Space and Cyber should go hand in hand. All space tech needs a ground system (bases and users), a space system (satellites etc), and a link system (comms and cyber interface). A unified inner solar system for surveillance with real time uplink/downlink and target quality monitoring is an absolute game changer on the military stage. The fog of war dissipates when the enemy force is located and characterized 100s if not 1000s of miles from their objective. The problem... we have the capacity with overhead imagery and electronic surveillance but the processing is still done by human analysts that cant sort through the data fast and efficiently enough. The links are not common so it cannot be pushed to everyone to act on, we lack long range precision weapons to close a rapidly developing kill chain, the US has limited Electronic Warfare and non lethal tech that could be fielded to slow or degrade enemies, and a large portion of forces cannot upload into the cyber cloud to create a unified and real time picture. We have lost the advantage we had because we have stuck to traditional man in the loop ideology, were letting China close the gap because they have stolen or leveraged away tech, and we are playing tit for that catch up, building platforms not a full system of a newer generation force that gives us rapid response and deterrence. At this rate, we lose in space. We have more satelites at this point, but majority of them are comms birds. China has more dedicated to ISR and are putting more in space at nearly triple the rate we are. In the next decade the global landscape changes dramatically unless we pull our heads out of our asses
Space and Cyber should go hand in hand. All space tech needs a ground system (bases and users), a space system (satellites etc), and a link system (comms and cyber interface). A unified inner solar system for surveillance with real time uplink/downlink and target quality monitoring is an absolute game changer on the military stage. The fog of war dissipates when the enemy force is located and characterized 100s if not 1000s of miles from their objective. The problem... we have the capacity with overhead imagery and electronic surveillance but the processing is still done by human analysts that cant sort through the data fast and efficiently enough. The links are not common so it cannot be pushed to everyone to act on, we lack long range precision weapons to close a rapidly developing kill chain, the US has limited Electronic Warfare and non lethal tech that could be fielded to slow or degrade enemies, and a large portion of forces cannot upload into the cyber cloud to create a unified and real time picture. We have lost the advantage we had because we have stuck to traditional man in the loop ideology, were letting China close the gap because they have stolen or leveraged away tech, and we are playing tit for that catch up, building platforms not a full system of a newer generation force that gives us rapid response and deterrence. At this rate, we lose in space. We have more satelites at this point, but majority of them are comms birds. China has more dedicated to ISR and are putting more in space at nearly triple the rate we are. In the next decade the global landscape changes dramatically unless we pull our heads out of our asses
Like how certain military analysts like to conceive of everything as a 'Battlespace'.
Though it's not a battlespace ....... it's our sky.