Mikayla Easley
Over the next decade, the Defense Department intends to proliferate hundreds of new military satellites on orbit that will provide improved space-based capabilities for warfighters. While the effort has been lauded as an ambitious and innovative plan to revolutionize space acquisition and development for the modern era, it has also exposed critical vulnerabilities in the United States’ ability to manufacture and deliver systems at scale — an issue that both the Pentagon and industrial base are working to learn from moving forward.
“We do not have the industrial capacity built today to get after this,” Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein said Dec. 7 during a panel at the Reagan National Defense Forum. “We’re going to have to start getting comfortable with the lack of efficiency in the industrial base to start getting excess capacity so that we have something to go to in times of crisis and conflict.”
Resilience through proliferation
Historically, the Defense Department tended to develop a few very large and exquisite satellites to conduct critical military missions. But with the growing use of space as a warfighting domain by both the United States and its adversaries, the Pentagon is now focusing on different ways to build resilience in its space systems — such as by launching hundreds of smaller, inexpensive satellites for a single constellation.
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