WASHINGTON — U.S. Space Force imagery specialists during a recent military exercise in South America helped locate illegal fishing boats and track other activities using business sensor satellites.
The exercise showed how unclassified data from business satellites may be leveraged for maritime security and other military applications, 1st Lt. McKenna Medina, head of the Space Systems Command’s surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking team, said in a news release Aug. 10.
A team from Space Systems Command participated within the 2023 Resolute Sentinel exercise in Lima, Peru. Imagery and data analytics specialists from the US, Peru, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Brazil, and the United Kingdom worked at Peru’s satellite imagery national operations center.
The perfect part about business products is that they’re not classified, Medina said. “They provide users the pliability to share business data with international partners.”
Need for timely data
Despite a business boom of easily accessible satellite imagery — which allowed the U.S. government to openly release intelligence on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — DoD has struggled to include these capabilities into military operations.
The Space Systems Command this 12 months established a business services office to assist support U.S. combatant commanders who need timely data.
The business office’s program to obtain data from business satellites is named SRT, short for surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking. It also has been known as “tactical ISR” (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) however the Space Force modified the term to convey that the SRT program is just not trying to switch the imagery support provided by the U.S. intelligence community.
The Space Force plans to determine a unit inside U.S. Southern Command, and the exercise served as a test for a way future operations could possibly be conducted with support from space assets, said Lt. Col. Jonathan Whitaker, Southern Command’s director of space forces. “Our hosts in Peru and Colombia gave us a world-class opportunity to check operational points of the long run Space Forces Southern Component Field Command,” he said.
Applications for business imagery
Gen. Laura Richardson, head of U.S. Southern Command, said space-based data may help address challenges within the region like deforestation within the Amazon rainforest. “Those problems and others that present security challenges in Southern Command — including illegal mining and illegal logging operations — may be identified from space … and that information may be shared amongst partner nations within the region,” Richardson said Aug. 4 on the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Through the exercise in Lima, U.S. and allies relied on satellite imagery to discover and locate a vessel suspected of illegally fishing in Peruvian waters. The suspected ships had turned off their radar and gone “dark.”
Satellite data also supported disaster planning by imaging a volcano in Colombia that showed signs of impending eruption. The Space Systems Command team captured business synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data showing the conditions of the volcano in Colombia and compared it to data from a Peruvian volcano that had recently erupted.
Capt. Benjamin Berezin, SSC deputy branch chief, said it was “eye-opening to see partner nation imagery applications since it gave the team’s analysts latest avenues to work with partners.”
Space Systems Command is attempting to “showcase the good thing about business technology to combatant commands and partner nations,” said Col. Minpo Shiue, director of SSC’s Warfighter Integration Office.
“We expect all combatant commands to search out this capability,” he said.
The SRT program office is planning a six-month pilot project to evaluate U.S. Africa Command’s needs for business sensing and analytics products.
Industrial Space Office
The Space Force leadership has made it a priority to deal with combatant commanders’ needs in a timely fashion, said Jeremy Leader, acting deputy director of the Space Systems Command’s Industrial Space Office.
The SRT program is meant to collaborate with the intelligence community “whereas we may focus lots more on that timeliness piece, versus the more strategic intelligence piece,” Leader said Aug. 8 at an Intelligence and National Security Alliance forum.
“The large difference between SRT and ISR is absolutely specializing in that timeliness piece,” he said. “As we push for those varieties of solutions to have the option to gather things in a timely manner, the more business capabilities that we are able to bring into that fold, the higher we are able to address the timeliness gap.”