s made Foreign Military Sales very difficult or more challenging, because in the past, the U.S. used to operate things and then we’d say, ‘Okay, now let’s transfer this to an international partner.’ Where in today’s environment, we’re finding that our international partners want it at the same time, we’re getting it.  

Like Brad mentioned, the F-35 as we were just training on the F-35, some of the partners in the F-35, they were also needing training. So they’re asking for things either sometimes even before we get them – non program of records. So that’s why you know you hear this all the time that ‘Oh the Foreign Military Sales process is so slow or it’s broken.’  

I do not agree with that statement. The Foreign Military Sales process is not broken. There’s always room for improvement. But there’s a reason oftentimes for oversight and accountability why things go slow.

11:17 – 13:10 

(BH): Yeah. I would add there’s a couple of different control regimes to protect U.S. sensitive military technologies. There’s the International Traffic and Arms Regulation, ITAR, there’s the Export Administration Regulations, EAR. And then there’s actually one called the Missile Technology Control Regime, MTCR, that are all relevant when you get to space in particular. And if you go back even just five-ten years ago, space was the exclusive remit of a handful of nation states. 

And now we see, with the commercial space sector moving quickly and the price of launch coming down, that more and more nations who historically would never have thought of themselves as a space faring nation now have a realistic pathway to getting involved in some of those areas that they haven’t historically. And so we find a demand signal that’s just growing out there for nations as they think about getting involved and understanding that space is the critical component of any multi-domain operation. 

And you see that in Ukraine and we see that in Iran today, that space is a critical player in that whether it’s the missile defense, missile tracking piece or if it’s the satellite communications, navigation timing, the overhead imagery, or even some of the offensive systems that maybe it use to deny those advantages to our adversaries.  

Nations are seeing the need for those things, and they’re actively pursuing those, and so as they engage the U.S. system, they run into some of these control regimes that would force them to go the FMS route, as opposed to, in some cases, being able to buy those technologies from the industry partners directly. But there’s nothing, as Heidi indicated, it’s not that they can’t sell those things.  

It’s just that there are mechanisms by which we ensure that we make a sound policy decision that’s fully integrated across the whole of the U.S. government, from the State Department and the Commerce Department and the Defense Department in a variety of different agencies to ensure that we’re making the right decisions on the types of technologies that we are willing to sell and export to other nations.

13:11 – 13:18 

And what are some things industry needs to be thinking about to better provide a technology or capability through the FMS program? 

13:19 – 14:53 

(HG): Right. So, a country can buy directly from a company. It’s the company’s responsibility if it’s what we call a dual-use for both commercial and defense to go through and get the licenses needed through Commerce and make sure it’s coordinated with the State Department. So there’s a process, as long as the company has the marketing license to be able to export, the country can go directly to them. If it’s something exportable. 

You know, one of the things I found when I was Director of Defense Technology Security Administration is I think a lot of people weren’t aware of their role looking at the sensitive technology making security Department of War decisions on whether that technology poses a risk. 

And their motto was ‘Keeping the U.S edge.’ And so they review all of these requests from companies to be able to export to make sure that the U.S. does keep the edge. And, you know, that’s a sensitive topic to bring up when you have international partners hear that, but I’ve talked to international partners and they want the U.S. to have the military edge. So they are supportive. We need to keep the edge and that’s what DITSA does.  

One of my biggest recommendations. Now this is more to companies is they need to sit down with the Defense Technology Security Administration early in the process and often because it will avoid them over-promising technology release to different countries. It’s just important to get that knowledge ahead of time before something’s promised to be able to export.

14:54 – 15:15 

(BH): One thing that’s it’s an interesting thing is that you could have an entire complex system that is releasable to another nation, but there could be a single component, a guidance chip or a cryptography chip that’s embedded in there that is restricted in a certain way that would prevent that sale or restrict that sale from a certain country or partner without changing something about the way that thing is built or configured.

15:16 – 16:56 

(HG): I would say there’s several things that the U.S. looks at when they decide, is this a technology that we want to export or not? And one of the first things you’re looking at: is there a legitimate need for this export? And I’ll give you an example, is titanium. And we would look like somebody wanted some unusual amount of titanium. 

Well, titanium is used to make golf clubs, but it’s also used to make weapons. So you got to review that and say ‘Okay, why are they asking? Is there a military need for this? And you also look at does this transfer contribute to regional stability or does it trigger an arms race? 

So you want to look at that. You want to look at human rights. I mean, so there’s a whole checklist of things that you’re going to look at. And one of the biggest things is are they going to be able to secure this technology and protect it. And so it doesn’t get in the hands of terrorists or adversaries. And overall, is that transfer in the strategic interest of the U.S.?  

And this is where as a DTSA director. There was a committee that I used to sit on where it was an end-user review committee, where the DTSA director sits on it. There’s a representative from Department of State and Department of Commerce, and there might be some times where I would say, ‘Well, I’m concerned there’s some risk about the security piece,’ but then the State Department’s looking at it through the lens. Well, this partnership is really important and then commerce is view is like, ‘Well, this is really important to our economy.’  

So oftentimes these three agencies get together. And if at the director level, if you can’t come to an agreement, it can go all the way up to the President and the Cabinet on whether we should transfer our technology or not.

 16:57 – 17:21 

Now there was a recent study that was published by the Bruegel a think tank based in Brussels that showed foreign military sales purchases from European nations jumped from an average of $11 billion a year from 2017-2021 to $68 billion in 2024 alone. 

So given that surge in demand from our international partners over in Europe, how might that be creating a burden on industry to meet these growing demands? 

17:22 – 19:19 

(BH): A little explanation may be helpful. So when I was in Belgium and the Belgian government signed an order for 34 F-35s, in practice what happens is that order comes through The Security Cooperation Office makes its way back through DSCA and ends up in SAF/IA, which is the implementing agency in that case for an F-35 sale. 

And then what practically happens is SAF/IA. In this case, it’s the JPO, the Joint Program Office, because F-35 was handled differently. But that office picks up the phone and calls Lockheed in Fort Worth and says, ‘Hey, you know how you’re already building 1300 F-35A models for us. Well, I want you to add 34 more slot them here, here, here and here.’ 

Put this specific configuration on them. And when they come off the end of the line, slap a Belgian tail flash on the end of them. Then the U.S. government takes ownership of it. And then we transfer it back over to the Belgian government. So we’re essentially, when other countries buy, it increases the scale of the buy that the U.S. government is getting so the fixed cost associated with developing things comes down.  

But again, some of the delay in delivering these capabilities is the fact that if you wanted some of these systems and we see this playing out right now in Ukraine and some concerns in Iran, and I think the President actually had some of the leading defense industry leaders come to the White House talk about needing to ramp up production to the extent that the system itself does everything it’s supposed to do as quickly as it wants to do it. 

And you put in an order for a Patriot battery or whatever the system is, and the industry says, ‘Oh, it’ll be seven years before I can deliver that.’ That’s on the industry side. And so they’ve got to have predictability in the demand signal and a guarantee that they’re going to have the authority to sell those sorts of things to those other nations. 

But there’s an industry component to this that contributes to the frustration and delay. It’s not all on the U.S. government side. And so our industry partners, having the willingness and the ability to lean forward and to take some of those risks within the parameters and authorities that they’re authorized, I think is an important element to add to this. 

19:20 – 20:41 

(HG): Yeah. You bring up a good point, Brad. And I can tell you I was not as sensitive to the industry side of this until I worked for industry. And what happens is, in an international partner’s mindset, the first time they start talking about wanting a capability, they start the clock. ‘I told you ten years ago, I want that capability, right?’ 

But in industry I mean, they have shareholders. They can’t start moving out on it until they actually get an order. You have to be careful how much a company is willing to put in their own funds, not knowing what the order is going to happen or not. 

And munitions is a great example of what we’re seeing now. Allies have been encouraged to put in their weapons order for decades, and now all of a sudden, everybody wants munitions. So, I just, this is something where they need to put in the order to justify companies to add another production line. But if you look at a lot of our major defense primes, the majority of their focus has been more on the U.S., which is really important. 

But I think there needs to be a lot of companies who aren’t set up to do international sales. If you look at where the money is right now and where the need for the growth in military capability, it’s in our international partners as spending increases globally on military capabilities.

20:42 – 22:27 

(BH): When I was at NATO doing defense planning, we were trying to get everybody to get to their 2% metric and the NATO 2% pledge, which was agreed at the Whales Summit in 2014, basically said Allies that are above 2% should stay 2%, allies below 2% should aim to move towards 2% within a decade. 

And then the last little bit in there, the why was in order to fill their NATO capability targets and to alleviate any NATO capability gaps. And then we saw last summer, they’re now committing to reaching 5% of their GDP on defense spending and a subset of that will be in space.  

And so again, I think this demand signal is coming. And so having the conversations early and often to understand what is in the range of the possible. When Allies come and say, ‘What can we do to add value?’ being able to clearly articulate that. 

And then for NATO as NATO, to get to a point where they can clearly articulate to each other how much of what types of things that it will take to deliver the coherent set of collective capabilities that they need to fight the space fight that will be part of any multi-domain operation going forward. 

And then as a subset of that conversation, you then look at, ‘Okay, well, how much of that is going to be a sovereign-national system that I might need to pursue through the U.S. Foreign Military Sales process? And how much of that could I get from a commercial provider? And so as the U.S. anticipates this demand signal coming in the very near future, positioning itself to provide that message on the front side: What’s the clear demand signal?  

If you’re asking, making sure that industry is ready to deliver on that, it will help streamline the process to get to decisions earlier so that the government approval process isn’t the delay. There may still be delays in fielding capabilities, but it won’t be because the system is taking too long and is broken.

22:28 – 22:52 

This brings us to the crux of our conversation today, which is two executive orders aimed at reforming Foreign Military Sales program. And I’d like to take a moment to dive into each of them specifically. 

The first executive order is Reforming Foreign Defense Sales to Improve Speed and Accountability and was signed in April of 2025. So now, we’re coming up on a year since its release. Can you speak to what this executive order set out to achieve? 

22:53 – 24:25 

(HG): That one is largely – it’s about fixing what we would call the machinery of the process. What they’re required to do is create a priority partner list and an end item list. It’s something I know in the Air Force we had already done. But what’s great about this is these partner priority lists will go all the way up through the State Department. 

I mean, we’ve got to remember that the State Department really is the lead agency as far as foreign policy. So anyway, I think the priority partner list and priority end items is a big one. Export-ability by design. Again, something we’ve talked about within the Department of War, but this will be a broader initiative that industry needs to keep in mind export-ability from the very beginning. And this is really I think this is very significant for the space field – the technology there.  

The third thing is streamline congressional notifications and streamline it as normalizing the process through Congress, that’s going to be helpful and consolidated inter-agency approvals will be part of that. 

And then they’re looking at electronic tracking system where it’ll get better visibility not only to the U.S. industry, but to foreign buyers and the transparency in the process will be helpful, and then the other Missile Technology Control Regime restrictions are going to be reviewed because there is some question what is included under that regime maybe should not be and moved out of it and so they’re looking at some barriers for that one. 

Those are the kind of the main things that were in that executive order, which are huge – if we can remove some of those barriers.

24:26 – 24:34 

I’d like to dive a little deeper into the export control element. What’s the significance behind reviewing and revising the Missile Technology Control Regime? 

24:35 – 26:57 

(BH):  When the Missile Technology Control Regime was created, it was, you know, we’re not going to sell ballistic missiles to country X, Y, or Z. 

But now, given the way it was written, there are things that fall into those categories, including those missile systems, ballistic and cruise missiles, but also things like UAVs that weren’t really on the radar when those regimes were invented. And so there’s different categories within there that again, we’ve got to work through and so what I would argue, and this is a point that I think is worth highlighting. 

So as Heidi said: ‘is the system broken or is it just it’s built to be delivered of it?’ So it is slow. One of the things that the service has done, particularly SAF/IA under Deanna Rhyalls team, is what’s called the star baseline. And so the baseline is a process by which the SAF/IA and the service have sat down and figured out what types of things would we be willing to export to certain countries by mission area and very specific subsystems? 

And they’ve got nations in tiers and ways that they think about those things. And what they’ve done is they’ve essentially decided ahead of time. This is not a shopping list. It’s a classified document and is restricted in its distribution. So it’s not intended for Allies to get it and go, ‘Oh okay. Let me go buy that then. Because they said I could have it.’ 

It literally is intended to say short circuit the process. It decides ahead of time that we are willing to, from a matter of policy, export something to a country so that when a request comes in, we can go, ‘Yep, we’ve already decided that this doesn’t need to delay that process any further.’ Now, just because something isn’t in the existing star baseline doesn’t mean that a country couldn’t ask for and potentially be given that. It would just require what’s called the top line. 

So if a country comes in and asks for something and SAF/IA goes and looks and says, ‘Oh, that wasn’t something we envisioned, or we had not decided ahead of time that we were willing to sell that country that type of technology, they would do what’s called a top line review, which would take some period of time, weeks and months to make a policy decision across the whole of government from the United States perspective, to then move that thing forward. 

So again, is the system broken or does it not move fast enough as some of the executive orders have hinted at? This is a concrete step that Deanna and her team at SAF/IA have taken to try and help expedite that process and keep that policy review from taking too long.

26:58 – 27:07 

There’s also a second executive order that came out in early February of this year: Establishing an America First Arms Transfer Strategy.  

What is this one about? 

27:08 – 29:12 

(HG): Yeah. So that one’s a little more at the strategic level about looking at foreign policy and the industrial strategy. This one, they’re calling for a prioritized sales catalog. And again, that was supposed to happen within 120 days between the Secretary War, State and Commerce, which I mentioned to you, were kind of the three main agencies to publish this catalog of what they would like Allies to buy. 

Now, keep in mind, these are all sovereign nations, and they’re going to buy what they want to buy. But this is something where we would say, these are what we would be interested in them growing their capability, what we’d like them to buy. So think of it kind of as a menu reflecting the industrial and strategic priorities of the United States. So that’s one.  

And then the second thing is kind of Promoting American Military Sales – a task force. It’s a new and it’ll be interagency again, which is awesome. And it’ll be led by the National Security Advisor to oversee the implementation and then quarterly performance metrics is another. They’re going to look at all the FMS case execution data and publish publicly for the first time. So that again Allies, industry, Congress can all use it – is the intent.  

And then looking at partner prioritization – favoring allies who have invested in their own defense and hold strategic geography for U.S. operations and contribute to U.S. economic security. 

So when people say, how can I be a valued international partner? Well, are you participating? Are you allowing access? These are the people that are going to be prioritized for the export of some of our best equipment. And again, these are not new concepts. There’s something that for the last couple decades that we’ve looked at, but it hasn’t been integrated and driven from the top of the U.S. leadership and that’s what I think is exciting, is bringing all the agencies together with very clear alignment and focus on international partnerships.  

29:13 – 29:48 

Now, beyond the executive orders, the Department of War has also announced an organizational change – or realignment.  

The Defense Security Cooperation Agency is the government agency that manages the Foreign Military Sales process. The Defense Technology Security Administration is the agency that determines which technologies can be shared with Allies and partners.  

But at the end of last year, the Department said it was moving both of these agencies from the policy directorate of the Pentagon, to the acquisition directorate.  

Now Heidi, you’ve held leadership positions with both of these agencies. So what is your takeaway from this realignment? 

29:49 – 31:18 

(HG): Yeah. So the Defense Security Cooperation Agency and Defense Technology Security Administration, they both worked under agencies and reported directly to the head of OSD policy because, as mentioned, Foreign Military Sales has historically been used as a foreign policy tool. 

Now, as we see a little bit of it’s still going to be a foreign policy tool. You still need Department of State involved, but you’re seeing a shift now more to look at the impact to our industry and using Foreign Military Sales. It’s an important part of our industrial base. So having it aligned under acquisition is where it has shifted. 

So the head of acquisition will be now held accountable for expediting Foreign Military Sales. And looking at it, I think it’s going to be helpful because they’re going to look at it to say, ‘Does it help our industrial base, our supply chain opportunities, or looking at it through a lens of industrial and foreign partnerships?’ So it’s a combination of both, but holding the acquisition community accountable for the timelines contracting process. 

Sometimes you might have to take a trade-off and it’s under the same leader where you take a trade-off that you are going to expedite equipment to the U.S., or are you going to expedite the equipment to a foreign partner? Well, you need to look at that and have those conversations with operators, with policy to make sure that’s being done and aligned to the best interests of the U.S.

31:19 – 33:37 

(BH): And if I could just piggyback a little bit on the realignment. So DSCA is moving out from under the policy side of the Pentagon to the acquisition side of the Pentagon, which I think highlights: the current administration talks a great deal about burden-shifting and burden-sharing.  

Now, the U.S. historically does not like to talk about having gaps and seams, and I get that. But at some level, it just is reality that we’re not going to have enough of the right types of systems everywhere we need them to be able to do everything we’re going to do.  

So for example, when I was in Belgium and they were looking to replace their F-16s with something, and their war plan that they have for the defense of Europe says ‘We need X many fifth-gen fighters,’ and we knew that the U.S. had a certain number they were going to be able to bring to bear, but some are going to be held in reserve for the Pacific Theater, and others are going to be held in reserve for the CENTCOM AOR, and therefore we needed allies and partners to fill in those gaps.  

And so, again, we were very sensitive about talking about those in any kind of detail. But the idea that we’re going to leverage allies and partners as we think about what do these global architectures look like and it kind of gets to that International Partnership Strategy with the service. 

We talk about integrated by design or allied by design. I think the U.S. is acknowledging that it can’t do everything, everywhere that it needs to do. And so as it thinks about building these systems, there are going to be requirements for Allies, partners and friends to contribute to these constellations. A good example would be the Golden Dome, right? As we think about whatever that architecture is ultimately going to look like.  

If, for example, you’re going to have sensors on the ground to look up and monitor things, they’re going to be in other people’s countries. So you’re going to have a mechanism by which you’re having the conversation, ‘Hey, can we put this in your country? But you could just as easily have a conversation to say, ‘Hey, would you be willing to buy and field this system?’ 

So whether it’s ground-based or space-based, as the US builds that out, they look at allies, partners and friends to figure out what they could do. And then to the extent that those countries are going to buy those systems to contribute to those architectures, those processes would run through the overall FMS system. And it fits perfectly with this realignment of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which oversees this whole FMS enterprise, from under the policy side to the acquisition side. 

33:38 – 33:50 

And what are some other actions the United States is taking or should take to facilitate better engagements on the front-end of the Foreign Military Sales process, particularly as space becomes a more prevalent as a warfighting domain? 

33:51 – 34:56 

(HG): Yeah. I think what’s happening now is one, as Brad mentioned earlier, is educating more people on the space domain and space capabilities that are needed, but almost like normalizing space as a domain. It’s no different than any other domain. We need to exercise together. We need to be integrated together for deterrence, and then if needed for war efforts. 

We need to get more guardians educated on security cooperation and through the pipeline, there’s a specific training program that you go through to be that person at the embassy where you become – it’s called a Foreign Area Officer. So we need more guardians to become Foreign Area Officers that have space expertise. 

I mean, we’ve got people that are fighter pilots, we have logisticians, we have intel officers. So each of our different communities are represented. And then you kind of place them where we think we best need them in embassies, where maybe the space capabilities are going to be more prevalent. So that would be the one thing on the human capital side that I know that SAF/IA, they’re working, and looking for the resources to do that.  

34:57 – 36:44 

(BH): Yeah. The specific program there at one point was called the Regional Space Advisor, which was the Space Force’s version of a Foreign Area Officer. I haven’t heard much about it lately. When I was in the government, they were talking about having the first class out there and fielded. 

And it’s just I think, as Heidi indicated, it’s a matter of priority. We don’t have enough people to go around for all the things we have to have them for and so trying to figure out where we would carve out the bodies to fill out this program. 

I think another area that’s related to this is in the FMS world, there’s this thing called the surcharge that. So you’re buying a certain amount of stuff, but then there’s a surcharge that’s on top of that. And that surcharge actually goes to sustaining the entire security cooperation enterprise for the United States all over the place.  

And so, for example, when we were in Saudi Arabia, they were looking and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t have the right space experts, uniformed military bodies who are coming over here.’ But a way to do that is to take some of that Foreign Military Sales money and use that to go get some contract support where you can go identify people who have the relevant experience and bring those people in.  

One of the challenges in the space security cooperation world right now is that there are cases in the pipeline that are making their way through, but there aren’t that many space FMS cases at this point that are generating that kind of revenue that would then go to sustain the system. 

And so I know General Purdy at SAF/HQ and Deanna at SAF/IA, have been trying to identify a pot of money to kind of provide the seed corn to get the momentum going or prime the pump to get that system moving and I think they’ve had some success recently. 

And then Mr. Mike Miller, who’s a the current head of DSCA, and he was acknowledging the same thing where we got to get the space side of the security cooperation enterprise from a human capital perspective, up and running at a level that will then become self-sustaining over time.

36:45 – 39:41 

(HG): And I use analogy again, this is kind of normalizing conversation that we went through the same thing when we were selling F-15s to several countries where trying to get uniformed F-15 pilots to go help with international training. We didn’t have the capacity. We needed pilots in our own cockpits, so we ended up having to do contracted training instead of sending our uniformed trainers internationally. 

So there’s oftentimes it’s kind of looking at like we need like our guardians right now working U.S. priorities and how do we build enough of them then to work on the international business, which is really important too, to build that capability capacity of our partners. So it’s kind of this pull; this tension right now.  

But like I said, I think you’re always going to have complaints about the process taking too long because there’s a lot of people in the process that are trying to get to ‘yes.’ And sometimes it takes time to understand how to put the right security measures in place in order to get to ‘yes.’ The catalog of yes list. That’s easy. The catalog of no, that’s easy.  

It’s this in-between gray area where people are trying to figure out how do we get some of these capabilities to our partners but put the right security measures in place, that oftentimes takes a little bit longer.  

And there’s been FMS reform initiatives for the last decade at least. But what’s unique now and exciting right now to see is executive orders come in from the President’s office, not just to the Department of Defense or the Department of State, but it’s across all agencies to reform Foreign Military Sales. 

But Foreign Military Sales, it’s important to understand, is on the backbone of our acquisition process. So if you don’t reform the acquisition process, you’re not going to reform FMS. So that executive orders came out to reform both at the same time from the very top is really exciting.  

And not only these executive orders, but I think the work that the Space Force is doing and SAF/IA is doing to have this catalog and looking at ways to expedite and implementation plans, working with our partners on that.  

And then there’s also been organizational changes at the Department of War. They’ve moved Security Corporation and Technology Security Administration underneath the acquisition process. So that senior leaders from other countries have one point of entry. 

They don’t need to go to OSD policy and acquisition.All of this is goodness, but like anything, it’s new. Space isn’t new, but opening it up to international partners is still fairly new. 

You know, the hope is that those reforms and this reorganization is going to be able to streamline some of the processes. Those are the big, exciting opportunities that are happening right now that the partners should be watching closely. 

39:50 – 39:53 

And then in your respective capacities as leaders of Elara Nova’s International Partnerships sector, what role does Elara Nova potentially have in this actively reforming Foreign Military Sales process? 

39:54 – 41:32 

(BH): Yeah. I think a couple of things. I mean, one, when we think about who our customer is for Elara Nova on the International Partnerships front: support of the US government, where it’s not adequately postured to execute the mission, which could include people being on the teams that are out there on the frontlines that fill those gaps.  

Two is engaging with allies, partners and friends directly to help them understand and define what those requirements are and understand how to navigate the process. We’ve got people like, I worked in an embassy run by the Security Cooperation Office. Heidi was SAF/IA, DTSA and DSCA like there’s nobody else who’s got that kind of resume. And we’ve got other people with deep experiences at a variety of levels that can help people understand and define those requirements and then map its way through the process. 

And then the third: helping U.S. industry trying to understand and trade those foreign markets and understand how do I navigate the landscape: whether it’s ITAR, EAR, Mission Technology Control Regime? How do I position my capabilities so that Allies, partners and friends are aware of it and would be interested in building that? 

And again, as we have conversations and talk about what’s your architecture, what’s your priority mission area, what’s your balance between sovereign-national and commercial? And to the extent that its sovereign-national and you’re buying your own systems using that exploit-buy-build model, if you’re going to go buy our systems, how do you define those and how do you effectively engage? 

And so we got people who can help on all of those fronts. Whether you’re designing the architectures and helping refine the requirements on the front side, navigating the process or shaping the demand signal, if you’re an industry partner, we’ve got the ability to do all of that, in a fairly unique way, particularly as relates to the space domain.

41:33 – 42:02 

(HG): It’s been great to be part of the Elara Nova team and just see the demand that’s come in from the international partner for Elara Nova expertise again across all domains, which is exciting, but specifically in the space domain. But the architecture where Elara Nova can be helpful is connecting the different domains where there are expertise, but it’s an area where there are not a lot of expertise in the international environment. 

So Elara Nova is positioned and ready to help close that gap.

42:03 – 42:37 

This has been an episode of The Elara Edge. As a strategic advisory firm, Elara Nova is the trusted guiding partner that builds tailored teams to illuminate unseen opportunities and deliver impact across every domain.  

With the trusted insight to deliver your decisive edge, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in national 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. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge. 

Episode 36: Digital Infrastructure Modernization to Lay Foundation for Zero Trust, AI

The Elara Edge Podcast

Host: Scott King 

SME: General (Ret) Tim Haugh, Senior Principal Advisor at Elara Nova, former Commander at U.S. Cyber Command and Director of the National Security Agency 

00:02 – 01:34 

When we think of the word “infrastructure,” things like roads, bridges, and the power grid often come to mind. But there’s also “digital infrastructure,” which the National Institute of Standards and Technology defines as ​​”the ability to store and exchange data through a centralized communication system.” 

The Department of War kick-started the year with a series of steps to enhance the resiliency and reliability of its digital infrastructure that underpins military operations. In early January, the United States Space Force announced it will be overhauling computer networks at each one of its bases, according to a $12.5 billion task order through the Base Infrastructure Modernization program.  

Also in January, the National Security Agency released the first two products of its Zero Trust Implementation Guideline, while the DOW launched its Artificial Intelligence Acceleration Strategy. Altogether, these actions demonstrate the growing imperative to prepare the military’s digital infrastructure to take advantage of emerging technologies and counter evolving threats. 

Welcome to “The Elara Edge” here to discuss the modernization of the Department’s digital infrastructure is retired General Tim Haugh, Senior Principal Advisor at Elara Nova. With over three decades of military service with the United States Air Force, General Haugh previously served as the Commander of United States Cyber Command, Director of the National Security Agency, and Chief of the Central Security Service.  

Sir, welcome to the show!  

01:35 – 01:36 

I’m excited to be here. Scott. Thanks for having me.  

01:37 – 02:03 

We’re excited to have you and looking forward to the conversation today. Let’s begin with a look at the role of digital infrastructure in modern day military operations. Perhaps one of the best ways to understand this is by taking a look at the relationship between the space and cyber domains.  

From your perspective: how do the space and cyberspace domains interact when it comes to military operations? And how did this relationship factor into the early days of standing up the United States Space Force? 

02:04 – 03:48 

Yeah absolutely, Scott. They are inextricably linked. When we think about what it looks like to warfight space, the foundation of that is also what’s happening terrestrially on the ground: how we control satellites, how we leverage technologies in space to sense, to communicate, and to fight. All of those are tied to how we operate within cyberspace, both to leverage those capabilities on space, to be able to control them, but also to ensure that they’re secure. And foundationally, when we think about what space does as part of our warfighting doctrine across all domains, having security in cyberspace is absolutely essential. 

At the time, I was the 16th Air Force Commander and in support of Space Force leadership, as they stood up the service. And one of those decisions was how will the Air Force provide support to the Space Force in terms of the Air Force network and then being able to support space operations? 

And as the choices were being made, one of the most critical were what were the sets of expertise that the Space Force would need? And one of those choices in terms of the career fields that were identified as essential to the future of the Space Force is cyber and clearly building out expertise was critical and that will only become increasingly important.  

As we’ve seen in the recent conflicts that have occurred, particularly within Ukraine, the contest for the ability to have assured command and control, through both terrestrial and through space – absolutely essential – and that really drives towards what infrastructure that then needs to be built, sustained, operated and defended to have assured operations in both space and cyberspace. 

03:49 – 04:01 

The Space Force task order to modernize its digital infrastructure follows a similar task order to do the same for Air Force bases across the Pacific.  

Can you describe what the Space Force and Air Force are looking to do here? 

04:02 – 07:02 

In this case, and what the Space Force wants to modernize in their digital backbone is all of the infrastructure that allows every Guardian to be able to interconnect, whether that’s to the Internet, whether it’s the services that are available inside of the Department of War networks or the ability to connect and operate through the domain, through both unclassified and classified networks, and then making sure that infrastructure is well positioned to be able to provide the right capabilities to the Space Force and every Guardian – in terms of routers and switches that interconnect networks and interconnect bases to the broader network – is an investment that’s clearly being made through the Base Infrastructure Modernization program.  

It is also the computing infrastructure that every Guardian and Airman leverage every day when they come to work. It’s also the infrastructure that runs our hospitals and runs space operations and runs air operations on a flight line. 

So all of those require the ability to have relevant technology to be able to drive not only the capabilities that are required to fight and win, but also provide a user an experience that allows them to come to work, log on, get to work and be successful and that requires investment. 

And the investment and the priority to be able to ensure that infrastructure is in place is also going to be the foundation for how capabilities like artificial intelligence will be integrated and the compute power that is required at the network edge to be able to operate and do that, particularly as we think about contested environments. 

At first, it needs to provide the foundation to be able to meet the mission needs of the Space Force and the Air Force for the contract in the Pacific. So it has to be sized, it’s got to be capable enough and then the support to be able to operate and ensure the maintenance of all of those systems – uptime and resilience to be able to make sure those missions run – has to be one of the first priorities.  

The second component is ensure the architecture is defendable and is in compliance with the direction that the Department of War is taking in terms of the policies of how we modernize networks, how we secure them, and ultimately how we build them using a zero trust-based approach, because the adversaries are relentless in cyberspace. 

What that looks like today, whether that’s China, Russia, North Korea, Iran all bring different subsets of capability. But particularly China is focused on being able to take away strategic capability from the United States and having resilient infrastructure is the foundation to ensure that can’t happen.  

And I think the approach, as we talk through today of that mixture of improving the underlying base infrastructure, building out in zero trust principles and setting a foundation for the integration of AI, it really does start with the foundational infrastructure that is secure and defended.

07:03 – 07:20  

We’ve heard General Stephen Whiting, the Commander of US Space Command, previously refer to cybersecurity as the “soft underbelly” of military operations. 

What do you think makes cybersecurity and digital infrastructure particularly vulnerable to either state-backed or adversarial attacks?  

07:21 – 08:40 

There are a number of factors, that particularly within military services that have brought vulnerability. One of those is lack of investment. So at key times, if we don’t upgrade these capabilities, you can fall into a situation where the vendor no longer supports them and that technology debt brings risk. It also brings less functionality. So these investments are critical.  

The other is how do we integrate weapon systems into these architectures and ensuring that there is coherence in how the services think about the interaction with the defense industrial base and set a clear set of standards on what is expected as we build and field new capabilities and ensure that they can immediately integrate into an architecture that doesn’t create seams. 

And then finally, we’ve got to be able to build this in a way that can adapt to the threat environment and in how we secure things like the identity of every individual and every agenetic AI capability that we intend to deploy. We’ve got to be prepared for a changing architecture in demand signal based off of the emergence of these technologies and ensure that they can be integrated in a coherent way that maximizes the opportunity and doesn’t bring additional risk. 

08:41 – 08:46 

I’d like to emphasize that idea of risk. What would an attack on the digital infrastructure of military bases look like? 

08:47 – 11:50 

Yeah, I think at that point, first and foremost is we have to be able to have situational awareness in both our space and our cyber domain in a way that’s commensurate with what we’ve learned in air, ground and the maritime. That is the first thing a commander needs. They have to have situational awareness so they can make good decisions about risk. 

The second component in this discussion is around resilience because we’re certainly going to be targeted in an area of tension and in crisis. We’ve got to be resilient and expect that there are going to be very aggressive attempts to compromise our networks and compromise our partners, both in industry and our foreign partners and Allies.  

The approach that China has taken to targeting the critical infrastructure of the United States is a really good example of the types of things we would see targeted on military bases: things like water treatment, energy generation, critical functions inside of telecommunications or networks. 

They have shown that if there are vulnerabilities that they will continue to attempt to enumerate those vulnerabilities and take advantage of them if they exist. And then once in a network, they will look to compromise the identity of key system administrators that have privileged accounts that allow them to move laterally and ensure that they would be able to have deep access if we ever are in a crisis. 

We’ve seen that in our critical infrastructure. It’s been well articulated in various reports done by the intelligence community and by Homeland Security and those are things that we understand that methodology and how to defend it.  

One of the key things that they would attempt to exploit are vulnerable aging systems and so upgrading those is critically important. And then the ability to implement zero trust would be the area that would defeat or make more difficult the ability to take on different identities within organizations and networks. So we will see adversaries looking at every one of these networks. They’re going to be looking for vulnerabilities now enabled increasingly by artificial intelligence and they will take advantage of them if they see them. And that is the environment we live in every day would only be accelerated in a crisis.  

We’ve learned a lot of lessons in our support to Ukraine about what does resilience look in a modern warfare environment. And we have to know that we can scale, because certainly all of the domains rely on space to be able to deliver situational awareness, communications, particularly in extended range environments and so we need to ensure that the ground segment, the terrestrial component, the cyber elements of spacecraft are secure and resilient because they will certainly be aggressively targeted. 

And I think these types of initiatives that we’re seeing, in terms of foundational investment and direction on AI and zero trust are going to be things that are going to be really important to implement aggressively to buy down that risk.  

11:51 – 12:06 

Now, the task order was designed as a quote “Enterprise IT as a Service” solution to be delivered through an Indefinite Delivery-Indefinite Quantity or IDIQ contract. 

What exactly does this mean and why is that important? 

12:07 – 13:47 

The idea behind enterprise IT as a service is being able to leverage the strengths of the industry to bring current technology and resources to be able to build and maintain networks. In essence, be able to say, take an area that previously would have been maintained by an Airman or Guardian, bring in expertise from industry, and allow them to both operate and sustain that base infrastructure to allow Guardians and Airmen to be focused on other types of operations that are critical to our warfighting missions. 

And this is a further expansion of what the Air Force has done at a number of bases. Now building it out at each of the Space Force bases, and also bases across the Pacific for the Air Force. This is an extension of that approach. It’s giving them flexibility in terms of the number of potential vendors they could leverage that they’ve already identified as qualified to do the work against a pretty high ceiling of $12.5 billion. 

So it’s a commitment to building out the infrastructure, putting the resources behind it, and then having a bench of vendors that are qualified to do the work to ensure that as the Air Force and the Space Force expand this approach, that they’ve got the right expertise. The opportunity within the contracts is to also clearly state what the cybersecurity standards are and what’s expected of the day-to-day of how the network should be configured, how it should be defended, and then also what happens when an incident occurs. 

And I think the build out of this model based off of the previous work, should allow for a deep understanding of how to do that. Now it’s going to be about scaling, underneath this particular contracting approach. 

13:48 – 14:06 

At the same time this modernization effort is underway, the National Security Agency, released the first two products of its Zero Trust Implementation Guideline.  

At a basic level, can you define for our audience what zero trust means and then walk us through these two initial implementation products: Primer and Discovery phase? 

14:07 – 16:51 

Zero Trust is an approach to security that does take time to implement and is complex.  Previously, when we thought about defense of a network, we thought about the perimeter, the network edge. What zero trust brings is an assumption that that perimeter is going to be breached. 

And how do you defend your network, your data and your users in an environment where you give least privileged access – only giving access to data, applications, tools, infrastructure for the things that an individual is authorized to do and only for the period of time when it’s authorized. This approach, when implemented, gives an opportunity to make sure that not only are you secure at the network edge, but you can be secure internally against very aggressive threats. And if one member of your team is compromised, you don’t lose the security of the entire network.  

And what NSA has done in terms of implementation guidance is to break that down into five parts for services and commands to implement zero trust. 

In the first release is a Primer – helping organizations understand what all goes into organizing as a zero trust architecture, and which modules make most sense for those organizations to begin with and lay out how to implement and mature those areas to be able to meet what the expectation is from the Department of War. 

The second component, which is part of the first phase of implementation, is what NSA has identified as discovery – create visibility and understand the data, applications and the assets that are within your architecture, and then begin to set policies that implement authority guidance for every function in the network. It really does set a baseline for how zero trust can be implemented, and then sets the conditions for the phases that follow to meet the Department of War expectations. 

As the implementation guidance is put out as the DOW CIO continues to clarify exactly what expectations are, there are opportunities for individual programs and vendors to be lead turning these and thinking about ensuring that they put the baselines in place that will allow for implementation and integration of capabilities, platforms, technologies, applications into these networks using a zero trust approach. 

And that’s going to require continued discussion between industry and government. But clearly setting the roadmap for where zero trust goes. There’s an opportunity for industry to follow. 

16:52 – 16:55 

And what will zero trust ultimately look like in a military operation? 

16:56 – 17:51 

Well, what we’d see in an effective zero trust operation? As an example, if a vendor is going to provide an update to a capability that’s on a base – today, that in different programs and different bases, they might have different authorities.  

Under zero trust their authorities would be very narrow and would only be authorized during the window of time that they are upgrading that system or doing some form of maintenance function. Very similar to how in if you’re maintaining a system on the flight line, you’re going to tag in and tag out. You’re only going to be operating on that aircraft in certain windows when you’re authorized.  Zero trust provides the same type of approach that you only have authority to manipulate that system in windows of time and within your span of authority. That reduces risk to the overall architecture, but still allows that system to be updated and maintained. 

17:52 – 18:08 

This brings us to the third element of our conversation, and that is the Department of War’s recently released Artificial Intelligence Acceleration Strategy. 

Certainly AI become a major talking point in national security circles in recent years,  but generally speaking, how does AI factor into this conversation about digital infrastructure? 

18:09 – 21:39 

I think it’s really at the forefront. The Department’s strategy to accelerate implementation of artificial intelligence requires capable infrastructure that is secure and needs to continue to grow the compute capacity that fuels the implementation of artificial intelligence.  

The idea behind what artificial intelligence can do, the running of algorithms, the use of agents, the autonomous use of capabilities, all of that needs computer power to operate. 

And depending on the scope and scale, the amount of data and the expanse of simultaneous things that you’re going to ask those agents and capabilities and algorithms to do requires an increasing number of computing power. And you can get that computing power through a couple of different ways. One can be on-premise, computational power that are investments in servers and data centers that allow for control of that. 

The other can come through any of the number of cloud providers that are a part of the architecture and how you choose to organize that really becomes important in terms of what’s available to every Guardian and Airman in terms of computational power to run models and algorithms and agents and it also is an incredible bearing on cost.  

If portions of the infrastructure are going to be inside of the military services, then you have to have all of the infrastructure from data centers, the ability to cool those data centers and ensure their operations have power, water, cooling, to be able to operate. So that’s an additional infrastructure that has to be sustained. 

If it’s chosen to leverage our large, managed service providers and cloud providers for that computing capacity, you’re going to fund them. But they have to build out that architecture and sustain it. So those are choices that don’t have to be made completely. It’s likely a balance of the two that will ultimately be relied upon.  

But if we’re going to build out more infrastructure, there will be more requirements for things like water, cooling, power that will be critically important and have to be sustained and defended inside of the Department’s architecture. 

And increasingly, that’s going to have to be at the network edge, not just at the center of a network. And this will be an evolution of how we’re able to make that compute available to every Guardian and every Airman, regardless of the type of contested environment they’re in. This is really foundational and these are areas that are going to be really important as the Department determines what those investments look like.  

The document really sets out aggressive intent from the Secretary of War to first move out on pace-setting projects that are really about setting conditions to in terms of ensuring that the infrastructure is in place, thinking about the data that is required, the models and the policies to accelerate the use of artificial intelligence across warfighting, intelligence, and the broader enterprise within the Department. 

This will certainly drive investment. It’ll drive planning, and then it will drive the services to think about where artificial intelligence will be most effectively integrated to enhance capabilities within their respective service.

21:40 – 21:52 

Thank you, Sir. And I’d like to go through the three pace-setting projects laid out in the strategy: warfighting, intelligence, and enterprise.  

Let’s start with the first one: warfighting? What is this one about?  

21:53 – 22:44 

I think the big picture of this – this is really about where does artificial intelligence fit in the ability to execute the warfighting missions across the Department? And this will be very foundational when we think about how we gain situational awareness, how commanders make decisions, how we communicate those decisions, and the autonomy that we give to platforms and weapons. 

And this pace-setting project will really bear out in terms of what are those areas that also now need to be invented in terms of how we test these capabilities and that partnership between industry and government as the acceleration of artificial intelligence isn’t just done inside the services, but inside vendors and inside of capabilities that will be delivered.

22:45 – 22:51 

And how about the second pace-setting project: intelligence. Can you elaborate on what the Department of War is aiming to do here? 

22:52 – 23:44 

The Department is setting some clear benchmarks to think about how intelligence will be integrated closer to the edge as a warfighting capability. This is an area of a tremendous advantage for the United States: our ability to sense and make information available to commanders around the globe. The challenge set forth by the Secretary is not only to do that in real-time operations, but also to accelerate the work that brings together that intelligence and capability development. 

So two major, I think, directions will be how to make different sets of intelligence fuzed for commanders at all echelons. And the second being, how does that intelligence really get integrated more quickly in capability development earlier for individual capabilities to be able to be enhanced and infused with artificial intelligence as a core capability.

23:45 – 23:47 

And how about the third one: enterprise?

23:48 – 24:25 

This is thinking about how does the entire department come together and leverage these sets of capabilities and building out the not only just the ability to have the infrastructure available, but it’s how do artificial intelligence bring more capacity and capability to the broader enterprise of warfighting that occurs across all of our military domains, and to be able to capitalize on that and do it faster than an adversary in a very contested environment. 

So I think these three areas of warfighting, intelligence and enterprise, are a clear set of a foundation and intents laid out by the Secretary of War.

24:26 – 24:34 

So now that this strategy is out there – what happens next? What steps are being taken to implement the strategy and then, ultimately, what does success look like? 

24:35 – 26:43 

Well, I think first is each service and command has been given some clear direction to build plans to establish AI integration leads within their organizations and then evaluate their mission for where artificial intelligence makes sense and can be rapidly infused in the areas the Secretary has outlined.  

The next phase of that is in those areas – where will dollars go? What will the investment look like? And that investment will have to span across the ability to generate the requisite compute, the ability to ensure that the right data is available and is accessible at the right level for models and algorithms, and then ensuring that the Department and each service has the talent to execute it. And I think those areas are going to definitely require investment and they’re going to require significant collaboration with industry. 

Given the fact that many of these technologies are still being invented and the rapid evolution of models and what agents are going to look like, there’s a tremendous opportunity for investment in key areas. The Secretary laying out the set of priorities will now begin to get into individual projects, as services and commands start to identify their key requirements and the areas that would most benefit by infusing artificial intelligence. 

Inside those opportunities are places for investment. There’s places for experimentation and then aggressive implementation to ensure continued advantage. So I think you’re going to see those emerge and then success looks like the ability for us as a warfighting organization to be able to deliver capabilities at speed, to be able to integrate data for decision, and also to have weapons that have new capabilities across all domains that we can ensure operate consistent with the overarching intent and policy and guidance that exists across the Department in terms of warfighting, consistent with our laws and our values.

26:44 – 26:57 

Our interview today covered three elements pretty comprehensively: digital infrastructure, zero trust, and AI.  

The Department of War is actively taking steps toward these ends. So what do these actions signal to industry? 

26:58 – 27:54 

I think each of these provides an intent, and I think that’s the best thing that the government can do is clearly articulate intent and share that with industry. So in this case, whether it’s here’s the intent for the future of the architecture. Here is the intent for what it will look like in terms of how the government wants to secure that architecture using zero trust principles and with an expectation that all capabilities are going to be infused by artificial intelligence. 

They’re setting the roadmap and that is probably the most important thing that, in terms of the public private partnership, is a clear understanding of intent. And that intent should only become more clear, as the Department articulates priorities inside of Golden Dome, inside of other major programs that are going to be driving and implementing those things that are consistent with the National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy.

27:55 – 27:57 

Can you elaborate on how Golden Dome ties to this conversation? 

27:58 – 30:12 

Where the Golden Dome program needs to start in terms of the types of priorities that the President has given them, and then building in the resilience and speed necessary to be able to make those decisions within really incredible timelines. 

The challenge of being able to identify, any and all threats, to the homeland and then to be able to act on those threats. 

 It’s all about speed and the ability to identify the threat, understand it, give orders, and then have capabilities that can respond with requisite speed to be able to mitigate those threats. We have known how to do this as a nation and been prepared to do it in very specific scenarios. But now those scenarios are so diverse and growing in terms of the threat and the speed of the threat.  

It really does demand a command and control structure that is always on, always available, and integrated with the right data sources to have situational awareness that can provide the right data to the decision-maker, and then the ability to execute command and control in a way that can be executed very quickly from decision-maker to shooter, and to be able to assure that not only can you track and have custody of of every one of those threats, but you also understand your effectiveness in real-time to mitigate those threats.

So I think speed is one of the clear tenants that comes from the demand signal. The other is, of course, it’s got to be secure. These will be foundational capabilities in defense of the homeland. It must be built on a bedrock foundation and then it’s going to also require just incredibly resilient communications to ensure its availability.  

The digital infrastructure is what ties it all together: every sensor, every base, every shooter, every command and control node in a way that gives that situational awareness and gives that power to be able to make decisions, create outcomes, and understand the results of those operations. And the resilience and the capability that are provided through that infrastructure can be an accelerant to the command and control for Gold Dome. 

30:13 – 30:25 

Thank you Sir, and what opportunities exist for commercial and industry partners to contribute solutions to anything we’ve discussed today: whether that be digital infrastructure, zero trust, AI, or command and control in Golden Dome? 

30:26 – 31:25 

There’s a menu. A large part of this is thinking through resilient communications in many different ways. That’s leveraging different parts of the spectrum. It’s leveraging different technologies. 

It’s about being innovative at every vendor to implement quantum resistance. It’s about how we think about the applications that are required to knit it together. And then what’s the underlying compute that allows it all to operate at speed?  

Those are all opportunities that allow for ensured resilient communications in ways that we can continue to evaluate, whether that’s in the space segment, whether that’s within traditional RF bands or if it’s leveraging a diversity of our managed service providers in terrestrial networks. All of those have to be meshed together in a way that assures command and control and assures availability for the leaders that are going to be empowered to make those decisions. 

31:26 – 31:37 

Now, in addition to serving as a Senior Principal Advisory at Elara Nova, you’ll also have a guiding hand in the firm’s new Cyber, Data & Communications sector. 

What should our listeners know about its new CDC sector? 

31:38 – 32:35 

Yeah. I think everything we’re thinking about now is how do you integrate capabilities faster? How do our domains interoperate and how do we ensure within the defense industrial base and with broader industry, how do those capabilities be brought to bear in a way that they can be effective from the outset and meet the demand signal that’s coming from the Department and from each of the services? 

Elara Nova brings a really deep portfolio of cyber experts that have served across all elements of our intelligence community and the military services and when combined with all the other expertise that exists in air and space that both have served in the Department and are current in state of the art of what’s happening in industry is invaluable to be able to accelerate that work in a way that will produce an outcome that really brings back the best capability for the nation. 

32:36 – 33:10 

This has been an episode of The Elara Edge. As a strategic advisory firm, Elara Nova is the trusted guiding partner that builds tailored teams to illuminate unseen opportunities and deliver impact across every domain.   

With the trusted insight to deliver your decisive edge, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in national 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. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge. 

Episode 35: Department of War Seeks Solutions for Emerging Counter-UAS Mission

The Elara Edge Podcast

Host: Scott King 

SME: Lt. Gen. (Ret) David “Abu” Nahom, President of Aeronautics & Missions Systems sector at Elara Nova (DN) 

Col (Ret) JP “Spear” Mintz, Managing Director of Aeronautics & Missions Systems sector at Elara Nova (JPM) 

00:02 – 01:40 

A series of escalating events in recent years has demonstrated the growing prevalence of drones in surveillance and military operations. In 2024, unidentified drones flew over a military base in Langley, Virgina. In 2025, Israel used drones to take out Iranian air defense systems in a coordinated attack, while Ukraine launched “Operation Spiderweb,” using drones to damage and destroy aircraft deep within Russian territory. 

Now, a new report from the Department of Defense Inspector General uncovered a series of challenges for defending the United States’ military installations from similar drone incursions or attacks. The report coincides with updated guidance from the Joint Inter-Agency Task Force 401, an Army-led organization tasked with the counter-Unmanned Aerial System (or UAS) mission. The updated guidance requires military installation commanders to prepare their own counter-UAS plans within the next 60 days. 

As part of this effort, the Department of War is actively seeking new and innovative solutions for the counter-UAS mission. 

Welcome to “The Elara Edge,” we have two guests today, joining us to discuss the inherent challenges of the emerging counter-UAS mission, as well as some of the solutions that are being considered. 

First, we have retired Lieutenant General David “Abu” Nahom, President of Elara Nova’s Aeronautics & Mission Systems Sector. General Nahom previously served for 36 years with the United States Air Force, culminating in his roles as Commander of Alaskan Command, the Alaskan NORAD Region, and the Eleventh Air Force. 

Sir, welcome back to the show! 

01:41 – 01:42 

(DN): Great to be here, thanks again Scott.  

01:43 – 02:02 

Also joining us is the Managing Director of the AMS sector, Dr. JP “Spear” Mintz. Recently retired from the Air Force, then-Colonel Mintz commanded in the Air Force’s Spectrum Warfare Wing and also served as a Special Advisor to multiple senior leaders including at NORAD and US Northern Command, among others. 

Sir, welcome to the show! 

02:03 – 02:05  

(JPM): Thanks Scott. Appreciate you setting this up for us. 

02:06 – 02:24 

Thank you both for taking the time to join us today.  

Now, when it comes to Unmanned Aerial Systems, or UAS’s, the United States Air Force already has a well-established means of identifying and categorizing these drones – specifically by Group Numbers. 

Can you walk us through these group numbers and how we understand the differences between them? 

02:25 – 05:36 

(JPM): Yeah, you bet. So the group classification here, at least as it references Group One to Group Three. It’s based on, a couple of things: size, weight, it’s operating altitude above ground level. So a Group One drone, 20 pounds or less, flies at less than 1200 feet above ground level or AGL. What you’re thinking about really here is your hobbyist quadcopter types, the kind of things nearly anybody could buy off the internet. 

The next group, Group Two, the size is up to between 21 and 55 pounds, flies up to about 3500ft above ground level. And that’s your mid-sized drones thinking of things like a ScanEagle, etc. These are usually going to be things that have a military or state-backed flavor, because although some of the hobbyist ones could potentially reach this category, the cost and proliferation of these Group Two drones is not nearly as much as it is with Group One.   

And then Group Three, which is up to 1,320 pounds and up to a flight level of 180. So you really think of these as smaller unmanned aircraft and not normally what you might think of as a drone in traditional parlance.  

And these groups matter here because of a number of things. So one is size. So at least from a radar cross-section perspective, it’s a lot easier to detect a larger UAS, a larger drone than a smaller one. And then of course, the larger the UAS, the more fuel and payloads they can carry over a much larger distance.  

The second what matters is the altitude at which they fly, because in radar, the closer it is to the ground, the more interference you have from things like trees, ground clutter, buildings, etc. and not only that, but you might also reduce your ability to actually detect the UAS just from a purely line of sight perspective. And then also, operating altitude is important because at higher altitudes you generally have higher speeds, right?  

And then third weight matters when it comes to the collateral risk of engagements with these things. Because a larger UAS, a 1,300 pound drone laden with explosive crashes into a populated area, it’s very different than a 18 ounce quadcopter that has nothing on it except for a camera. 

And so all of these factors matter. Also, in terms of identification. [If] you want to identify a UAS. You do that in order to make some assumptions about its intent. Is it a large one traveling at high speeds, pointed at a target you might consider critical on the blue side? So you think maybe it’s weaponized?  

Or is it a child operating their quadcopter they got for the holidays around an airbase because, you know, he or she loves the Air Force, that it just wants to fly or curious about what’s at the base or wherever it is. 

And this identification and intent are important because you have to decide what you want to do about it. Do you want to use a weapon against it? Do you want to do nothing about it? Do you want to make a phone call? And when you think about engaging this with a weapon, something that could take out a smaller Group One drone may not be effective against one of the larger Group Three drones and vice versa. 

And the inherent challenge lies here in a similar situation of a car driving along the side of an airbase, right? You don’t know who’s in there, what’s in there, what they’re doing. It could be just some people showing up to the base, some tourists looking at something they’ve never seen before, or you could be developing a problem there. 

So you can’t always assume intent from simply the size or shape or speed or even position of an aircraft. So you have to be ready to respond and I think that’s a really important topic to get into.

05:37 – 06:11 

(DN):Yeah, [with] the types, what’s interesting, too. Is that how you control them, too. These smaller ones that are less, they’re less sophisticated. They may be line of sight where the person actually controlling it is in some kind of visual of the actual system. 

When you get to these larger ones, these could be beyond line of sight, whether that is through some kind of a satellite feed or some kind of other network that has been established. 

And usually as you go up the groups, you’ll see more of the beyond line of sight and the ability to control these things at further away distances. But I actually have to have somebody inside of the quadcopter itself for the Group One.

06:12 – 06:15 

So how can the Air Force respond to a drone incursion or attack? 

06:16 – 08:45 

(JPM): Well, Scott, there’s a couple of ways to think about this. And it’s not as simple as a scaling problem. Just thinking about the number of shots you have to take or how you might engage this to defeat one or more of these, including a swarm. You have to take into consideration what laws are in place. Policy and regulations are needed to make sure that these UAS’s aren’t proliferated out into the wild, and so anybody can get their hands on them at any time. 

 Some of those are clearly civilian dual-use technology, so you can’t put limits on that. But some of the bigger ones of course, you can. You want to have some of those technologies retained for military use. 

Another thing to consider is defending forward. So if this were a standard military operation in which you were protecting a base or a location from an air attack, you’re going to conduct intelligence operations to try to figure out who’s out there, do a threat assessment of why they want to attack you, how they’re going to do it, what are their capabilities to do so, etc.. And what can you do really, is to defend against those threats forward. Can you take out their capabilities forward, whether that’s kinetically, non-kinetically or in some other way?  

There’s also, of course, what you would think of as deterrence. You can deter your adversary from doing something by showing them they’re not going to succeed in their drone attack or their drone swarm operations, or at least if they do something, it’s not going to be effective or cost effective to them if they go ahead and conduct this operation.  

 I think the cost-effective nature of this is really important, too. If we have these small, cheap drones making attacks or incursions into our airspace, it’s not cost effective from our perspective to expend exquisite expensive AMRAMMs, Patriot missiles, etc. to take them out. Those weapons are best used for the targets they were designed for. 

That’s why they’re so exquisite and expensive, because they’re very good at what they do. But if we have something like the APKWS which can be modified to achieve the same results at a much lower cost without having to waste our expensive weapons, that’s a real benefit. So there’s also non-kinetic means of responding, but we can get into that in a bit. 

But what I wanted to say is that it’s you’re not just going to go straight to shooting something. You have to detect and then determine intent, right? You detect, identify you have to determine intent. You have to make a decision on what you’re going to do about that, and you’re going to pair an effector to it, meaning to match a shooter and a target. 

If you decide you are going to shoot it, then you have to actually use the effector, right? You have to shoot whatever you’re going to shoot or however you take this down. And that all takes time. And that whole process from detect to shoot and even assess whether or not your shot was effective, is part of what we think of as a command and control structure that needs to happen and put all of those things together. 

Sir, do you have anything to add on that?

08:46 – 10:26 

(DN):One thing Spear hit on is the command control piece is going to be one of the hardest pieces. And you think about what Golden Dome and Joint Task Force 401 and some of the things that are coming forward right now in terms of homeland defense.  

But when you look at that command and control piece, think about what the size that Spear talked about for a type three. It’s not much different than a small general aviation aircraft. And how do you discern between one and the other? 

And so that piece, that’s where that command and control is going to be so key about what is a threat? What is not a threat? And be able to do that in a timely manner, where then you can pair the weapon like Spear talked about and take offensive action if that’s what’s needed. 

I think in my experience and my background of working with NORAD. I think that’s going to be the hardest part. And especially in a homeland about that command and control piece, discerning what is a threat and then getting after it in a timely manner.  

And I’ll tell you, the other part of that, too, is policy piece, too. What can you do in the homeland? If it’s just a hobbyist just trying to stir things up. What is America willing to put up with, with collateral damage when you start shooting weapons over an American city and shrapnel and things start falling down? What can we do? What can we not do? I think these are important things. 

And then when Spear talked about the non-kinetic piece. A lot of the non-kinetic, is also going to have an effect on air travel and other things we do, like cell phone service and a number of things that we rely on every day as a society. 

What are we going to be willing to do without, in terms of the electromagnetic spectrum? Whether that’s G.P.S.? Imagine in a city we shut down GPS to avoid a swarm. Well there goes all the Ubers and the Waymos, and you think about everything else we rely on every day in society. 

So, these will be important questions moving forward. Spear back to you. 

10:27 – 13:27 

(JPM): Yeah. Thanks, Abu and so, Scott, to kind of move on to your question about defeating these systems, we do have non-kinetic mechanisms, like Abu suggested: things like denying GPS, potential cyber attacks against whoever is controlling the drones, [it] could be responding in the RF spectrum or even network hacking these systems. Abu also mentioned the Joint Interagency Task Force 401, or JIATF 401, and it was just announced that, JIATF 401 contracted for two of these DroneHunter F700 counter drone systems. 

These DroneHunters can deploy a tethered net to go capture a drone or UAS, intruding in airspace in a way that minimizes the potential for collateral damage. And oh, by the way, they’re reusable. So in some situations and again, some drones, that will make a lot more sense than firing an AMRAMM or a Patriot missile. 

And then when you think about non-kinetic effects, one of the benefits is because there’s also less collateral damage on those. You don’t have two systems out there exploding and then causing debris to fall on civilian populations. But you also have to consider who has the authorities to use these particular actions anyway? And this is because the counter-UAS problem, especially in the US, but in many countries, is a problem that lies in the seams of law enforcement and military operations. 

Traditionally, lines are very well codified in law and for good reason about what the military can do and what law enforcement needs to be doing. And we want to make sure that the appropriate authorities are being used to detect, identify and respond to whatever potential threat that we’re talking about here so that you can achieve the desired outcome, while making sure that we’re protecting our civilian populace in the ways that the Constitution intended. 

So if you look at the kinetic side, there are times when you will need to use the kinetic side, because you either may not have a non-kinetic option, or the non-kinetic option may just not be as effective. And in some cases, you may get an indication that an attack is coming until the very last second. So you have to find ways to absolutely make a stop to whatever’s coming into your airspace. 

A kinetic effector you can think of as a gun that could be a handheld shotgun to an actual military style weapon, like a 20 millimeter that is carried on an aircraft, 30 millimeter aircraft. Or it could be a modified rocket like the APKWS. And there are other emerging technologies like we just talked about, can be sent out to go in and not only take these things out, but also just track them down and figure out what it is that they’re doing. 

And then there’s another solution which kind of spans what I’d say is there’s a seam or gap between the idea of a kinetic solution and a non-kinetic solution, and that’s directed energy which is now starting to come into its own. There are lots of systems out there that use RF energy, microwave energy, or even laser energy to shut these things down or damage them, right? 

But even those come with really important collateral damage considerations. And so while in some ways they may be better than launching a big heavy explosive missile over a populated areas. And in other ways, they’re not. Because if you think about the air traffic that might be behind your target flying, you know, behind it. And if you’re trying to lase a drone and accidentally lays the pilots of an airliner passing overhead, that could have some serious negative implications. We don’t want to be doing that. 

So you also have to consider how directed energy has potential collateral damage as well. So as these technologies develop, we’ll continue to see those things emerge.

13:28 – 16:01 

(DN):Yeah, I think the good thing is an industry is being unleashed on this problem set. And you’re seeing solutions every day come about that, even a couple of years ago, I would have never imagined. We’ve realized as a nation what a problem this is. 

We’ve certainly seen some of the cases. I know, Scott, you said you want to get into later on, talk about what went on with Ukraine with that complex attack using small UAS’s. But there’s also been a lot of cases in America that garner attention, like the swarms that were over in New Jersey, not too long ago. We certainly had a problem at Langley Air Force Base a few years back as well, with drone swarms.  

You’ve seen other small things where airliners have hit drones and done damage, and that’s garnered some attention. You saw where you had the California wildfires last year, and they had two very effective Canadian firefighting aircraft. 

One was grounded for a long time because it hit a hobbyist drone, and the drone was just watching the wildfires. And so people are starting to realize that these are a problem, not just for military use, but the proliferation, actually you can get on the internet or go down to Best Buy, and buy this type one UAS’s for almost nothing, and you can fly them just because you’re curious, and you could be a huge impediment to a firefighting operation or a police response with helicopters or, any number of things. 

And so I think, now that it’s getting a lot of notoriety, I think that’s good. And I think, industry is responding, and I think the technology will be there.  

Some of the response of those UAS’s in New Jersey. I mean, they’re right in the approach corridor of Newark Airport. What do you do at that point? And I’ll tell you from the ground, especially when it’s nighttime and you look up – you don’t know the difference. You see a red light. That could be a drone 100 yards away, or that could be an airplane ten miles away. And that light will look the same.  

 Again, it goes back to that command and control about what is the threat. And then what do you do about it? Because some of the things Spear went into, are absolutely spot on. When you look at the homeland, it’s such a complex area, but I think a lot of the areas we’re going to operate in are going to be equally as complex, whether that’s a European theater. 

Certainly, many of the South Pacific areas, when you’re talking about in Japan and Korea Guam and some of these places that have quite dense populations and busy airports. These will be challenges that the technology is going to have to solve because, it was very easy to put these quadcopters up there. 

And I think even easier to make these swarms and some of these things that are so impressive. You see, it’s amazing when you’re watching swarms where there is at halftime of a football game or whether that’s in some kind of a military operation, like you saw that the Ukrainians use and the Israelis use in their complex attacks in Iran, but now it’s time to figure out how to counter that one when necessary and I think that’s where we are. 

16:02 – 16:11 

I’d like to dig deeper into the emerging role of UAS’s in military operations. Can you elaborate on this role, particularly with recent examples like Ukraine’s “Operation Spiderweb?” 

16:12 – 17:17 

(JPM): Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Operation Spider Web, from what we can gather from open source reporting, was a June 2025 surprise drone attack on Russian air bases using small UAS’s. And by using special operations forces, the Ukrainians were able to position these small one-way attack drones near the edges of these Russian strategic air bases and then launched attacks on the aircraft there while they were on the ground. 

You look at this from a cost perspective. You get a number of small, relatively cheap one-way attack drones that took out several strategic Russian aircraft, probably hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. And from an asymmetry perspective, there’s a lot to be gained from that.  

The other thing that’s really important, that operation, and I sort of alluded to this earlier, but it’s this idea of reduced tactical warning time. If you position these drones around the edges of an airbase, you no longer have minutes, much less hours to react, to detect, to identify, determine intent, facilitate the command and control we talked about, select the effectors and then time to even make the intercept. You have seconds to react at best. And so now we need to find ways to close that entire kill chain in the counter UAS mission so much more rapidly.

17:18 – 20:37 

(DN):One other interesting thing to get from the open source. If you look at where these attacks were, these were not airbases right around Ukraine. These were air bases in the heartland of Russia, very, very far away from the fight. Where more than likely they thought they were fairly safe from any kind of attacks from the Ukrainians because they weren’t really going that deep. 

So, I think it was a huge surprise, a huge wake up, not just for the Russians, but I think the rest of the world, too. Where you can think you have these airbases with very expensive, exquisite equipment that you’re sheltering there and they became vulnerable very quickly.  

And you look at what the Ukrainians, attacked. They attacked nuclear capable strategic bombers. And they damaged and destroyed quite a few of them, which is significant to the Russian strategic defense of their nation. To me, what I took from it was a wake up call. 

And like Spear said, maybe you put something, a critical element a couple hundred miles from your border because you think you’re safe from attack. But next thing you know, you have a swarm of drones that comes out of a garbage can or a truck, right outside your gate. And seconds later, you’ve lost some really key element to your defense or a key power grid or something very critical to your nation. 

And so I think as you look at the defense against these swarms, again, they don’t carry much weaponry or if they’re small, but put it in the right place at the right time could be very significant. And I thought even though Spider Web was an amazing example of what the Ukrainians were able to achieve.  

I still think the Israeli example about how they use small UAS’s, in conjunction with more conventional forces like F-35s and, and F-15s and other was very unique because these small UAS’s were able to really enable a very complex attack very far from home.  

In the case of Israelis, you really had a complex operation that involved something as simple as a quadcopter and something as complex as an F-35 really in the same operation. And I think they really showed how effective these could be to do, some things as part of an operation, like maybe take out an air defense system or take out a key communication node, or take out maybe a city power grid, something that you could do with a swarm of small drones, especially if you can get it in close. 

And I think that’s what both the Israelis and the Ukrainians were able to achieve. They were able to figure out using, frankly, special operations to get these things close into the fight and actually have them be part of the more conventional fight and I think that’s something we’ve got to be very attuned to.

Now, it may be different in the Pacific because the distances are different with all the oceans, but it doesn’t mean you couldn’t float some of this over on a ship. There’s plenty of ways that people who say that these don’t apply to the Pacific, I think, are missing some of the broader point. This was, to me, was a display of how you use something that you wouldn’t expect to be part of a complex operation and really enhance what they were able to do. 

And in the case of the Israelis shutting down the air defense systems that the Iranians had and then they were able to bring in much more conventional firepower in because, you know, as effective as these swarms can be, as impressive as they look, these small quadcopters, these type one UAS’s don’t carry a lot of firepower. 

But in the right place at the at the right time can be quite effective because in the case of the F-15’s that came in pretty quickly after with a lot of firepower, were able to get through and do quite a bit of damage, neutralize the air defense systems and allow Israel to achieve their objectives pretty quickly.  

If you think about the distances from Israel to Iran and what they’re able to achieve. It was just nothing short of amazing.

20:38 – 21:29 

(JPM): Yeah, I mean, this really comes down to the asymmetry in air warfare. If you think in the past there’s an air base that has aircraft that can just take off, fly for minutes to hours to get to their targets, then perhaps go attack another airbase. There was a lot of parity there in terms of operational timelines, but what we saw in Operation Spiderweb is that the decision time was reduced to near zero. 

If you have minutes or hours to prepare, you can detect, you can identify, determine intent, you can harden your defenses. You’re going to reposition aircraft and you can launch. But when you only have seconds to respond, it underscores the absolute importance of a number of things [that] we talked about the speed at which you can detect this threat, determine what it is, assume or determine the intent behind it, and then being able to command and control, match effectors to targets, and then use them with the appropriate authorities to make that response happen in a fast enough manner. It’s really challenging the current air defense paradigm. 

21:30 – 21:55 

Okay, so let’s get into some of the solutions. At the end of last year, the Air Force put out an RFI, or a Request for Information, for technology that would modify an Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (or APKWS) that would be capable of taking down Group 1 to Group 3 drones. 

Spear, you referenced the APKWS earlier, so maybe you can start us off with this: what is APKWS? And how has its use evolved over time?

21:56 – 22:20 

(JPM): Yeah, so the APKWS, or the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System, it’s a laser guidance kit that converts a 2.75in rocket into a precision guided munition. It was originally developed as the AGR 20 for US service, and it’s got a laser guidance section. And then the rocket, motor, warhead and fuze are drawn from existing inventory. So you think of this as like an add-on kit that can use an older, cheaper weapon in a new way. 

22:21 – 24:38 

(DN): I was actually in the desert back in 2016, 2017, 2018, in Qatar, working at the [sic], when we started using this on our aircraft and really, what it boils down to is the ability to get after targets in a very, very cost effective manner. We call it “the right side of the cost curve.” 

You know, when you’re taking out a target that the enemy may have built up. You’re talking about maybe a $10,000 car, and you’re using a $2 million missile to take it out. This got us on the better side of the cost curve where we could do things very cheap and at mass. You could put quite a few of these things on an aircraft, and you could load them very quickly. 

And we found them to be very accurate, especially in low risk areas, where the aircraft could get pretty close to their targets, which was at the time when we were in the counter-ISIS fight, with what was going on in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan at the time. These were extremely useful, in that air to ground. 

What happened over this time as we’ll get into the RFI, is we figured out that you can use these things and other things that are moving slow like UAS’s. You know, when you look at what you’re defending and you think about the ground, it just completely makes sense.  

Let’s get away from Europe or the homeland. Let’s start talking about the Pacific, where what we’re defending is air bases and other key nodes and islands and other places around the Pacific. 

We know what the enemy is aiming at. We know where we got to be with our defensive systems. And that’s on the ground right next to these air bases and other locations that we’re defending. It’s the hockey analogy. We know the opposing team wants to put the puck in the net. So you put the goalie in front of the net.  

So if we can figure out how to use something like this, that low cost, many rounds, low collateral damage, because even on these islands [there] are collateral damage issues. If you think about some of the places that we are stationed around the Pacific, there are cities and there are quite a bit of urban sprawl in some of these islands. So you are concerned with the low collateral as well.

If you could figure out how to do this on the ground, this would make a lot of sense for getting after that and not having to launch a very expensive Patriot missile, for instance, against a very low cost UAS. Rather, save the Patriot for a theater ballistic missile or something that it was truly designed against coming at your airbase or your area in the Pacific.  

And again, very, very inexpensive UAS’s, and we were using very expensive missiles on them. It’s that cost curve that we’re never going to win against. This really helps us get after that. 

24:39 – 26:11 

(JPM): I mean, if you think about it, APKWS it was originally designed not to target airborne threats, but now it’s being used to target those new low-cost airborne UAS threats. There’s a couple things that are really important about this. We talked about the cost of these both high end exquisite weapon systems like the AMRAMM versus the APKWS. 

But think also about the opportunity cost of using those AMRAMMs, or Patriots other exquisite weapon systems to target drones. When we think about inventory and replacement of those shots. Like, I would rather have my fighter aircraft save their AMRAMMs for what they’re really needed for to target other fighter aircraft or other large aircraft. So in addition to the cost differential here, there’s an inventory advantage as well. 

The other thing this does is it provides as a new launcher opportunity. So instead of a fighter aircraft carrying these APKWS, we might have a different form factor available, like a ground base launchers, including ones that the RFI is asking about.

And then finally, this presents an opportunity for a lower collateral damage weapon. So instead of something large, like an AMRAMM, especially if you’re near a place where there’s a higher risk for civilian population, something like an APKWS, would be lower collateral damage, certainly not zero. 

But if you’re in an empty area where there’s no civilian population around or population around at all, then collateral damage considerations might be a little less important.   

But as we know, there are a lot of these kind of UAS incursions around very populated areas and airports, houses nearby, etc. so providing a lower or zero collateral damage weapon is extremely important to the future of countering these sort of threats. 

26:12 – 27:19 

(DN):The first time I saw this technology being used in the Middle East, it was amazing. Because if you look at the rocket technology that they’re using, other than the guidance packages, which Spear, talk to you earlier, I mean, the technology that goes back to the Vietnam War. 

We’ve been having rockets and the launchers that use it very similar to that for a long time. It’s just something we had never thought of. And it really was a mix of operators and engineers coming together, figuring out a very effective, a very cheap way. And the cheap is important, because, again, when the enemy can put up thousands of these targets, we can’t be shooting millions of missiles at all of them. 

At some point, we’ll run out of those missiles and we will run out of money, too. It was such a huge thing to get into our aircraft for air to ground and it was really the innovation to bring it in air to air, by some test pilots and engineers in the test world, and then operationally, it was proven out in the deserts in Syria. 

And now you look at a ground-based version of it. Then again, what’s the next thing for APKWS? Maybe there’s something that we can go even further to enhance our base defense and our and eventually our homeland defense as well. 

27:20 – 27:22 

And so what makes an RFI like this important? 

27:23 – 28:47 

(JPM): So let’s talk just for a second about what an RFI is. It’s a Request for Information. It’s an exploration of what’s out there and what’s in the market. What it’s not is a request for proposal. It does not signal that there is a direct impending contract coming out of this. But I think that’s important because it’s asking about the same precision guided, 70 millimeter rocket concept for a ground launch and then aimed at Group One and Group Three UAS’s. 

So these small drones think DJI quadcopter all the way through tactical UAS, which are really just small aircraft. And now the RFI just came out in November and the responses were due at the end of 2025. So I think right now the Air Force is chomping on the information that they received.  

So I think this RFI is important for another reason, which is that it’s signaling that the Air Force is coming into its own about this idea of base defense and investing in air base defense. 

And I think that’s important and good in a way, because the counter-UAS fight is really an air superiority problem. And while a lot of history would show that air base defense is a very small part of that, clearly this new UAS threat is proliferating and causing that particular style of threat causing threat to air bases is so much bigger part of air superiority now. 

And of course, the Air Force has air superiority is one of its core functions. And this conversation goes to show that air superiority is not just fighter jets fighting over a large swath of water 50 miles away from each other or more. It goes all the way from small UAS’s all the way up to hypersonics, ICBMs and beyond. 

28:48 – 31:44 

(DN):Well, there’s other reasons too. If you’re going to defend a base – to be airborne, you can’t be airborne forever. You have to actually get the airplane in the air. It’s going to have to be in some kind of a position where it can intercept. If you can do it from the ground, it is much more efficient to do that.

If you know we have a critical base let’s say on a South Pacific island and we know that that is vulnerable. We put what’s defending it on the ground. We don’t have to have the airplane airborne, with gas and with tankers.  

We put it on the ground and it’s a cheaper, more efficient way to actually defend a point. Now, the difference is what if I have to defend a very large area. That’s why you’re going to want things airborne as well. There is a mix of that. 

When you look at the air base defense piece and what Spear’s alluded to is we’re going to be in many places. And I keep going back to the Pacific fight because that’s certainly a fight we center on in how we look at investment across the Air Force. We’re going to be in many places.

We’re going to be getting there very quickly. And we may not be able to rely on anyone else to provide the air base air defense. So we may have to bring something in and we can bring in light quickly. Very effective. Defend these locations against all myriad of threats. And, the type one, two and three. 

So a relatively small aircraft right on down to the quadcopter. You can go buy it out at Best Buy or Walmart. These things can and very, very cheap enter into this world, as you’ve seen in the Middle East and other places, and the ability to mass these things in locations that can be very not helpful to air operations, even whether they have offensive weapons or not. 

You put a swarm of these things near an air base. It’s really hard to operate airplanes. We have problems just with physical birds, let alone birds that are made of metal like this around an air base. And so as we move throughout the Pacific and we move quickly, thinking about the ACE concept and how we’d actually operate, the ability to defend our own air bases, it’s going to be more and more important as we get further and as more of this proliferates. 

And it’s not just about a small non-state actor using something like this. It could be a state actor. And this is a part of a more elaborate, complex attack using very small UAS’s, and at the same time maybe theater ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and other things to use in concert with each other.  

And you certainly see that in the homeland. You’re going to hear them talk about critical infrastructure and what needs to be defended in the homeland as we go further down this Golden Dome conversation. So it will be important to have some kind of ground-based interceptor system like we have around the National Capital Region right now.  

But at the same time, America is very large. And you’re going to have to have systems like this that have the ability to get up and move and go from point to point very fast, to defend large swaths of our nation. Certainly when you start thinking about Alaska and the Pacific, Hawaii, Guam and all the areas that we would have to defend, we couldn’t just be on the ground. It would be very difficult. That said, we know there’s the critical places we’re going to have to defend, like the National Capital Region or other critical locations for our nation. 

31:45 – 31:58 

The rising need to address the counter-UAS mission also coincides with the United States’ renewed emphasis on homeland defense, namely through the Golden Dome initiative.    

So what role and relevance do drones and UAS’s have to the Golden Dome conversation? 

31:59 – 33:55 

(JPM): With Golden Dome, if we back up for a moment, this idea of defending the homeland against air and missile attacks is something that has a long history in NORAD and in U.S. Northern Command.  

And the systems that we have now, were because we produce capabilities. So the threats that existed at the time and the priorities that we had in terms of funding and the technologies that we had available. If you go back and read the executive order for Golden Dome, it’s now an idea of how do we focus not only on ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, advanced cruise missiles, next generation aerial attacks, and as a homeland defense type of initiative? 

And so the counter-UAS flight is absolutely relevant to Golden Dome, but it’s certainly not the entirety of it.  

 But there are really there are overlaps. And these overlaps are really important because Golden Dome will be a layered system or system of systems, and not just from a physics perspective in terms of what areas you might be defending, but also how you might do this, because you’re going to need capabilities that will overlap in terms of what we talked about earlier in the detection, identifying, determining intent, command and control, selecting and responding with effectors is going to apply across the board there.  

Even if those detection mechanisms and the effector mechanisms may be very different depending on the type of threat. And so what you’re going to need are systems that can be integrated together, or a system that can detect hypersonic threats and ballistic missile threats, as well as systems that can detect these small UAS drone threats, in order that a greater and more integrated command and control system can help the authorities and operators decide. 

What should we do about this? What can we do about this? What timelines do we have?, What authorities do we need? And then of course, at the end game, what are we going to do against this thing? Is this going to be a kinetic kill? Is it going to be a hand off to law enforcement? Is it going to be something else? 

So as we look at this, some of the questions that Golden Dome is going to have to ask and answer and is asking about authorities, about collateral risk, collateral damage systems, they’re going to apply to this counter-UAS mission. And I think it’s going to require a collaborative approach among all the teams that are looking at this problem set.

Sir, over to you. 

33:56 – 34:57 

(DN):Yeah. I think I’ll just kind of narrow in on the that the C2 aspect, the command control aspect, and it really is great to see that the Joint Interagency Task Force, JIATF-401, is working with the Golden Dome team in terms of the command and control, because it’s going to have to be seamless across all domains. 

Where I think Golden Dome really, again, go back to the executive order. We’re thinking about ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, hyper glide vehicles, some of these even space weapons coming from and emanating from space. There are attacks that could be more conventional. Right on down to, even cyber and really any domain, and if we’re truly going to be safe as a nation – what Golden Dome intends.

The counter small UAS fight could be something just that specifically, or in the case of if you go back to, we talked about, the Israeli case in Iran, it could be part of a complex attack on our homeland and so the command and control structures are going to have to be seamless across and I think that’s a great indicator to industry, about where they focus their technologies because they’re going to have to have to be able to be seamlessly integrated across all domains. 

34:58 – 35:05 

Now, moving forward, what should industry’s takeaways be from the growing relevance of counter-UAS as part of these homeland defense conversations? 

35:06 – 36:33 

(JPM): Yeah, that’s a great question, Scott. I think the biggest thing that industry should take from this – is this is a real need. It’s not just a passing fad. It’s an emerging threat that’s not only causing real problems today, but it’s going to continue to emerge and evolve.  

And so looking not only at this RFI, but the wider Golden Dome initiative and what’s going on around the world, industry should take this time to start investing in and exploring ways that they can contribute to the counter-UAS flight, and whether that be in detection, in identification, command and control, or some kind of effector as well.

And there are a lot of new technologies out there. And I think that’s what’s interesting about this mission set, is because of the small, cheap, proliferated nature of these threat drones themselves.  

What you’ll find is that a lot of nontraditional companies can and are putting offerings into this space where in the past they didn’t or couldn’t compete because traditional air defense technologies were very expensive, required a lot of R&D just because of the nature of the threat, needing a missile to go many, many, many miles and detect high fast targets. 

But now this new threat in this new space allows for greater and faster innovation from smaller defense companies, and also nontraditional and nondefense companies. Because, again, it’s not just a military challenge. This is also a law enforcement challenge. So it’s a civil air space. It’s a public safety challenge. And so there’s opportunities for companies both in the U.S., outside the US for defense and non-defense, large and small, to be working on these technologies. 

And they’re not working on a military technology. Maybe they’re working on a law enforcement, public safety technology because they’re going to need this as well.

36:34 – 38:57 

(DN):I think the challenge we have for some of these companies, too, is that, as they develop technology, is how you bring this into some kind of a program where they, these small companies can have the steady stream of money that they’re going to need to stay in business. 

You know, many companies are coming up with an amazing technology. But if it doesn’t get adopted, that company can’t stay in business if they’re not able to sell it. So I think that will be a challenge, of the government, finding the right technologies and bringing it into a program where you can keep these companies moving forward. 

 And then in many cases, some of these small companies will merge with larger companies are merging their small companies. That’s so they can continue on. But that’s where the Valley of Death is very real when there is actually money and small business innovation efforts, SBIR I, SBIR II, other places, STRATFI, that small companies can find money to continue to develop their products. 

But then to get to that point to some kind of a program award, sometimes it’s a very large leap. It’s very hard for these small companies. So I think that’s something for us to watch. I think that’s something where Elara Nova can be quite effective as we help some of these companies manage that Valley of Death. 

 And whether that’s pairing up with a company or whether that’s looking for other avenues for funding so they can stay alive and then making sure that the government sees their technology and sees how applicable that can be to this fight because, the secret sauce is really going to be in some of these small companies and some of it’s just amazing technology as we bring it forward, it’s not always going to be a large companies.  

But in many cases, the large companies, like the Lockheed Martin’s and Northrop’s, the BAE’s and others are very important because they do have the ability, to extend the funding and have the structures to not only, to continue to develop the technology, but then to scale it, at the necessary speed that the Department of War is going to need moving forward. 

 And I think the industry is so far, doing a pretty good job responding and so I look forward to more indications from the government of exactly what they’re looking for, so industry can stay focused. We do have the best industry in the world. And we will figure out how you can make this command and control, where you have a handful of small UAS’s around an airbase like we had at Langley a few years ago, and we’re able to quickly identify where they are, who they are, and then apply the countermeasure to neutralize it if it is truly a threat or if it’s not a threat – let it go, or if it turns out to be a manned general aviation airplane that just wandered into the wrong airspace, you let it go, and then there you deal with it in terms of a civil matter. We’re not there yet, but I think we’re getting there very fast and it’s great to see that the country is focused on this.

38:58 – 39:09 

In what ways does the dual-use implications for counter-UAS mission, also present a unique opportunity for the government to establish a public-private partnership that would accelerate the development of counter-UAS technologies? 

39:10 – 40:50 

(JPM): Yeah, so I think if you think of this as a dual-use technology or a dual-use technology space, there’s of course the military applications. And particularly in the U.S., we’ve seen opportunities to spend money on countering this threat, both for US air bases, for U.S. air bases overseas, etc. but that’s still a relatively small subset of what this problem space could look like. 

If you think about every police department in the country, every police department perhaps in the world needing something like this system or something to counter threats in this space from both local and national safety objectives. I mean, just from a counter-UAS perspective, the need to detect, identify and determine what you’re going to do about it is not simply a military application, right? 

You need to do that in law enforcement and public safety, as well. And so this need is going to be proliferated across the globe if it’s not already there. And any place where these drones could cause problems. And there’ll be different ways of handling them as well. We don’t need to get into this discussion about whether every police department’s going to have something that can shoot down a drone because they may take a different approach. It’s not really us to say what’s going to be, but they are going to need something to detect, identify and then make a decision on what they’re going to do about it.

But it also does beg the question about what types of law or policy we need that are essentially the equivalent of a police officer pulling over somebody that’s speeding, right?A drone not where it’s supposed to be or approaching someplace it’s not supposed to be. It’s kind of like somebody’s speeding. So what’s the counter-UAS equivalent of a police officer putting their blue lights on to pull somebody over.  

So as the U.S. technology evolves, policy evolves and norms evolve. How we think about these aircraft and how they operate in the national and international airspace, we’re going to have to rethink how we work together from a civil and military perspective, so that we can take advantage of these new technologies while also keeping our population safe. 

40:51 – 42:25 

(DN):I think the dual-use is actually really going to be very effective because for the same reason Newark Airport is not going to want to have small UAS’s flying around the final approach corridor. They’re going to want a way to detect those small UAS’s and get them away. 

And whether that is some kind of a non-kinetic effect where they can actually move them away, or whether they physically take the things down, because there is a need in both the commercial and military sector, I think the technology is going to advance that much quicker because, on the commercial side, they come up with a way to keep UAS’s away from a busy airport in a downtown area like Newark Airport, New Jersey. 

Then we probably can use that very similar technology at Anderson Airbase in Guam. And for an offensive drone swarm there’s probably some various similarities in that technology.  

So I think that’s probably a good thing that this is a problem both in military and civil area, and you saw that, last year with those devastating wildfires in LA County, when they had that problem with drone swarms, some of them were good because they were police departments and others. Others were not. 

They’re just a hobbyist wanting to see the fires. And next thing you know, you were having impacts with small drones with aircraft and causing a lot of damage to those aircraft that were trying to fight the fires. And you’re also seeing in places like say the Super Bowl. 

Well, they’ll put a TFR or a Temporary Flight Restriction over the Super Bowl. So, aircraft don’t fly near it for security reasons. We’ve done that since 9/11 with large events like that. What about the drones and the hobbyists? And then and all the other things that are taking place around an event like that. And so I think the dual-use nature of the dual-use problem is going to help us solve this quicker for both sides. Spear, anything else on that? 

42:26 – 43:08 

(JPM): Yeah, I mean, if you look at similar technology advances, there were times when, for example, the Global Positioning System, the GPS, and specifically the receiver that you needed to figure out where you were, it used to be huge. And then you have organizations like DARPA that miniaturized it to make it more usable on the battlefield. But since then, I mean, you’ve got GPS receivers on everything to include your watch, your phone, etc. so the continued miniaturization of that, due to the commercial applications of GPS, the military now gets to take advantage of the fact that those receivers are now so much cheaper and so much smaller.  

And I think the same thing is going to happen with a lot of these technologies. So it’s really beneficial to the military and the civilian world that there’s a dual-use nature to this because it’s going to help accelerate, bring down the cost and size of all of these things.

43:09 – 43:18 

As the respective leaders of Elara Nova’s Aeronautics & Mission Systems sector, how can Elara Nova support the development and acquisition of counter-UAS technologies? 

43:19 – 45:04 

(DN):Our intention for the Aeronautics and Mission System, the AMS side of Elara Nova is to help these companies navigate, not only the government side of things and working through the innovation efforts as well as getting into programs. 

But as well as helping them tell a story about if they have a technology, where that can be used and how – present that technology, whether it’s to another company. If they’re going to be paired up with another company, or if it’s to the government or to an international partner as well. 

I think that’s one thing we do well, in AMS – is we have a lot of operational experts, and we can help them tell that story really well. We can also help them navigate, whether they’re looking for that SBIR I effort, that SBIR II effort they’re looking for. How do they get in front of the right person at the Department of War or whether that’s one of the Combatant Commanders? 

Who is that right person you need to get in front of? And when they get in front of that person, what story should they tell? And I think that’s something we’ll be very effective at.  

And then looking at the larger piece of the Golden Dome, we’re very involved with Golden Dome. I know a lot of it is on the space side. General Guetlein and his team, many of them came from the Space Force, but it is an all-domain effort. When you look at how you’re going to defend the nation and much of Golden Dome is going to be outside of the space sector, we talked a little bit about it right here about the integration with JIATF 401, the command and control networks, etc. 

Many of these small companies are coming to us with questions about Golden Dome, about how would they fit in? How could they become part of a broader consortium as part of this large-scale effort to defend the homeland? And I think we’re putting ourselves in a great position to help these companies tell their story, figure out how they can integrate, figure out how they can get funded and ultimately get into some kind of a program of record, and then proceed from there. Spear, anything else on that? 

45:05 – 45:34 

(JPM): Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this counter-UAS mission poses a great question for us to figure out how the Aeronautics and Mission Systems sector can provide complementary expertise or a high quality outside look to these companies developing these technologies. I mean, these companies are already staffed with brilliant people that developed awesome technologies, and they have great operational depth. And the answer we believe that AMS can provide them with expertise that can complement and leverage the strengths they already have within their company to ultimately get capability into the hands of those that need it. 

45:35 – 46:14 

This has been an episode of The Elara Edge. As a strategic advisory firm, Elara Nova is the trusted guiding partner that builds tailored teams to illuminate unseen opportunities and deliver impact across every domain.  

With the trusted insight to deliver your decisive edge, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in national 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.

Securing Space: A Plan for U.S. Action

The Council on Foreign Relations Space Task Force, co-chaired by Elara Nova partner Lt Gen (Ret) Nina Armagno, published a new report: “Securing Space: A Plan for U.S. Action.”

The report outlines a series of findings and recommendations for the United States to immediately address the strategic challenges and existential threats found in today’s space environment.

Episode 22: Department of Defense Budget Must Realign to Space-Based Threats

The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security

Host: Scott King

SME: Gen (Ret) John E. Hyten, Senior Principal Advisor at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy (JH)

Lt Gen (Ret) Nina Armagno, Executive Director of International Partnerships at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy (NA)

00:02 – 01:43

The United States Space Force requested $29.4 billion for Fiscal Year 2025, a two percent drop from the previous year. The final budget, however, has yet to be passed as the federal government is currently operating under what’s known as a “Continuing Resolution.” 

This is a reality the Space Force has become familiar with. For half of its existence – or about thirty of the past sixty months since the Space Force was founded – the military’s newest service has been operating under a Continuing Resolution.

The Space Force was founded in response to the threatening actions of near-peer competitors in space. But without the appropriate funding to build and maintain a strong and capable Space Force, the national and economic security of the United States remains at risk.

However, even the traditional Department of Defense approach to building and resourcing its force structure, which begins with the budget, leaves the Space Force with only a marginal amount of the funding it needs. 

Welcome to the Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security,” I’m your host Scott King. I’m joined today by retired General John Hyten, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Senior Principal Advisor at Elara Nova: The Space Consulantcy, as well as retired Lieutenant General Nina Armagno, the first director of staff with the United States Space Force and executive director of international partnerships at Elara Nova.

Together, they co-wrote a recent opinion editorial, published by SpaceNews, stating that it’s time to re-focus the DOD budget away from legacy programs to resource against the modern, space-based threat.

General Hyten, Sir, welcome to the show!

01:44 – 01:46

JH: It’s great to be here.

It’s great to be with General Armagno, always.

01:47 – 01:49

And General Armagno, thank you for taking the time to be here today.

01:50 – 01:51

NA: Thank you. Scott.

01:52 – 02:14

As of our recording today, Congress and the DOD are operating under what’s known as a “Continuing Resolution.” This is in lieu of a passed budget for Fiscal Year 2025. 

Now, many in our audience are likely familiar with Continuing Resolutions, but for those who aren’t, let’s set the table here:

What is a Continuing Resolution? And how does it affect the Space Force’s overall budgeting and planning process?

02:15 – 03:12

JH: So a Continuing Resolution real simply is the fact that we don’t have a budget for this fiscal year. Therefore, the Continuing Resolution said we will comply with last year’s budget limits and budget programs, which means no new starts can happen.

Which means any changes in budget can’t be done because we have to operate at last year’s budget level. That means any relatively new program that started the last couple of years probably has a required budget increase that is needed in order to deliver the capability. That budget increase can’t be executed because it hasn’t been passed by Congress.

Therefore, all of these programs are delayed. The inefficiencies waste of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, and most importantly, from our perspective, you can’t deliver the required capability that we need for the nation because we can’t fund the programs and so many space programs in today’s day and age, are in that – that category of we need additional funding in order to execute and we can’t execute them.

03:13 – 03:52

NA: And if you look at the Space Force budget in particular, you’re probably looking at about a $4 billion deficit, but that doesn’t tell the full story. The full story is the impact on the new starts as General Hyten just mentioned. And for a new service trying to consolidate capabilities from across the other services – that’s one thing.

But what the Space Force is really working on are new capabilities, using new technologies for new missions and the impact to delaying those programs is significant, not just for the Space Force, but the entire joint force and our nation.

03:53 – 04:23

JH: It’s kind of a little bit of a Catch-22.

We actually build our budgets assuming that Congress passes a budget on time. So that come the 1st of October, with the new budget, the new program is executed on the 1st of October. Here it is, the middle of February, soon to be March, and there’s no budget. That means the last six months we’ve been wasting time and money because of the law that says there will be a budget on the 1st of October, we build our budgets assuming that there will be there on the 1st of October. So it’s a little bit of a Catch-22 because they’re never there.

04:24 – 05:02

NA: And so guess what the entire Pentagon has been working on assuming the new budget’s going to be passed? They’re already working on 2026. I mean, that whole thing’s probably being blown up by new presidential priorities, of course. But traditionally the approach is it’s typically carved out to be a third, a third, a third. A third goes to the Army, a third goes to the Department of the Navy, which includes the Navy and the Marine Corps. A third goes to the Department of the Air Force, which is Air Force and Space Force, roughly. But the newest service in town only garners about three percent of the overall DOD budget and has been flat over the last year. This is harmful.

05:03 – 06:06

JH: And the other piece of that puzzle that really hurts the Department of the Air Force is that the Air Force in their budget, is the only service that has a pass-through element of the budget.

That pass-through element I think in the 25 budget was roughly $45 billion. That goes straight to the intelligence community. That doesn’t come to the Air Force. It was put in the Air Force a long time ago when that budget was hidden from the world. Nobody knew that budget exists. Everybody knows that budget exists right now. In fact, we can pull out the Air Force budget, and look at it.

So when you go one third, one third, one third, the Air Force one third includes $45 billion for somebody else. So we actually don’t have, we the Department of the Air Force, don’t have one third. We have about one fifth and when you actually are trying to build an Air Force, that’s why we have ancient airplanes. I mean, the newest B-52 is like 63 years old.

We can’t build our new space capabilities because they’re paying other people’s bills, and it’s almost untenable. But you basically can’t have an Air Force and you can’t have a Space Force unless you change that fundamental structure.

06:07 – 06:29

Funding for the Space Force has increased year-over-year since its inception. The outlier, however, is the latest budget request for Fiscal Year 2025, which came in at about $600 million less than the previous year. 

If passed that way, this budget request would still put funding for the Space Force at around $29 billion. But even so, is that enough?

06:30 – 07:33

NA: No, it’s not enough. What is the actual number? Well, I don’t have it. But I’m sure it’s not enough. This is a service that’s barely five years old. Every indication is that it needs to grow. 

I hear today there’s a ceiling on the Space Force budget. We are flat-lined and I know decisions are very difficult within the Space Force and within the Department of the Air Force.

But I don’t believe that flat-lining the Space Force should have been one of those decisions. I know Secretary Kendall has said right before he left that the Space Force budget should probably double, but perhaps he had an opportunity to, at the very least, put some more funds into 2025. There are nuances. I know there’s a story behind the story, I get it.

But the service hasn’t been around long enough to have those deep relationships with staffers on the Hill, or within the Pentagon. And I think some of that lack of experience contributed to this flat budget.

07:34 – 08:51

JH: To me, the defense budget should be all about ‘How do we respond to the threats of the world? Right now, the most significant pacing threat that we have is China. China is basically building air and space capabilities and strategic capabilities to challenge the United States in the Pacific.

The second one is Russia. Probably even more concerning in the near term. They’re building the same thing. Why have they been building those things? They’ve been building those things because they realized the American way of war depends on air and space capabilities, period.

Therefore, seems to me like the threat demands an increase in air and space capabilities, an increase in naval air and deployment capabilities. And the third priority would be the United States Army. If you look at the numbers, it’s actually the reverse, which means, and don’t get me wrong, the Army is critical in the Middle East, will be critical in anything to do with Russia. 

But if we’re going to deal with the threats we have to do, you shouldn’t see a declining budget. You should see an increasing budget. 

And so it bothers me when the threat does not drive our requirements. When it’s all about the threat. I would expect to see a robust capability to defend the capabilities we have on-orbit and deny adversaries the use of capabilities against our forces on the ground, at sea, and in the air and I don’t see that.

08:52 – 09:04

And with respect to the role of space-based capabilities in joint military operations, how might an under-resourced or under-funded Space Force adversely affect its ability to support the other services like the Army and the Navy?

09:05 – 09:53

NA: Space is used in every operational mission. Certainly every joint operational mission. Every single day, the other services use capabilities from space. Just think of satellite communications, GPS, weather, missile warning. These are fundamental capabilities that all of our operations, our plans. We rely on the fact that they’re going to be there. With a flat budget and other priorities coming down, especially now from a new administration.

And I’ve seen those hard choices. I’ve seen the Space Force and the Air Force have to make very hard choices about those capabilities. You know, what gets funded? So you certainly can’t make everybody happy. But it’s even worse when you’re not even starting on a level playing field.

09:54 – 10:49

JH: So you kind of put two and two together and you see it as up to three.

And the reason is because the bills that General Armagno just described for PNT, comm, missile warning, all of those bills have to be paid and they have to be paid upfront because every military service requires them. Now we’ve moved into a contested world in space where we have to worry about somebody threatening us in space, threatening those capabilities that I just described that are the must-pay bills. 

And so the Space Force lays in the capabilities that are needed to go do that offense, defense, fires however you want to describe it. They lay in those capabilities. And then we can’t get a budget, because Congress won’t pass a budget and so all of that money that is programmed can’t be used.

And then the waste in the Space Force budget is astronomical, no pun intended, because of that same issue. That’s why when you add two and two, you get three because you have the must-pay bill and then you have the inefficiencies put in, because we don’t have a budget.

10:50 – 11:04

And, Sir, you mentioned the need for the DOD to pay their bills upfront – which leads into my next question.

Can each of you elaborate on the role that Congress plays in this process, and how can the DOD work with Congress to streamline these efforts to receive the funding that it needs?

11:05 – 12:54

NA: The budget gets sent over to Congress. But then what Congress says, and I think to this day, though, they will tell you – they get the president’s budget and they throw it in the trash and they start over with their own priorities. The president’s budget is not literally in the trash. I mean, it is the foundation of what the executive is posturing for and supporting and trying to get Congress to align.

Then come posture hearings where the Department of Defense and all the other, most senior leaders of our government, come to the Hill and it’s a parade of briefings. 

Following that is lots of engagement and what I found in trying to fight for programs and advocate for budget, for the space programs in the Air Force when I was part of AQS. General Hyten and also led AQS earlier in his career, the acquisition for space, essentially in the Department of the Air Force. I found that bringing them in early, bringing the staffers into program briefings, your acquisition strategies and plans to help them understand what you’re going after.

I found that to be very helpful. We did it very deliberately with a program called “Silent Barker,” which is space-based space situational awareness. So satellites in-orbit that can also monitor that very domain and I found that this was a program that the Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office were working together at the direction of Congress.

The best thing we did, was we went to the Hill, talked to staffers before the program was even announced, or certainly approved, and they certainly felt like – and they were – part of the program from day one and part of the decision-making.

12:55 – 14:51

JH: So Congress’s number one job is the power of the purse to pass a budget. That’s their job, not the president’s job, not the Supreme Court, the Congress of the United States, the Senate and House of Representatives together have to come up with a budget.

Now, they’re supposed to come up with a budget by 1 October. So they lay in a series of briefings. General Armagno called them “posture hearings.” They lay those posture hearings, usually for a Combatant Command like STRATCOM or Space Command or Central Command or Indo-Pacific Command. They lay those posture hearings in usually early March. You have the Secretary of Defense usually comes in the posture hearings in late February or early March kind of leading the way.

Then you have the Combatant Commanders after that, then you have the services come in. And the job of all those people, the SECDEF, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Deputy Secretary, the Vice Chairman, all the Combatant Commanders, and then the services is to defend the president’s budget to Congress. The schedule is the schedule. You’re going to go ahead and schedule those things.

I can’t tell you how difficult it is as both a major command commander, then a Combatant Commander, and then the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to have to go testify to Congress on the president’s budget when no president’s budget was submitted to Congress, because the schedule is going to be the schedule, and everybody thinks the budget’s going to be there other then it’s not, then you have to stand and answer all their questions on these future programs when you have no budget. So when the budget does come over, then you basically have to do it all again.

What General Armagno described is a great way to do it. You bring the staffers over, you educate them as fast as you can, but you’re behind the game trying to get to October 1st, and then you do this every year.

So the waste that goes to the taxpayers is horrible. But the education of the Congress, which is the job of the Department, I mean, we don’t lobby, but we have to educate Congress on what we need – that is damaged tremendously when the leadership of the Department can’t talk about their priorities to Congress because they don’t know what they are yet, because the president hasn’t decided. So it’s, it’s just a raw mess.

14:52 – 15:07

Here I’d like to lean into each of your respective careers and experiences working with the budgeting process.

Starting with General Hyten, Sir, can you share some insights from your experience as the former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

How can we overcome some of these budget challenges?

15:08 – 16:15

JH: The first thing I’ll say is that as a whole, Congress has become dysfunctional the last ten years. But the amazing thing to me that surprised me in all my three four-star jobs, Space Command, Strategic Command, and Vice Chairman was how much each member of Congress, Senate and House of Representatives were interested in educating themselves and trying to do the right thing to build the budget that they have to do.

And when you take the time to go talk to the members and talk to their staffs on a frequent basis, they will work hard to do the right thing for the country, and things will end up in the bills that you think are impossible, because they really it’s just this tight margin between the Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

It makes moving things as a whole very difficult. But if you take the time to actually go across the river and explain to Congress what you’re trying to do, they will do their absolute upmost best to include those things in the budget, and you can move these things forward. We could actually move fairly quickly, if we could solve this overall problem of passing the budget on time.

16:16 – 16:22

Thank you, Sir. And to take it one step further – is there a particular program or specific experience that really encapsulates this effort?

16:23 – 17:34

JH: An initiative that we had when General Ellen Pawlikowski was Commander of Space and Missile System Center. I was AQS, head of acquisition of the Pentagon. Our desire was to buy more than one satellite at a time in production and that was against the law. The law said, if you go to production, you have to fully fund that program.

Well, fully funding a satellite program back then, it was a multi-billion dollar satellite. And I’ll just make up numbers. And it was for the Space-Based Infrared System, the Advanced EHF system. If we paid for one, it would cost roughly $2 billion. If we paid for two, it cost us $3 billion.

In other words, a billion and a half dollars a satellite. So we could save the taxpayer $1 billion each on both of those programs. So we could save the taxpayer $2 billion if we could just spread the funding out to buy two. But that would cause a change in the law. But General Pawlikowski and I, we spent tons of time on the Hill educating both the staff and the members of Congress.

What would happen if we did that? And son of a gun. When the law came out, they changed the law to allow us to do that for those programs. That was remarkable.

17:35 – 18:05

NA: Another example, last Secretary of the Air Force, Secretary Kendall, worked with Congress on the law that says there should be no new starts under a Continuing Resolution and he was able to get an exception.

There was a new program the Space Force wanted to start. I think it was a Replacement GPS or some smaller program, and that was being used to kind of test out the new exception to the law and more of that kind of work needs to happen, because laws can be changed.

18:06 – 18:47

JH: That’s the thing to remember, because the Congress writes the law, the president signs them into action. Any law can be changed. People think the acquisition program is inflexible, that there’s only one way through the process. This is the way it’s going to be.

If you actually read the Federal Acquisition Regulations, which are basically the compilation of all the laws that have passed over the last number of decades, on how you buy things, pretty much every way you want to buy something is included in the law. 

And oh, by the way, if it’s not, all you have to do is get Congress to change it, which means the right person, or the right military leader has to go over and explain. And then Congress can and does on many occasions change the law for the benefit of the country.

18:48 – 19:01

Now, General Armagno, you served as the first director of staff at the United States Space Force, where you had a hand in crafting the very first Space Force budget. 

So, Ma’am, what perspectives can you share from this first-hand experience?

19:02 – 21:06

NA: Well, it was really difficult to build the first Space Force budget because there was really nobody in the Pentagon yet. General Thompson was leading a team of maybe 30 of us.

I was asked to come over as a two-star to help him and everyone else, all of our expertise, all of our ‘budgeteers,’ if you will. Was back at Air Force Space Command in Colorado Springs. So we really had to communicate well. It starts with a strategy. You start with trying to fulfill your overarching strategy and goals for the service.

Brand-new service. A lot of that wasn’t yet defined. As a service, you start with budget guidance. Now, we did get that guidance from General Raymond. You take the guidance and then you realize when you’re done with this process, there’s way more that you want to pay for that you want to do than you could ever possibly finance it.

So there’s a lot of competing requirements coming from other services. Congress as well, has their favorite programs and projects. 

And so one example of how hard it is to pivot your budget. There was a recognition, especially during that time, that space domain awareness was so crucial and important for our new Command, U.S. Space Command.

It was important to their planning, to their missions. And the Space Force coined a term ‘Pivot to SDA.’ But I saw, especially in those budget deliberations, I saw that SDA, especially the ground-based radars and optical telescopes, were talking about space-based systems as I just mentioned, Silent Barker. I saw those budgets get cut. I mean, they just couldn’t stand up to the pressure of the other things that the Space Force was trying to do so early on snd so even if your strategy and the guidance is written as ‘Pivot to SDA,’ if there’s no money behind that, there’s not much of a pivot.

21:07 – 21:47

Thank you, Ma’am. Now this declining budget request is also indicative of a broader trend that we’ve been witnessing in defense spending over the years.

In 2022, U.S. defense spending came in at just over 3.4 percent of our GDP, or Gross Domestic Product. The Congressional Budget Office forecast that this spending will continue to decrease by another percentage point by 2034. 

That would put our defense spending at nearly half of the running average of 4.2 percent of GDP Congress has traditionally allocated for defense spending over the last half century. 

From your perspectives, what has triggered these broader declines in defense spending from Congress?

21:48 – 22:51

NA: The national debt is a problem. We also see rising non-discretionary fund needs. We see an aging population that needs to be cared for. And when you see how large the defense budget is, there have been efforts along the way to decrease the DOD budget. I remember something called “Sequestration,” back in 2012, 2013, 2014 time rame, which was a ten percent budget cut for ten years that the Congress passed into law.

Yeah, I know the DOD has a big budget, but I can tell you from somebody, a commander on the ground, it was really difficult basically cutting programs that were non-mission, but they were the the essence of what made a base, a community, for example, or the Air Force feel like they were part of a community.

And I think today you see just different changing congressional priorities and you see a focus on the perceived and probably real bloat across our entire government budget. That’s what I see.

22:52 – 24:30

JH: I see it that way, plus a little different. I agree with everything that General Armagno said. But the little different comes from, well, two things. And these are things that former bosses taught me.

And since I’m going to quote them, I’ll tell you they were. General Mattis once said, “America’s the richest country in the world. We should be able to afford survival. We should pay the bills that we have to pay in order to do that.” 

But then it was General Bob Koehler when I think he was at STRATCOM, when he said that because the budget at the time was $700 billion, he said, you know, if you talk to the average guy in the street and and say, you know, the defense budget is $700 billion, 700 billion with a ‘B,’ they would assume that we have a pretty darn awesome defense for the $700 billion.

We’re approaching a trillion now and right now, we are the least efficient acquisition bureaucracy that I’ve ever experienced. We pay sometimes ten times more than we need to for something. We keep things around much longer than we need them. We waste enormous amounts of money through Continuing Resolutions, and if we actually spent our money correctly, that amount would be plenty to build a defense.

But there’s so much waste and you started this discussion with the Continuing Resolution. That’s money you never get back. That’s just gone. So we got to stop wasting money. We got to get rid of bloated bureaucracies. We have to delegate decisions down to lower levels so people can make decisions and move quickly and effectively energize our budget. 

So number one, we should pay the money we need to pay for survival. And number two, when we see waste, we should kill it.

24:31 – 24:40

So where do we go from here? What needs to happen not only with regard to the budget for FY25? But for the defense budget process as a whole moving forward?

24:41 – 25:22

JH: You know, everybody thinks that the president’s budget is the budget. It’s not, it’s just the start of the discussion. So the actual budget, what goes to space in FY25 will be decided by the Congress. I know that the current administration is going through a quick re-look at the 25 budget to come up with what I would hope they make some different recommendations that were in the previous version.

And then Congress has the opportunity to change things, and I would hope they would do it strategically with regard to the threat. And if they do that, the budget will align where it needs to be. But there’s a lot of political pressures from local communities all the way up to the companies that actually have the work, that will put huge pressure on it.

But if I had one thing to say, it would just be focus on the threat. If it doesn’t respond to the threat we shouldn’t be doing.

25:23 – 25:57

NA: I totally agree with that. And I just wanted to highlight that Representative Bacon, who as a Congressman in Nebraska, he wrote an opinion recently where he says enough about talking about innovation and working on new technology.

And I think it kind of goes along with what General Hyten and saying he wants tough choices to be made based on priorities. Those priorities should be based on the threat. But he says it’s time to actually set priorities. Congress fund those priorities and move out quickly on producing systems.

25:58 – 26:32

JH: If I was Secretary of Defense, and thank goodness I’m not, but if I were Secretary of defense and I went to my posture hearing before a budget was even submitted, perhaps I would do nothing but talk about the threats and the capabilities that are required to deal with the threats.

Somehow we forget that that’s what we’re all about. Our job is to defend the nation against all threats. Everybody that wears the uniform, everybody that serves in government, swears an oath to the Constitution and embedded in that is the ability to defend the United States.

And if we’re doing things that don’t. I would say stop that and reprioritize against the threat that should inform Congress where the budget has to go.

26:33 – 27:02

NA: And as the threat changes, which we’ve seen it change over the last ten years to the point where there’s a theory that the next war will begin in space, the next war will begin in cyber. It’ll be unseen. It won’t be somebody crossing a border. It won’t be a build up along a border.

It won’t be a bullet fired. It will be in the space domain and therefore a restructuring of our national defense is probably in order here.

27:03 – 28:25

JH: If I was an adversary like China or Russia, looking at the United States, you don’t have to be a military scholar or a historian to say, if I was going to start a conflict with the United States, what’s the first thing I have to do?

It’s not actually attack the United States. The first thing I have to do is I have to insert doubt into the American population about our ability to achieve our objectives. I don’t do that with a military confrontation because the American people – rightly – believe and trust the United States military will dominate anybody on a battlefield. And oh, by the way, we will.

That’s not the way you start. First you take our eyes, ears, that’s space. Then you influence cyber to incur doubt. Then you attack the United States through chemical and biological warfare that nobody can see. Nobody can figure out where they’re coming from. And if you look at the way we responded to COVID in the not very coordinated activity we had responding to a COVID virus, all you have to do is insert that doubt, and then you challenge the United States with military force because now the doubt is across the American people.

So it’s not through the Army or the Navy or even through the Air Force originally. It’s through space, cyber, chemical and biological warfare that’s unattributable and those things we actually don’t do very well defending ourselves right now and that should be one of the highest priorities we have, because that’s how conflict would start.

28:26 – 28:41

Thank you, Sir, and in response to how the nature of warfare is changing. 

What are some of the technologies, capabilities, and mission areas that the Space Force needs to prioritize in communicating with Congress so their funding efforts can be resourced appropriately?

28:42 – 29:33

NA: Well, you can look at it in basically two buckets. One bucket, what is needed to fight tonight in space, but in support of every other domain. That would be capabilities like anti-jam communications, protected PNT – position, navigation and timing.

And then there’s another bucket. What about a war that extends to space? What about a war in space? Those technologies definitely are being discussed at classified levels, but we can talk about the vulnerabilities of satellites and vulnerabilities in the space domain. 

Satellites have no defenses. Zero. None. Well, one technology would be on-board sensing – an on-board sensor that could simply provide a satellite its own warning or its own sensing of something nearby or an approaching threat.

29:34 – 30:51

JH: So I was lucky enough to serve at the four-star level for a long time, through three different administrations. And without going into detail, which would be inappropriate for so many reasons, classification as well as discussion with presidents, I’ll say with the three presidents I worked for directly: President Obama, President Trump and President Biden.

At some point during that time, I had a discussion with them about offense and defense. At some point in the discussion, they would look at me and say, all three of them, right? Now think, President Obama, President Trump, President Biden, three different people as you can imagine, but they would look at me and hold me accountable, rightly so in saying, ‘Didn’t you tell me years ago that we needed to build a more resilient space architecture because we don’t have the ability to defend ourselves? And then that would change the whole discussion about offense and defense, if we had a resilient space architecture. How come you haven’t built a resilient space architecture?’ 

And by the time I got to President Biden, that had been going on for like ten years. But it was the same question from three different presidents, three different things.

You said multiple times, we need a resilient architecture, and then you don’t build it. Now we’re building it, slowly because the status quo still wins in the discussions. But, again, it’s all about the threat.

30:52 – 31:27 

NA: And looking at the threat, it’s also very difficult to defend 1 v 1. So Russia, China proliferating on the ground, for example, anti-satellite capabilities, jamming capabilities, to counter 1 v 1 would be a fool’s errand. It would be very expensive.

And so it’s out-thinking your adversary out-maneuvering your adversary and putting capabilities in motion and funding them, most importantly to counter. But it can’t be platform centric. It has to be mission-area centric.

31:28 – 32:59

JH: So I’m looking at some of the things are adversaries do and learning from that is important.

A couple years ago, in the early phases of the Ukraine crisis, Vladimir Putin threatened to deploy and perhaps employ a nuclear weapon in low-Earth orbit. Everybody says that’s nuts. Why would he do that? Well, let’s think about what they’ve been trying to do in counter space. They spent an enormous amount of Russian treasure and time building a direct ascent anti-satellite capability that would take out one satellite.

And then they deployed that basically to threaten us. And then in the early stages of the Ukrainian conflict, a commercial company proliferated across the heavens, is being used against them. And that direct ascent ASAT they spent enormous treasure to build – tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to take out a ten or $100,000 satellite that doesn’t do anything to damage it.

So what’s the only option he has to actually threaten that capability? A nuclear weapon in low-Earth orbit, which is the dumbest thing in the world to do. It impacts them. It impacts us, impacts the world – it’s horrible. He’s got no way else to threaten us. 

We need to pay attention to what they’re doing, what works and what doesn’t work, and fill the void in the criteria so we never are in the point where we would ever consider what we did in the 1960s, which was build a nuclear-tipped ASAT capability. We did that in the 60s. That’s horrible. But we need to be smart about what we do and learn from our adversaries.

33:00 – 33:21

NA: And, you know, it’s not 1 v 1. It’s not space versus space. We can counter our adversaries from other domains.

We can counter our adversaries by using the levers of national power, like diplomacy, information – yes – military might, but also economic power. So there are many, many ways to get after this problem.

33:22 – 33:42

JH: There’s no such thing as war on space. There’s only war and all tools of the government, so if somebody attacked us in space, I want the adversary to know we may not come back in like we come back in a different way that will be more damaging to you than what you just created to us, because the goal is to win the conflict. The goal is not to win the battle.

33:43 – 34:11

Thank you. 

Now, I want to leave time for another major recent development that will have significant budget implications. And that is the Trump administration’s executive order, titled “The Iron Dome for America.” 

This order directs an assessment for a missile defense system for the United States homeland, while also signalling that space will play a big role in this initiative.

So can each of you elaborate on the role of space and what Space Force programs might be involved in this Iron Dome?

34:12 – 36:27

JH: So the first thing to say is that I would recommend that anybody listening to this go back and look at the Strategic Posture Commission Report of 12 bipartisan people that met a couple of years ago and came up with recommendations for missile defense that even talked about coercive threats against Russia and China, that we needed to have a defensive capability for that.

And a lot of that has turned into what President Trump is calling an Iron Dome for America and I think that’s good. But the first thing you have to realize that if you’re going to have any kind of missile defense capability, you can’t shoot anything you can’t see.

So the first thing you have to do is be able to see the threat and characterize it. Right now, the threat is moving from just a ballistic threat that we can see pretty well to cruise missile and hypersonic threats that we can’t see very well. So the first priority to deal with those threats will have to be to build surveillance systems to deal with that.

Now some of those surveillance systems will be terrestrial, but most of those will be space-based, and they’ll have to be changed. And some of those, by their very nature, will have to be low to see the dim targets that are going to be cruise missiles and hypersonics. So coming up with an integrated architecture of ground and space to be able to see and characterize all the missile threats that threaten America is the first step to an Iron Dome.

The second piece is that we have to go after the rogue states, the North Koreas and Iran and make sure we can defend ourselves against that. And then the coercive threat from Russia and China, which is a low number of low-yield weapons, threatened to be used like in Ukraine to change the equation because we don’t have a like capability to respond to that.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had a small number of defense capabilities in order to take out those capabilities, so we didn’t have to respond in kind with a nuclear weapon? 

Now, those capabilities can be broadly built, using ground -based, air-based, naval-based systems in order to deal with those kind of threats, but ultimately to get to an Iron Dome for America, you have to get to a capability that can attack many targets with one capability, because otherwise you get to the problem we were talking about earlier with the ASAT capability.

You’ll never be able to build enough interceptors, so ultimately, on the weapons side, to achieve the vision that President Trump has defined, you’re going to have to move into space.

36:28 – 37:12

NA: From what I’ve read, the Defense Department is taking this in phases. They know they can’t build the whole thing today with today’s technologies and today’s budget.

So we know that current systems will certainly participate in the Iron Dome. Our current missile warning systems, even though they can’t see all threats. Those will be part of this architecture. Our strategic communications systems in space will be part of this architecture. The Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture that the Space Development Agency is building will be enhanced and part of this architecture as well.

So it remains to be seen exactly how it all will fit together in the end. But they do realize that they’re going to use what we have and build upon it.

37:13 – 37:37

JH: That’s why I recommend the Strategic Posture Commission and I have to admit, I was one of the authors.

So, you know, it’s somewhat self-serving. But what we laid out was the phased approach. What you do near-term, what you do in the mid-term, and then what you do in the far-term in terms of technologies to change the game and everybody on the commission agreed with those recommendations, which tells me that’s a pretty good starting point.

37:38 – 37:58 

Now, the executive order also states that funding for this Iron Dome for America should be included in the Fiscal 26 budget request. As we mentioned before, we currently don’t even have a budget for 2025. 

So what needs to happen to make this a reality to incorporate such a monumental effort such as this Iron Dome, into the Fiscal 26 budget?

37:59 – 38:42

JH: So the first thing that has to happen is the Missile Defense Agency needs to divest itself of all production and sustainment programs, period. Which means they don’t do any production sustainment, all they do is research and development. Then the services responsible for producing, sustaining THADD, Patriot, ground-based interceptors. All those capabilities that are out there and the Missile Defense Agency can just focus on: ‘What do we need in order to get to the long term future?’

And you lay in the capabilities of applied research and technology, basic research and technology all the way through in order to build that, you can actually do it in the 26 budget pretty easily, but not if 80 percent of your people are doing production sustainment, because if that’s your organization, your culture is production and sustainment, not innovative moves to the future.

38:43 – 39:20

NA: And to be sure, this will be very disruptive for the status quo that the Pentagon is used to and to some extent, the other services.

And if you bring it back to the role of Congress that we talked about as well. I read that Senate Republicans are proposing a $150 billion more for the defense budget for 26. 

Will that all go to the Iron Dome? Doubtful. And even if it did, there will still have to be tough choices and programs and projects that are killed among all services to afford to do what this very ambitious project is asking us to do.

39:21 – 40:11

JH: I assume it’s going to be the Missile Defense Agency. But however this team is formed, the Space Force needs to have active members on the team.

If you look at the UCP that’s out there right now, this integrated global surveillance mission is a Space Command mission, and therefore the Space Force is the primary service provider for that capability. So the Space Force needs to be heavily involved in that. 

And then as the threat gets played out in this group, the smart people in the Space Force should look at and say, you know, I’ll look at directed energy, I’ll look at kinetic energy, and I’ll look at all those things and they can do trades pretty quick because they have the capability to do that and say, this is what space could provide in those areas.

And then you could say, what is the technology readiness of it? So what would it take in order to improve technology readiness levels of those capabilities and lay those programs in to do that? If you have the right people in the room from the Space Force, they can lay all those pieces out and you can have an integrated approach.

40:12 – 40:20

Together, you also wrote an OpEd that was published recently by SpaceNews. What was the motivation behind writing that OpEd and why release it now?

40:21 – 41:20

JH: So, Scott, you can probably get my answer. It’s all about the threat. And we’re not responding to the threat, and the budget doesn’t reflect the threat that’s out there today. And we’re not making the right decisions as a nation for how are we going to deal with that threat? And because we’re not making the right decisions, we’re lagging in the capabilities as we need to deter this kind of threat. 

The last thing anybody in this country should want or anybody in this world should want, would be a war between the United States and China, or a war between the United States and Russia. 

Nothing good can come from that. But in order to deter you actually have to have real capabilities, and those capabilities have to be seen by the adversary, and they have to strike fear into the adversary, so they decide when it’s an opportunity to act or not. They make the decision, “Not today.” And that’s got to be every day going on to the future. 

And so the reason we we wrote the OpEd was to emphasize the point that resources are not being put in the right place, and we need to adjust where we’re putting the resources.

41:21 – 42:10

NA: They’re not. And actually, you know, failure to act is not an option. 

What China is doing in space: intercepting our satellites. That is a maneuver that brings us one satellite closer to another. It’s not stopping a mission or intercepting and turning something around like you would think in the air domain. An intercept is a very close pass. They’re doing this all the time to our satellites. They are practicing tactics and techniques.

They’re getting ready to do this to the United States. We can see not only their build up, we can see them practicing their TTPs. The threat is so very real and can be seen. Now the budget needs to be re-prioritized and re-worked to meet this reality.

42:11 – 42:28

Now, each of you represent Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy in various capacities. So how is Elara Nova and its team of partners and consultants, prepared to provide the experience and expertise necessary to build and maintain a strong and capable Space Force – a process that begins with the fiscal budget?

42:29 – 43:13

JH: I tell you what, we have some pretty spectacular Guardians right now that understand the pieces of the space capability.

But what we don’t have in large numbers are Guardians that understand the entire enterprise. What Elara Nova understands through the leadership and the folks that we’ve hired, is we understand the entire enterprise and how to bring enterprise capabilities together and integrate the “eaches” to build something that is much broader. We have consultants that do that. We have advisors that do that.

When you use Elara Nova, you get all of that capability. Right now, I believe, and I wouldn’t be involved with Elara Nova if I didn’t believe this, that we fill a critical void and the capability by providing that enterprise approach. I think that’s the unique thing that Elara Nova provides.

43:14 – 43:50

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.

Episode 23: SPAR Institute Begins Latest Effort to Develop Nuclear Propulsion for Space

The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security

Host: Scott King

SME: (DD): Donna Dickey, partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy; aerospace engineer with decades of experience at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Air Force Research Laboratory

(BT): Brad Tousley, PhD, partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy; former director of the Tactical Technology Office at DARPA

(TC): Tom Cooley, PhD, partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy; former chief scientist at Air Force Research Laboratory

00:02 – 01:26

Late last year, the United States Space Force allocated $35 million to the Space Power & Propulsion for Agility, Responsiveness & Resilience – or SPAR – Institute to develop nuclear-powered systems for spacecraft propulsion. 

The institute demonstrates the latest effort by the Space Force, in partnership with the Air Force Research Laboratory – or AFRL – to explore nuclear fission as an energy source in space. If successful, nuclear energy can enable the Space Force to “maneuver without regret,” among other capabilities. 

Traditionally, maneuvering in space has been generated through electric or chemical propulsion, both of which have their respective limitations. Nuclear fission, however, which splits an atom’s nucleus within a controlled reactor to generate energy, carries significant advantages compared to its electric or chemical propulsion counterparts.

Welcome to “The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security.” I’m your host, Scott King. We have three guests today, for a roundtable-style discussion on the use of nuclear energy in space. 

Donna Dickey is a partner at Elara Nova the Space Consultancy, and an aerospace engineer with decades of experience working with agencies like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – or DARPA – as well as the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Donna, welcome to the show.

01:27 – 01:28

DD: Thank you.

01:28 – 01:39

Also joining us is Doctor Brad Tousley, a fellow Elara Nova partner, and the former director for the Tactical Technology Office at DARPA. 

Dr. Tousley, thanks for taking the time to join us today.

01:39 – 01:40

BT: Thank you. Glad to be here.

01:41 – 01:50

And then we have Doctor Tom Cooley, an Elara Nova partner and the former chief scientist at the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Dr. Cooley, thank you for joining us.

01:51 – 01:52

TC: Absolutely, glad to be here.

01:53 – 02:04

As mentioned at the top, the United States Space Force directed $35 million to the SPAR Institute to develop nuclear-powered spacecraft propulsion.

But what is the SPAR Institute, and the purpose behind this funding?

02:05 – 04:27

TC: The Space Force with luminaries like Joel Mozer and others really recognizing and wanting to focus the basic research investment at universities, towards things that are going to be game-changing for the Space Force. 

And so amongst other things, this type of university consortium idea emerged.

And one of the topics that really stems from, General John Shaw’s catchphrase, “maneuver without regret,” meaning that we need to be able to operate and maneuver satellites without having to think about how much the lifetime of that satellite has now been spent, because we have just used fuel that would otherwise be used for station-keeping and whatnot.

That concept of maneuvering without having to think about the cost of this national asset [that] has just been diminished because you have maneuvered is one of the concepts that really has shaped much of the sort of long-term thinking and goals for the Space Force.

It’s very clear that maneuver is a critical capability for the Space Force. And that was not something that we had to think about in the past. And so when, Joel Mozer and others, looked at, ‘Well, what are some of these long-term big ideas and capabilities that are going to require major technology breakthroughs?’

The ‘maneuver without regret’ certainly informed that. And when they were talking about what could universities sink their teeth into and provide a viable option and viable capabilities for the future. I mean, we’re talking about the long-term, right? That we’re not thinking these are going to be operational capabilities in a year or two.

This is fundamental research that needs to be done. And so when they were standing up these university consortiums, this was one of the key ideas that emerged: nuclear power in space.

It’s long been identified, but we just haven’t been able to bring it into the portfolio. And so ‘How do we do that?’ It’s the kind of, really meaty question that we can put into academic worlds and have them sort through this. And so that’s, if you will, some of the origins.

And then with the award going to the University of Michigan to lead that effort, bringing together a lot of other really top universities that are able to contribute different components to this. That’s how it was formed.

04:28 – 05:25

BT: Scott, if I could jump in, one of the additional points I want to add to what Tom just said is that, SPAR is an example of, I’ll call it a university research initiative. The Department has used these techniques many times before to catalyze universities focusing on a particular challenge or a particular area the Department needs. 

And it does two things:

One is it focuses them on the problem. And so in this case, the Space Force can engage with the Institute to specify details of the problem in a way that can be very collaborative. 

The other piece of it equally as important, if not more so, is the human capital side of it. The graduate students and the students that come out of the Institute can help go into the Space Force or supporting the industry in general in this area for the long-term.

And that’s something that these university research initiatives tend to set up. When you have a five-year project, you’ll get a bunch of students all the way through a Master’s or Doctoral program focusing on different areas of the technology that is needed in this case for, in this case, space nuclear power and agility and that could be really beneficial as well.

05:26 – 05:39

And as it relates to “maneuvering without regret.” I have a two-part follow-up question:

1. What does “regret” look like in space?
2. Say we have this capability – what opportunities does that open up for the Space Force?

05:40 – 07:03

TC: So what space hasn’t really had is the in-space logistics. Clearly, there’s a lot of work that goes on with logistics on the ground. But in terms of in-space logistics and by logistics we mean refueling and just upgrades or maintenance repair, anything like that. We just haven’t done that because it’s really hard to do in space.

You have to get to the satellite. You have to be able to operate on that satellite. You have to refuel. Otherwise, I mean, there’s we need to think through that. And so what does regret look like? 

Well, it means that, ‘Gosh, you know, something broke. You used all your fuel. 

You now no longer have an otherwise perfectly good asset in space to do a critical national defense job.’ And so regret is losing that asset because of the inability to have that logistics chain that again, we sort of take for granted. 

So, that’s the main thing is that we really have to start thinking through, ‘How do we get that kind of space-specific logistics?’ And it all comes back to being able to get to and from your satellites, maneuver them.

Put them where you need them. If you lose an asset on one side of the GEO belt, and you’ve got a perfectly good one on the other side. ‘Well, how much fuel is it going to take and how long will that take?’ And that’s a trade. That’s a very direct trade.

07:04 – 08:05

BT: Scott, I also think that from a pure physics perspective, the latent energy in the nuclear reaction is simply far more per unit volume compared to chemical or standard electric and we know that on Earth. But the part of the problem on Earth is there’s a regulatory issue in terms of the safety. But if you think purely in terms of the physics and the energy density and what’s possible, you can get a whole lot more when you rely on nuclear power, but you have the regulatory, you have the policy, the concerns with debris and all that, and that’s inhibitive.

But if you can successfully get past that, it completely changes the architectures and systems in space that – we depend on for resilience. Well, one of the reasons for proliferation is we’re concerned about resilience. So we’re just going to send a whole lot more things up there because we’re concerned about the resilience.

Once you go back and you rethink of it in terms of nuclear power as a source in space, it completely changes all of those considerations. The ability of moving an asset around that we have, to be resilient against the threat, to be more survivable, to provide distributed ISR capability.

It all changes once you have nuclear [power] in space. All of it.

08:06 – 08:08

DD: And you wouldn’t have such big solar panels or any at all.

08:09 – 08:11

BT: Exactly, exactly. Absolutely.

08:12 – 08:31

I’d like to pause here and dive deeper into the two primary energy sources that we’ve traditionally used in space: electric propulsion and chemical propulsion. 

Let’s start with electric propulsion, which Donna, you just indicated is commonly generated through solar arrays.

Can you share more about the benefits or limitations of electric propulsion in space?

08:32 – 08:55

DD: Sure, to start with the limitations: electric propulsion has very low thrust, so maneuverability is limited. And it depends on energy from the solar arrays, which trickle power into the batteries. 

Low thrust is absolutely fine for many spacecraft, but for maneuvers like collision avoidance in congested space – you’d rather have much higher thrust and reaction times also.

08:56 – 09:47

BT: In terms of ISP, electric propulsion is just wonderful. The problem is that you can’t generate enough power with conventional means to power electric propulsion to get substantial impulse that you need to really change an orbit quickly. 

You can with nuclear power. But you can’t with electric. But electric is extremely efficient. So they tend to be used for station-keeping for long-duration missions, for things where I can afford to have a much lower impulse per unit time.

The power-added efficiency from a solar array. The advancement in the last 15 years has been very linear. It’s very incremental. There’s no factors of ten improvement in a solar panel. So if you think of a solar panel conductor, solar drive assembly and ride it through the bus to some propulsion system, it’s very linear.

There’s no factors of 10 or 100 improvement. There just isn’t. And so in order to get more power, you just got to get bigger, bigger, bigger arrays. So [if] you can shrink those arrays to almost nothing. It gets a whole lot better for a variety of reasons.

09:48 – 09:57

TC: And they don’t work in eclipse.

So, you’ve got to calculate that and oversize it with batteries and the like. That’s not something you need to do with a nuclear power [source].

09:58 – 09:59

And then what about chemical propulsion?

09:59 – 10:42

BT: Well, chemical is the standard like we’re thinking about today’s traditional chemical thrusters. And the capability there is the ISP is a little bit less. The impulse is a lot more, but there’s a limited amount of it. You are volume-constrained or weight-constrained. So there’s architectures being considered.

Well, I’ll just refuel on orbit. Well that comes back to logistics. Now I’ve got to launch it, right? Now, I go back to the launch weight from the surface of the Earth. I mean, one of the discussions of going to the moon is, from the water ice, can I extract hydrogen and oxygen to make chemical propulsion on the moon?

Because the gravity is a lot less and I can get things off the moon as opposed to launching it from Earth [I can] launch it from the moon. But once again, this is coming back to chemical, which can be consumed relatively rapidly compared to nuclear.

10:43 – 11:02 

DD: You really just want the heat that it creates. The heat that you can get from a reactor is much better than the heat you can get from a chemical reaction and combustion.

And that’s where you get twice the efficiency of a chemical rocket and yet you still get the thrust of a chemical rocket. So it’s kind of the best of both worlds.

11:03 – 11:22

Thank you. Now, the SPAR Institute is looking to develop a means for deploying nuclear energy in space – specifically through “nuclear fission.” 

But still, the term “nuclear energy” can be a pretty loaded one in today’s world – especially in national security circles.

So can we clarify what we mean by “nuclear energy” in the context of this conversation?

11:23 – 12:08

TC: Yeah, I think the main thing is to differentiate nuclear energy from a nuclear weapon. And a lot of times the public doesn’t necessarily understand that. And probably the main concern for this community is the policy.

And if we look at the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, it’s very clear to not put weapons of mass destruction and specifically nuclear weapons in space and so that’s not what we’re doing. We’re not putting a nuclear weapon. We’re using nuclear technology to simply generate electricity. So if you go back even in the 80s and some of the key most successful space programs that we’ve had, we had RTG, radio– help me out, Brad.

12:09 – 12:10

BT: Radioisotope thermal generation.

12:11 – 12:43

TC: It’s one of those terms that we, an acronym that we all know what it means, but you forget what it means. So those were the core of the Voyager, and anything that’s going to the outer planets and that is fundamentally nuclear technology, nuclear energy, for the source of energy. So that’s what we’re really talking about is using nuclear energy, but using it as a reactor. So that is a harder thing to do. It’s taking – I’ll put the stink bomb out there and say it’s taking the Three Mile Island reactor. Making it safe to launch [and] putting it in space.

12:44 – 13:49

BT: Another factor to think about, Scott, is nuclear weapons: the uranium or plutonium is assembled in a critical fashion.

It’s driven together to design and create an uncontrollable reaction. That’s for the maximum energy consumption. 

And in the case of a nuclear reactor, it is critical. But you got a moderator in place that is designed to control the reaction in a way that you can sustain it for a very long period of time.

And then, you leverage that in the case of hydrogen or whatever for chemical propulsion effects or combined effects, or you can use it just to generate electric power. 

I mean, I think that’s one of the reasons why some of the early studies about well, going to Mars specifically with chemical versus nuclear thermal.

It’s like you get 2x half the transport time with what’s available today. So that shortens everything up. I think the reactors can operate quite a long time. It’s going to be well past the lifetime of the spacecraft. So that’s one of the issues with nuclear power in space is the policy side of disposal.

What does disposal mean? Where do you send it? Where do you put it? Particularly, if the reactor is going to be long-lived compared to other spacecraft, or how do you shut it down? 

From a mission-assurance standpoint. I mean, all those things are part of the trade space.

13:50 – 13:56

Can you share a little bit more about what Three Mile Island was and how events like it influence the public’s perception of what nuclear energy means?

13:57 – 15:33

BT: Yeah, so I would put this way: Up until Three Mile Island, Japan, France and the United States, in the free world, were probably the three leading countries in examining and using nuclear power for peaceful electric power generation purposes. 

And the accident at Three Mile Island, which stories [have been] written about the series of errors, human and machine and otherwise, that unfolded. It basically caused a couple of reactors to go through a partial meltdown. 

And the impact of that on U.S. public policy. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Atomic Energy, it basically set us back in the development side of nuclear power for decades. Japan and France continued forward. We didn’t. It never changed the physics. But the bottom line was the accident caused a complete change in the public mindset of whether this technology is safe.

That’s the long story short. But, yeah, the Japanese have had their own problem, though. They had – it was actually a trip I took with DARPA in 2014, we went to see Fukushima, which was where they had the great undersea earthquake in the Fukushima prefecture.

And the Japanese had a similar problem with the tsunami hitting the plant. So they’ve had their own. The French have never had a major accident. The Russians of course had Chernobyl. But it doesn’t change the physics of it.

And I’m hoping this time around with a lot of the new capital, with the need for AI data centers, for the desire to go to space with longer range systems, I’m hoping that this time around, we’ll we’re going to get ourselves the next step beyond past limitations.

15:34 – 15:41

So where do we go from here?

And how do we evaluate the trade-offs between those advantages, against some of the challenges that still need to be overcome?

15:42 – 17:55

TC: Principally again, if you could have a maneuver without regret. So essentially implementing an electric generator or nuclear electric generator that you could then utilize a high efficiency, high ISP, electric propulsion. And now, if you have 100kW, kinds of scale of power available, then you can start to get some pretty decent thrust out of that.

When we talk about electric propulsion, we kind of mentioned it earlier, we’re talking about very, very low thrust. We’re talking about very low force because it’s that ion thruster that’s using a very small amount of that ion. You know, I mean something like xenon, and then accelerating that to very, very high speeds using the electrical energy and then being able to change the Delta V of your spacecraft. We usually think about it in terms of micronewtons or even millenewtons, right?

On that scale of force from one of these electric ion thrusters. If you go from, again, having hundreds to 1000W to now 100,000 or a megawatt, you can again reasonably put that into an ion thruster and now you’re getting into a Newton, type of force. Now that doesn’t hurt your head so much to think about.

Well, what will it take to actually change your orbit, change your altitude or change your inclination? All of this takes a lot of thrust, a lot of Delta V. So, that’s really the principal reason why the Space Force has become interested in it. 

However, there are a lot of other things that you could do with this kind of energy and if we sort of shift over to our NASA brethren, if you want to spend any time on the moon, you’re going to spend 14 days in daylight and 14 days in night, unless of course, you’re standing right on the pole. 

But that’s a very, very harsh, harsh environment. And you’re going to want something that’s going to heat it. You’re going to need energy. And so it’s a very logical thing to be looking at nuclear energy for human habitation on the moon, even in Mars, you need to have some sort of source of energy that is not dependent upon the sun, which requires then a bunch of batteries. So this is the basic, sort of things that are driving initially, the push for nuclear energy.

17:56 – 18:18

DD: And then you get the bigger engines.

Even in the ‘60s, the earliest reactors they had were 300MW. So you can imagine they can get 1500 seconds of thrust and at 55,000 pounds. So, that enables going to the moon much quicker, going to Mars much quicker. And not having people spend 18 months in a can.

18:19 – 19:18

TC: So there’s one thing that we haven’t yet talked about, but it’s that you’re generating all this heat.

You use the heat to turn it into electricity somehow have to get rid of that excess heat. That is one of the major drawbacks from going this route. The good news is organizations like DARPA, and others have been looking at materials that, again, can maintain much higher temperatures and be effective radiators for a higher temperature nuclear reactor. 

So that’s one of the reasons I think that’s forcing this discussion, is that we can start to see a path towards developing those technologies that will make your thermal management system not the same size as your solar cell of equal generation and that’s almost your beginning point for most of these satellites is how big do I have to build my thermal radiator, in order to have…and you know what, Donna, what you just said is a 300 megawatt. Like, wow. How big would that heat thermal radiator be? That’s big.

19:19 – 19:21

DD: The amazing thing is that the engine was not that big.

19:22 – 21:35

BT: That just goes to show the power that these nuclear systems for electric purposes can generate is enormous. The phrase that was given to me was “Yeah, Brad. What good does it do to remove whatever 2000m² of solar array on a satellite if I’ve got to turn around to replace it with 2000m² of radiators? You’re still launching a lot of mass with the radiators, as well.“

So I’m hoping that the SPAR Institute, one of the things they can work on, is new techniques for thermal management and heat rejection. How do you do that? It’s going to be a big problem. It just is.

So, they talked about the capabilities. When I think about the risks there’s really three things that pop to mind.

One is risk on-launch. And there’s just the whole nature of: do you launch the system integrated? Do you launch it distributed? You can imagine taking reactor components and launching on three different spacecraft, three different launches. There’s different ways of doing it, but there’s a risk on-launch. And there’ll be regulatory, there’ll be policy, there’ll be mission assurance of that. So that’s one thing that has to be addressed and will be addressed and it’s just a challenge we’re going to have to work through. 

The second is mission assurance during operation, just because I launch and get it into orbit, I’ve got to have the mission assurance, like any other system, to make sure that it’s going to operate in a nominal way during its entire mission lifetime. So that’s the second parameter. So if people thought that mission assurance was already stringent, it’s going to go to a whole new level when it comes to nuclear power systems in space. 

And then the third is disposal. At end of life, there’s a whole set of risks and trades about how you do that. And even in fact, if you look at the Committee on Peaceful Use of Outer Space back in ‘92, were thinking through some of the principles of nuclear power sources in space.

And they talk about what’s okay. It’s okay to do a nuclear reactor – RTGs – for interplanetary. That’s not a problem. It’s okay to put them in high orbits. And it’s okay to put it in low-Earth orbit. But you gotta be able to store it in high orbits afterwards. This is all because – in the example of interplanetary, it’s not coming back.

So disposal is billions of miles away from me. Well, what does that mean in LEO, HEO, MEO or GEO? So there’s a whole set of things that deal with disposal and how that is effectively done. So that’s the way I think of the risks: launch, mission assurance in operation and disposal.

And all three of those must be addressed.

21:36 – 21:41

DD: I would also add collision avoidance. Goes with the requirements on the spacecraft to be maneuverable.

21:42 – 22:15

This is not the first time that the United States has looked toward developing nuclear energy for space. 

And primarily, there are two ways nuclear energy is being developed, the first being “nuclear thermal propulsion,” or NTP – which uses a propellant to split an atom within a nuclear reactor to generate heat, which then can create the thrust to maneuver a spacecraft.

One program that looked at this approach was the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application – or NERVA – which ran from the mid-1950s to the 1970s.

What’s the story behind NERVA?

22:16 – 22:53

DD: So there was a precursor called the Rover program, kind of Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission. And then NASA came in and took over in 1959 from the Air Force. And it’s an upper stage engine, using nuclear thermal propulsion and with hydrogen as the propellant.

They developed several reactors. The amount of power they could produce increased, and then they integrated it into an engine and started testing in 1964, and then went all the way through to the end of the program. And they [held] multiple tests, multiple reactors in terms of like 20 reactors. And, they never did launch it. Unfortunately.

22:54 – 23:13

BT: My understanding from going back through the history was Congress started to defund it in 1967 because of the cost of the Vietnam War.

They were balancing that versus a whole bunch of other national security things. And then I guess Nixon actually canceled the entire program in ‘73. But like Donna said, they did a lot of work and made tremendous progress. But – no launch.

23:14 – 23:20

And can you elaborate on some of NERVA’s progress? How would you describe the program’s legacy, today?

23:21 – 23:47

DD: I think it gave you a bunch of engineers and the experience to know how to deal with it and what policy problems – I’m sure they looked at launch and what it was, and it gave people an idea of how you would run a program for the future – which I think leads to things like DRACO and other programs that are going because without having that as the precursor and knowing you could even fire it, which they did on the ground.

Let us know that it’s possible.

23:48 – 24:05

BT: I’m biased, but technically this goes to the Three Mile Island thing, Donna. I wonder if the TRISO approach –  where you launch the pieces and either humans or autonomous systems assemble it on-orbit.

Maybe more tractable from a mission assurance standpoint and a safety on-launch that may help get past some of this. I don’t know.

24:06 – 24:17

DD: And autonomous, additive manufacturing, everything has come so much farther that perhaps you can put the risky part on a smaller, very reliable launch vehicle, and you can take more risk with the other parts.

24:18 – 24:38

Now, we just mentioned DRACO, which actually leads into my next question. DRACO, or the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations, is an ongoing program overseen by DARPA. 

Dr. Tousley, based on your previous experience with the agency – can you explain what the DRACO program’s goals and objectives are?

24:39 – 26:37

BT: So DARPA started the program. It’s important to remember that DRACO was done, started, and is being executed in collaboration with NASA. There are two programs going on these days that are in direct collaboration with NASA for a variety of reasons: technical, policy, Outer Space Treaty. One is DRACO and the other is LunA-10. 

They’re both being done because whether it’s nuclear reactors in orbit or whether it’s infrastructure on the moon, both of them have to be in strict compliance with the Outer Space Treaty and public and policy perception. 

In the case of DRACO, it’s focused on nuclear thermal propulsion. It’s focused on the demonstration of the capability in orbit. I will say that the program is in the process of being re-baselined.

I will say that the program has a lot of technical challenges. We mentioned thermal management. That is arguably the biggest challenge that program is dealing with, is effectively managing the thermal dissipation and how that’s structured in a spacecraft, so that’s one piece technically and we’ll see where it goes. 

I do want to point out if we’re going to refer back to NERVA, when I looked at a line in the numbers: in 1970 dollars, they spent $1.3 billion on NERVA over the life of it. So if you consider 1970 to today’s dollars, [that will] give you an idea of the magnitude of what they spent at that time.

We haven’t come close to that with DRACO and JETSON and all the rest of them. We haven’t even come close. So it’s a huge amount at that time, maybe that’s 8 to 10 times the amount compared to today in terms of real dollars. 

But the one thing that gives me promise is, separate from DRACO and JETSON. The fact that a lot of private and venture capital is flowing into this because they assess the potential of the value of nuclear power on the ground and in space. The fact it’s coming into it. Maybe this time it’s going to help the government together to get over the hump of the funding and the challenges.

It’s not easy. It’s just not easy. So we’re going to have to get the staying power. But DRACO right now, they’ve re-baselined. I know they’ve got technical challenges, and I know they have program challenges that DARPA and NASA together are working through.

26:38 – 26:43

Can you elaborate on that disparity in funding available? 

Is it just the risk-averse nature of the “nuclear topic?”

26:44 – 28:11

BT: So, think of three things: there’s how much money do I spend on a project versus where can I spend it elsewhere? There’s the regulatory and policy. And then there’s the conservative mindset.

I don’t mean public, but I mean just reticence to try something new and risky. I think all three of those things combined make nuclear projects more difficult to work through. It’s not just in space, it’s on the ground as well, because you will always find people that say, “Yeah, you can do that, but I can do it this way. It may need more coal, it may be more natural gas. It may need something else. But I could do that today, because it’s safer.” 

‘Yeah, nuclear is much better. But look what’s happened in the past. Look at Three Mile Island, look at Fukushima, look at Chernobyl. What if that happens?’ So I think that just makes…and I’ll be blunt because I met the former director of the national Nuclear Regulatory Commission as a part of the Defense Science Board.

It just makes the NRC really, really, really conservative. The effective risk posture is no mistakes. None. The French have dealt with this for years, and they don’t seem to have the same mindset of zero tolerance for any mistake. They have a risk management profile that allows them to deal with it. 

Three Mile Island; nobody died from it. Nobody. I went to Fukushima and saw how the Japanese, they are going to spend thousands of years cleaning the land up the way it originally was. The Russians with Chernobyl, they just dug a hole and buried everything, right?

So we don’t have to be like that, but our mindset surely got to be a little more tolerant of risk calculus to allow us to make progress. The physics don’t lie. It’s always going to be wonderfully efficient.

28:12 – 28:45

Now, I’d like to shift to the other process for leveraging nuclear energy – and that is nuclear electric propulsion – or NEP.

This process uses nuclear fission to positively charge gas propellants, which in turn generate electricity to power an engine.

One such effort looking at this is JETSON – or the Joint Emerging Technology Supplying on-Orbit Nuclear Power – program.

Dr. Cooley, I understand you have a direct connection with JETSON from your time as chief scientist at the Air Force Research Laboratory. 

So can you share what the JETSON program aims to accomplish?

28:46 – 31:13

TC: Yeah, sure. So let me tell you what I know about the JETSON program. And we really have to go back to the Department of Energy in Los Alamos who had a small program that was, I’m gonna call it a “hallway experiment,” because it was not well-funded, but it was to develop a small reactor, and run that for a period of time.

And that was, if I recall correctly, it was called KRUSTY and so out of that program, some of the engineers up at Los Alamos National Laboratories formed a small company called Space Nukes. And so Space Nukes had, again, this heritage of working on a very low power and I don’t recall – several just kilowatts of power.

So in the grand scheme of nuclear reactors, again, we’re very much on the low end of this. But it started the idea of, “Well, can we take this relatively small device and use that for all the benefits that we’ve talked about in terms of space energy?” 

And so the JETSON program really emerged from that idea and, with Space Nukes and a number of other larger primes who are involved in that, including Lockheed Martin.

But essentially, if we want to understand what exactly was announced or what the program is, it is funding Intuitive Machines based in Houston. You have again, I’ve mentioned Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse. All of these companies are looking at, I’m gonna defer to Brad in terms of some of the risks associated with it, but to take a small reactor like what was done, in the hallway of Los Alamos.

And I believe they did that actually out at the Nevada Test Site that they’ve created this small reactor and can you get it into space? And so the purpose of that is, again, to go back to electric thrusters, so, powering an ion thruster using this electric energy. But the hard part of this really is the reactor getting that into space safely, so that you can use it for, again, myriad purposes. Specifically, though, for the Space Force funding, as a thruster.

So this is just a really important distinction. The DRACO program is a nuclear thermal propulsion, NTP, and the JETSON program is NEP, nuclear electric propulsion.

31:14 – 31:30

Now, I also want to call out a separate government looking to develop a mobile nuclear reactor that can be used for primarily land-based purposes: and that’s Project Pele by the Strategic Capabilities Office. 

Dr. Tousley, what relevance does Project Pele have to this conversation?

31:31 – 33:16

BT: Yeah, Scott. So Project Pele, is an attempt to develop a prototype reactor and put it on a military base to demonstrate the efficacy of essentially remote power sources for basing that are in distant places, right? And the Strategic Capabilities Office has been looking at this. The reason I think it’s important to note this for consideration is that in this case, investment and research development for terrestrial power sources can affect longer range advancement for small modular reactors that could be used in space.

And so I think that’s something to note that the nuclear power industry is watching as the Department advances, in this case a small modular reactor that could be used on a military base. Military bases have different regulatory authorities of what they can deploy on their own. In the particular case of Project Pele, the construct is there’s a base up in Alaska, Eilson Air Force Base.

It’s very remote. It’s difficult to get fossil fuel sources in there in the winter to resupply. So they’re greatly constrained about when the logistics that can show up and support that base exist. The theory is if we get a small modular reactor up there to power the infrastructure, to power some of the systems that are up there – that would be a lot wiser to do that.

So that’s why SCO helped to pay for this project going forward. Some of the same performers that Tom pointed out on JETSON are in the trade space of consideration for these small reactors. But the reason I bring it up is it’s in the Department. It’s under different authorities and policies. They’re doing it for terrestrial mobile power purposes, but if they make progress and they develop it – I think it’s going to continue to help the business case for continued investment to get through the challenges in space, as well.

33:17- 33:29

So, now that we’ve reflected on some of the historical and ongoing programs developing nuclear energy. What happens if we’re ultimately successful in finding a way to safely and efficiently deploy nuclear energy in space?

33:30 – 33:38

DD: Obviously going to the moon, going to Mars and making a more efficient use of space in our own cis-Earth space.

33:39 – 34:03

BT: Yeah, I completely agree, it means you can move around without regret. It means, “Hey, maybe I can put systems on the moon that I can’t today. I can operate through the night. Maybe I can start thinking about true manufacturing, logistics, and resupply in space in a way I can’t do today.” I could see a future where you dedicate all kinds of reusable launch to get nuclear capabilities up in orbit.

You assemble it up there, and then everything in space is powered with nuclear. I could imagine that 100 years from now.

34:04 – 34:07

DD: And that opens us up to the resources of what the solar system.

34:08 – 34:11

BT: Absolutely. [It] changes everything – changes mankind’s assumption on everything.

34:12 – 35:28

TC: It really does. One of the other things, too, that I get excited about and I think is really emerging is all the debris in space.

When you think about how many rocket bodies we’ve launched historically, all this material is up there that is essentially a danger to operating in space. You have to keep track of it. Not so much the big pieces as the little pieces, because there are so many more of them. But the idea of being able to reuse all this material that’s there, you have to re-manufacture that. You cannot do that without a tremendous amount of energy, both to actually go grab the thing and maneuver it where you need it, but then also to actually turn it into something useful, right?

This also goes for, again, using in space natural resources. If you want to go catch an asteroid. We need to be thinking about those types of opportunities. You can’t do that unless you have a lot of energy and you have some infrastructure. 

And to Brad’s point, that’s exactly the kinds of things that nuclear energy will start to flip the thinking to where we can utilize all these dead rocket bodies that we’ve put up there, other satellites, other things of that sort. Solve two problems at once: Building the future infrastructure, at the same time, cleaning up the old one.

35:29 – 36:35

BT: What I learned one time was, thinking through sailing ships, steamships, to nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. When the United States went to a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, it was because the distances and the deployments we had, put such a burden, infrastructure-wise, on conventional fossil fuel-based sources to get our ships around the world that with Rickover and others, we got over the hurdle – the whole regulatory side of it.

The nuclear Navy’s incredibly safe and now the entire U.S. Navy really depends on nuclear power for a global power projection. Well, if you think about the heavens, my gosh, there’s no more of a natural analogy of using nuclear power in space than how we changed the U.S. Navy’s operations globally with nuclear power. It makes perfect sense. I mean, like Tom said, for lack of a better term, imagine if you had a nuclear-powered recycle truck or trash truck in space.

It might make sense to use that to clean up all of LEO of all the dead satellites. It doesn’t make sense with conventional propulsion to do that, but with nuclear, it might make perfect sense. And then you clean everything up once at the end of life, you don’t have to de-orbit it at all. You move it some ways distant into outerspace.

You know, It just changes everything.

36:36 – 36:46

On this idea of “recycling” or even extracting natural resources in space – what value does a spent rocket body or an asteroid have in a “recycled” or second life, so to speak?

36:47 – 37:47

TC: You kind of have to think of it as a raw material resource. You’re not going to use it as is, but you’re going to need to break it down. Now, that depends on what you’re starting with, but let’s just assume we have to go back down to its raw material basis. The only way you’re going to do that is with a lot of energy and then again, have the infrastructure.

This is not going to happen in the next 5 to 10 years. This is a long-term goal. But if we in the United States want to be leading that change, leading that new emerging industry and capability, we need to be investing in it now and being willing to take the risk.

Going back to what Brad sort of laid the groundwork: we have to be not so timid, and so scared of the specter of a Three Mile Island, which thanks for pointing out – no one died from that. We need to be thinking more broadly about how do we advance these technologies and enable companies to emerge and support them with policies, support them with the technology that it’s going to take to ultimately bring about that future.

37:48 – 38:08

And then how about In-Space Assembly and Manufacturing (or ISAM)? 

Dr. Tousley, you suggested earlier that one solution to getting nuclear-powered systems into space might be launching materials separately before assembling the system together in space.

So what opportunity can ISAM serve in this nuclear energy in space question?

38:09 – 39:10

BT: My thought about the in-space assembly and manufacturing of nuclear reactors is very specific. The biggest concern with launching a reactor is the material itself. It’s not the reactor structure. So you could imagine, for example, if you launch the reactor structure with one rocket and then the material, whether it’s TRISO pellets or otherwise, you launch them in distributed launches elsewhere where they’re actually spatially separated on the launch vehicle, the risk of an accident, or the risk of re-entry of any of those is minuscule at that point.

The problem is when you put it all together in an existing infrastructure and then you attempt to launch it, there is some concern in the mission assurance community that something bad could happen on re-entry. But one of my points was if you separate them, you separate the material from the actual structure of the reactor itself. You can separate things in a way that the risk goes almost to zero.

That’s just an example of how creatively we can make sure that we’re adhering to the Outer Space Treaty, and we’re adhering to safe, effective mission assurance practices.

39:11 – 39:34

Now, I’d like to bring it back to the SPAR Institute – a multifaceted effort across eight universities and 14 industry partners, that are all tackling different aspects of the nuclear energy development problem.

So how does the SPAR Institute reflect the collaborative approach – between government, industry, and academia – that is necessary to address these complex problems in national security space?

39:35 – 40:16

BT: I mean, if I remember correctly, I think University of Michigan is the lead. They’ve been involved in quite a few really demanding R&D projects in the past.

I know they’ve got a strong group on propulsion, electric propulsion. It looks like it’s a five-year effort, $35 million. That’s why it’s smaller in comparison to other programs and efforts. But one of the reasons I made the comment about human capital is – that I would argue that the biggest benefit we’re going to get from that is going to be funding these graduate students to work in an area that is critical to us.

So, in other words, they may only work on this effort for 2 or 3 years, but then they could end up working in the industry, supporting the U.S. government in this for the next 30. That’s the value. It’s the collaboration. It’s getting these people engaged.

40:17 – 40:44 

DD: You know, one thing we’re not addressing is what other countries are doing.

Competition is really the key. Having things like the SPAR Institute just creates new businesses, new technologies, and it just keeps the American engine going.

If other countries are doing that, their engines are going too, and we want to do some things that lift all boats. But I think we should really focus a lot on doing it for ourselves and knowing that it will lift other countries, too.

40:45 – 41:15

BT: At least with DARPA, I think DRACO and LunA-10 are examples of the U.S. government and NASA working together in a way that reinforces the value of the Outer Space Treaty and yet enhances our technological advancement in a productive way.

It’s not clear that other countries truly merge their civil and their government space programs together in a way that supports the Outer Space Treaty as opposed to ruptures it. But I know that we spent a lot of time as a nation focusing on doing things collaboratively, in that way.

41:16 – 41:25

And what about commercial and industry partners? What opportunities exist for them to be part of this effort in finding a solution, through programs like the SPAR Institute – or otherwise?

41:26 – 42:31

BT: There are a number of companies that are getting into 21st century small reactor concepts. Believe it or not, I don’t think it starts with space. Most of the money is flowing in. It’s coming from private capital. It’s coming from a lot of the big technology companies specifically for one reason, and that is that it’s pretty clear that the nationwide demands on data center needs for processing, computation and memory are driving huge growth in data centers.

And because of that, it’s pretty clear that that growth is going to drive stresses on the United States power grid. And I think a lot of these data companies know it and many of them are investing their own money in new starts that are focused on advanced nuclear reactors and power systems. They realize it’s going to be 10-15 years to get through all the regulation side of it, but they believe that there’s a pony there, and so many of them are investing in that.

I think the U.S. government’s going to benefit from that in terms of people, technology advancements. They’ll be questioning business practices, the policies, all that. The U.S. government is going to benefit from that. I’m bullish on that.

42:32 – 42:45

I want to go a step further on this role of private capital. We discussed earlier some of the funding shortfalls that resulted from events like Three Mile Island.  

But can you share more on the value private capital can provide in overcoming those funding shortfalls?

42:46 – 44:11

BT: So, I’ll put it this way in the past Three Mile Island the infrastructure necessary for nuclear power is enormously capital-intensive.

And it was a question of well, are we going to go down the nuclear path with all the challenges? Are we going to default back to traditional fossil fuel-based approaches. After Three Mile Island, the assumption was we’re going to go back. Don’t want to deal with this again. We have all this electricity that we could gain from hydroelectric.

I’m not even going to include solar because it’s contribution is so minuscule. But solar, oil, natural gas, coal those things can generate most of the baseload production we need. What’s happened in the last ten years is the rate of growth of demands on the power grid from the data centers has grown so fast, and the criticality that the United States and the economy is so important that the U.S. government didn’t need to convince a bunch of companies this is going to be important.

A bunch of these companies all by themselves, realize the cost per kilowatt hour is going to go up. It’s going to put more of a demand. This is a supply and demand challenge. They realize the demand is growing and so they’ve identified a portion of their capital is dedicated to venture capital investment in these new companies. Compared to – I’ll just put it bluntly – compared to DRACO, JETSON and Pele, it’s going to dwarf that and I think the U.S. government will benefit from that.

The thing, I will say, they won’t invest in the we that we have to think about in the Department and from an Elara Nova standpoint. The challenge the JETSON and DRACO both have is this thermal management issue. They’re not going to address that. Nobody else is going to focus on thermal management in space.

They’re not.

44:12 – 45:32

TC: I’ll just chime in and say that I agree with Brad’s assessment that the terrestrial demand for nuclear energy is going to drive the train. And, I’m really excited, though, to know that there are a number of space-focused companies that are thinking hard about how to bridge that gap, and think through all the safety and assembling something in space.

If it’s up to me, I would suggest that we should have a program that’s not DRACO. That’s not JETSON. That’s going to think through and enable other companies to enter this and learn the lessons about how do we do this safely? How will we assemble something in space? Can we focus the ISAM community, for example, on this very problem?

Those are the types of things that I think very much fit into the role of government. And that I’d like to see the government, take the leadership role and then give something like, a vision for investment communities, for companies to rally around and know that there’s going to be a longer-term funding stream as well as an end user at the end of the day.

Those are some really important components to be able to actually take all of the great seed corn that we have going into a program like SPAR and put it into a brand new industry.

45:32 – 45:40

And to really drive home the opportunity of using nuclear energy in space – what would this capability mean for the Space Force and its Allies?

45:41 – 45:59

DD: So they can maneuver without regret.

Spacecraft are going between 7 and 17,000 miles an hour. So it’s not easy to change your orbit. And it takes either a lot of fuel or a lot of time. Maneuvering without regret means having satellites and systems that can eliminate regret with new capabilities.

46:00 – 46:13

BT: It’ll allow us to maneuver without regret and in particular with our partners and allies. We can collaborate with them on the capability, enable them to do it as well. And I think it’ll change the entire free-loving world’s ability to protect our space assets and be resilient.

46:14 – 46:29

TC: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. We want to be able to drive the train in terms of policy, how it’s used. Again, utilizing the resources that today is space debris. Those are the types of things we want to be on the front-end instead of watching others do that.

46:30 – 46:49

Each of you are partners at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy. How does the complex nuclear energy discussion we had today – from its opportunities and risks, to the technical, policy and funding challenges that still need to be overcome – represent how Elara Nova is well-suited to be a key partner in these challenges?

46:50 – 47:39

BT: I think there’s 3 or 4 things, critically, we could do. Number one, we can support companies that are trying to grow into this area. From the standpoint of those that are outside of the U.S. government, they want to get in – that’s one thing. 

I think we can help bridge the gap on discussing and talking to folks about some of the policy challenges, because at Elara Nova we do have a lot of folks that are former military, former Space Force that understand that. 

I think we could help ring out some of the wheat from the chaff on the technical stories. So if there’s companies that have technical capability, but they want to get an assessment from folks that understand technically the challenges and understand how the Space Force operates, we can help them refine their messages in a way that’s really productive for them.

And then the last thing I think is just from a transition standpoint as they achieve success. We can help them understand what are the challenges to the transition, the great work that they’ve done into operations and into production for the Space Force.

47:40 – 48:17

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.