Intelsat Readies For ‘Epic’ Foray Into Military SatCom

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http://breakingdefense.com/2014/06/intelsat-readies-for-epic-foray-into-military-satcom/



Intelsat Readies For ‘Epic’ Foray Into Military SatCom
By Colin Clark on June 04, 2014 at 4:06 PM

WASHINGTON: For more than a decade, the US military has fumbled and groped and stumbled and, gradually, figured out ways to buy a mix of commercial satellite communications and dedicated military satellites so it could communicate and watch video from Predator, Global Hawk, and Reaper drones in theaters where military bandwidth was precious.

For much of the Iraq and Afghan wars, the US could easily buy commercial satellite time or transponders because of a fortuitous glut of satellites covering that region. That glut is fast vanishing. And places like the Pacific — marked by vast distances and relatively little commercial satellite coverage — have posed significant problems. Now the world’s largest commercial satellite operator, Intelsat, is buying Boeing-built satellites called Epic that it hopes — combined with changes in space acquisition and the development of secure radio waveforms — will supply the US military with enormous on-call bandwidth.

Boeing has built the Wideband Global SATCOM satellites (originally known as the Wideband Gapfiller, which was a much more honest name) to help plug those holes. But these satellites had to be built into the military’s acquisition budget and were subject to the Pentagon’s space acquisition system, known for its quality but not its speed. In part because of that slow-moving acquisition system, the technology on the WGS has been relatively quickly superseded.

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Among the keys to making the military a regular customer of the Epic satellites may be a program called COMSATCOM Pathfinder. On March 7, Air Force Space Command issued its first-ever request for commercial satellite communications to cover Africa. Gen. Willie Shelton, outgoing head of Air Force Space Command, has been pushing these changes, apparently as part of his general push for increasing the numbers and resilience of our military satellite architecture, a policy known as “disaggregation.”