[Satellite News 07-10-09] The recent cancellation of the U.S. Air Force’s Transformational Communications Satellite (TSAT) and a tightening U.S. defense budget have led to MORE cooperative dialog between military agencies and commercial providers, Intelsat General President Kay Sears told Satellite News.
    Sears said the dialog is advancing towards inclusion of commercial satellites in a distributed military satcom architecture, which spreads military communications throughout a massive network of global satellites. The solution aims to solve some of the security and protection issues that have made military officials uneasy over reliance on commercial providers.
    For Sears, easing this tension has been a priority for several years. In this special preview of our August Via Satellite Executive View from the Top, Sears explains the behind-the-scenes developments that have occurred since TSAT’s cancellation, and where the discussion on military and commercial satcom networks is headed.

Sears: The conversation is advancing towards a certainty that military and commercial satcom networks are going to co-exist and share applications. I think what we have seen recently is a real effort from the military to conceive an architecture that incorporates commercial. They clearly have decided that there is a role for commercial and we would like to see that defined a little more specifically. Security, of course, is a crucial component of that architecture. The military has to have some protected communications, but they also need a lot of unprotected communications. That situation is going to be achieved through a combination of the WGS satellites and commercial.
    One type of architecture I think is worth noting since the cancellation of TSAT relates to a distributed architecture. It would function much like the Internet, having multiple nodes or platforms or hosted payloads spread across many different satellites around the globe. This is now being discussed as a real alternative to building these huge TSAT-type satellites that cost a lot of money, with a lot of advanced capabilities concentrated on one big satellite. Distributed architecture is a great place for commercial to play and to be a solution provider because we are able to place the military on a variety of our satellites spread throughout the world. This has been the dominant type of architecture discussed since the cancellation of TSAT – a situation where there would be all different levels of security on these satellites, with the military being able to set that security.

Sears:  Yes. That’s exactly right. Just by distributing your protected and unprotected coms through multiple systems throughout the world, you are actually enhancing the security of the whole system. Essentially, the military wouldn’t even have to add the security features on all of those satellites as the architecture itself is more secure by definition.
After TSAT was canceled, the military went back to the drawing board and asked itself some questions about that particular system. One of those questions did involve the vulnerability of a single satellite. What if they had put all of their capabilities on one big satellite and it was taken out or experienced a system failure? They would have lost all of that capability. The security benefits of a distributed network architecture is a fresh perspective that has been gaining momentum over the past few months.

Sears: Yes, transponder exclusivity is available on many commercial systems and in many cases, the government is the only user on those certain transponders. The military can purchase an entire transponder that they can manage themselves within their capacity. This is often how the military buys – in full transponder increments.
At the same time, I think that it is important moving forward that both sides discuss how the government and military can utilize commercially provided managed services where they might be intermingled with other commercial customers. This situation does not necessarily mean that the military would not get the bandwidth, security, or quality of service that they need. There are a lot of great technologies out there that allow you to incorporate bandwidth-on-demand services that share capacity. The user experience is still very good and has very high quality. Intelsat is ready and able to provide both dedicated transponders and managed services.

Sears: One of the main differentiators that we look at relates to security. The military has said, that they need some of their communications to go over a fully protected system, and we agree with them. And by  fully protected, I mean specifically that there are varying levels of protection in place, with that system will have the highest level of protection. Currently, the military has a protected system, Milstar, which is now being replaced by advanced EHF. That is for their most secure communications requirements going over a protected satellite. In comparison, the Intelsat system has a certified NSA type-1 encrypted command and control link. Intelsat, like other commercial operators, protect their systems to an extent. But, we do not go as far on the protection as the advanced EHF systems will go. That is truly a protected satellite. It’s protected from jamming, nuclear explosions and several other dangers. But, these protections add serious costs to the satellite itself.
The military also has the WGS system. Although it does have some security features on it, it is not what you would call a fully protected system. It is much more like the commercial satellites that Intelsat flies.

Sears: Yes, and we are moving forward in dialog now with the military to lay out their needs and find out what they would pay for on truly commercial satellites. Right now, we have the command and control link encrypted. As far as building secure satellite, it is not that Intelsat is unable to build more secure satellites, we just need to know what, specifically, the military wants to see on them. I think both sides of the table clearly understand this.

The complete interview with Kay Sears will appear in the August issue of Via Satellite. For more information on how to subscribe, visit www.satellitetoday.com/subscribe