2010 Space Symposium - Session 8: Current/Future Operations and Collaboration Efforts

MR. GANDY: Good morning and welcome back. Glad to have you here for the second day of our conference. Hope you enjoyed that short film clip of Operation Burnt Frost. Obviously space operation had the opportunity to orchestrate with many space partners.

This morning we're going to start off with a great speaker, Colonel Andre Dupuis from Canada. He's been employed with various operational and staff tours in the air defense and space operations field. Among his command positions in the Canadian forces, he recently served at NORAD and U.S. NORTHCOM command center at Peterson Air Force Base and is currently serving as a director of space development under the Chief of Force Development National Defense Headquarters, Ottawa.

Today he will present his perspective on current and future operations and collaboration efforts. It is my sincere pleasure to welcome Colonel Andre Dupuis.

COL. DUPUIS: Good morning…. In the Canadian military, space capabilities are considered joint and fall under the authority of the Chief of Force Development Rear Admiral Ron Lloyd who's responsible for all joint force development in the Canadian forces and who coordinates the force development efforts of all of the services in Canada.

I'm very pleased to have the opportunity to update you on the progress we've made managing our space domain and to give you some insight into where Canada is going in military space.

But before I begin I would like to thank General Chilton for the invitation to participate in this symposium. It is yet another example of the strong support we're receiving from the U.S. military space community. Our close collaboration through the Schriever war games, bilateral/multilateral forums such as this symposium, embedded personnel throughout the United States, and collaboration on research and development initiatives have been invaluable to us as we advance our goals. Sir, thank you.

I doubt the message on this slide is new to any of you. Modern society has relied heavily on every asset of our life are touched by space systems from traffic management, to entertainment, to precision guided munitions.

While it can be argued that militaries may be -- in theory have alternative means to muddle through a day without space, I'm not sure we actually understand how disruptive losing these systems would be. In fact, our publics generally aren't even aware of this dependency and take for granted the services that they use which are provided from space. Our job is to understand the criticality and fragility of space systems and the importance of protecting them and sustaining them.

To borrow a word from Brigadier General Matte, the Canadian team lead at Schriever V and Schriever X, a day without space would be a military failure.

This reality is being recognized in Canada, and in the past, the government of Canada has had few space resources, but that is changing. And with that change is the need to have a coherent means of developing, operating, employing and sustaining space capabilities.

Canada is the second largest country in the world with the world's longest coastline. Yet, the bulk of the Canadian population of 35 million is located within 100 nautical miles of our southern border with the United States. This unique geographic and demographic combination leads to significant sovereign and security challenges. Space systems are often the only viable solution to address these challenges.

The overarching guidance for all space development within the Canada forces is the Canada First Defense Strategy signed by Prime Minister Harper in June of 2008. Central to this strategy is the identification of the six core missions which are listed on the slide.

To this audience it is no doubt clear that space capabilities are critical elements in conducting these fundamental Canadian forces missions. Nonetheless we continue to spend the effort to make those linkages understood to the broader military community. Space is a domain that the Canadian forces cannot take for granted.

To address the increasing importance of space to Canada and specifically to the Department of National Defense and the Canadian forces, we are in the midst of developing a series of documents to ensure that space capabilities are effectively managed and sustained, and that the space effects are incorporated as fundamental components of all of our operations. As listed, each of these documents builds on its predecessor. And when completed we will have defined the national defense space program.

This morning I will focus on the first two documents and discuss a roadmap program element. We are just beginning to see true concept development and doctrine effort, and there's not much I can say about them at this time, but stay tuned particularly as we engage in planning for the next Schriever games.

Through the excellent leadership of the Assistant Deputy Minister for Policy, Mrs. Jill Sinclair, the Department of National Defense is about to release a new national space defense policy, the first since 1998. When realized this policy will call for a comprehensive defense-based program to reaffirm the legal and national policy frame work and identify goals for the program.

As co-chair of the Canada/U.S. space cooperation forum and a steadfast supporter of the Schriever war games, Mrs. Sinclair clearly believes in the need to collaborate in military space. This belief is well reflected in the policy, and it's safe to say we understand the requirements for collaboration at every level.

I will provide you a preview of this new policy and the supporting national space strategy with the understanding that they're not yet official documents.

National defense space policy will identify three goals for the department as shown here. These are the broad goals, and to meet them, the policy calls for national policy to develop a sustainable and comprehensive space program that will integrate space into all facets of the Department of National Defense and Canadian forces operation.

The policy also will identify five space objectives for national defense: Acquire, assess, and use space data and services of interest to Canada; monitor terrestrial and space-based objects that pass over Canada's territory; air, space and maritime approaches; as well as observe space activities in other areas of national interest; utilize space systems to support all aspects of the Canadian forces operations, including intelligence-led and force protection activities, support arms control verification and transparency and confidence building measures for space, and develop an HR strategy to create and sustain a widespread and recognized knowledge base within the Canadian forces for space as a unique operating domain.

The national defense space strategy provides implementation frame work for the policy. It defines the scope of the defense-based program by linking the policy goals to specific space missions and activities and by directing the development of a roadmap for each.

Again, the common theme throughout the strategy is the need for collaboration within Canada and with allies. The space strategy was developed by my staff under the leadership of Director General for Integrated Force Development, Brigadier General Perry Matte, many of you know him well here, and coordinated with all our stakeholders, not only within the Department of National Defense but the Canadian government at large and our allies as well.

In particular, it's fair to say war games have been particularly useful in this development. The reality for us is that Canadian space is a dual or even a multiuse endeavor. We have built an excellent working relationship with the Canadian Space Agency via a structure that is co-chaired by Admiral Lloyd and the president of the agency, Dr. Steve MacLean, the Canadian astronaut who has served on two shuttle missions.

In addition to its basic role, the Canadian Space Agency serves as the force generator for Canadian space and has a long series of accomplishments ranging from the Canadarm, robotic manipulator, to RADARSAT-2 and the upcoming success to the RADARSAT, the RADARSAT Constellation Mission.

Dr. MacLean and the Canadian Space Agency have shown extraordinary support to the military space, and I've worked closely with us to identify and leverage common missions, initiatives and infrastructure to increase capabilities while reducing costs. Coordinating our programs have maximized the effectiveness of both organizations research dollars and helped produce three significant collaborative demonstration projects, RADARSAT-2 ground-moving indicator messaging maritime monitoring and messaging satellite, and a near-earth object surveillance satellite.

Further developments of our relationship with the CSA are a key enabler for the national defense space program. The objectives of the national defense strategy reflect the three goals passed down from the policy as shown here. Desired outcome for the first objective, assured access to space are the abilities to conceive, design and deliver space systems to meet Canada's defense needs, enhance the safety and security of Canadians, and support the government foreign policy and security objectives.

The goal of the second objective is to institutionalize space awareness and be able to employ and integrate space capabilities into full spectrum operations. Lastly, force (inaudible) need to be confident in the pervasiveness of space support services solidly anchored in a robust space domain awareness component. The strategy links space missions and activities to each objective. Objective 1 shown here encompasses two themes: Support activities and programs for delivering space effects. The strategy calls for a capability roadmap from each of the three programs listed, and work is underway on those documents.

I would like to point out that for the last point when we discussed the delivery of the PNT [Positioning, Navigation and Timing] program, the strategy does clearly not call for Canada to develop its own PNT capability, but rather we describe a PNT program that is structured to ensure the delivery and sustainment of the highest precision PNT capability possible from available systems. We are naturally focused on GPS, but understanding and possibly exploiting additional systems is consideration for this program.

Objective 2 has three activities shown here. The first, institutionalize space is largely necessitated by the nature of our career management processes. In the Canadian forces, careers are managed within career fields and trades.

As we do not have a dedicated space cadre, personnel assigned to space (inaudible) are essentially working away from their main career path which could place them at a competitive disadvantage for promotion and advancement. The strategy calls for development of an HR resource plan to train, manage and track space professionals within their apparent career fields. This in turn will allow the establishment of a force wide pool of space expertise, provide for advancement based at least in part on the achievement in the space career field.

Currently we operate space systems and employ space effects for what could be best described as ad hoc processes. This was an acceptable approach when Canada had few space systems. It was clearly not suitable with the increasing availability of space capabilities and our growing reliance on them.

To correct this, the strategy calls for tactical and operational level staffs that understand how to bring space forces to bear to deliver on the commander's intent. These staffs would be supported by Canadian space operation center and guided by doctoring concepts of operations, tactics and techniques and procedures which we are developing now.

Finally, effective exploitation of space-based ISR data invokes the capability sets required for tasking collection processing, exploitation and dissemination. This strategy defines needs for leveraging commonality in national infrastructures to provide improved responsiveness and increased throughput. Specifically it calls for pursuit of a dual-use ground station infrastructure to leverage the commonality between systems at the departmental and national level.

Third and final objective deals with operations in the space domain. Strategy identifies the need for an indigenous-based domain awareness capability, including an orbital analysis capability to support space common operating picture. It calls for a roadmap to address continued development and fielding with space surveillance capabilities, including space object identification capabilities and the ability to detect, track, characterize and attribute space events.

Canadian forces will develop the capability to exercise operational command and control over national space systems and to effectively apportion their effects amongst the force employers. To that end, implementation of a Canadian space operation center will be explored with linkages as appropriate to allied centers. This strategy does call for further exploration of strong allied collaboration structure, such as a combined Joint Task Force space.

A shrink provision of services involves a broad spectrum of activities, including providing safe passage via access to conjunction analysis, a mechanism for emergency dissemination of space event warning and identifying and countering electromagnetic interference. Mitigating risks in the future space must be consideration of the design and development of national space systems, both military and civil.

Finally, the Canadian forces will explore operational concepts to deny potential adversaries of their own space effects. But in keeping with our national policies, the methods employed are to have temporary, reversible and localized effects.

I hope I'm giving you a sense and direction of the scope of the national space defense program. I would like to quickly go through the activities we have on the books that will form a foundation of this program.

This is an overview of the ISR capabilities that we have in progress showing our ISR projects linked to the technology areas that they're exploiting. The flag ship of the ISR program is Canada's evolving synthetic aperture radar program. As the Canadian space agency has grown, the capability from RADARSAT-1 to RADARSAT-2 and now the RADARSAT Constellation Mission, the military utility of and dependence on this capability has steadily increased.

To fully leverage the space-based synthetic aperture radar capabilities developed by the space agency who are developing ground infrastructure stations needed exploit the capability for maritime and arctic surveillance as well as support deployed operations.

In the maritime domain, Project Polar Epsilon is providing the ground infrastructure for the maritime domain awareness concepts of operation and specialized tools to exploit the commercially-owned and operated RADARSAT 2 that entered into service in April of 2008. The aim of the project is to support domestic and global maritime awareness and to support Canadian forces and allied operations.

Polar Epsilon is constructing two new satellite reception stations on Canada's Atlantic and Pacific coasts in support of maritime operations, and those ground stations will be operational in early 2011. Polar Epsilon 2 is the project to exploit the RADARSAT Constellation Mission which is a follow-on capability to RADARSAT 2. RADARSAT Constellation Mission is currently planned to consist of three satellite-based radars to be launched in the 2014, 2015 time frame.

Polar Epsilon 2 includes the upgrades to the East and West Coast ground stations for data reception. The northern and I mean very northern, satellite data reception stationed to improve maritime and arctic surveillance and data latency and responsiveness. This is shown mostly here as Resolute Bay. And lastly, Polar Epsilon 2 will design and integrate an automatic identification system for ship's payload into the RCM satellite.

The fusing of space-based SAR and AIS data provided by integrating AIS and RCM provides a means of identifying noncompliant maritime vessel traffic amongst the 6,000 expected radar that returns that we will get in the North Atlantic and North Pacific. We have demonstrated the benefits of a few space-based radar and AIS common operating pictures through a series of joint operations with Canada command, notably the Winter Olympics of last year. And it is clear that this is a transformational capability and will have direct impact on how maritime domain awareness operations are conducted in the future.

The joint space support program is partly analogous to the U.S. Eagle Vision System. It's delivering two key capabilities: Space situational awareness and an unclassified remote sensing situational awareness tool.

The space situational awareness tool will provide commanders at all levels with an online tool that can quickly and easily provide operational information on enemy, neutral and commercial satellite and reconnaissance space platforms that could present overhead threats to an ongoing operation.

The unclassified remote sensing situational awareness capability will deliver two deployable ground stations that can access and provide commercial satellite imagery directly to theater providing a surveillance and reconnaissance capability that will augment the warfighter's traditional tool set. JSSP is in implementation with the SSA capability going IOC next week, as a matter of fact and FOC in about a month. IOC goals for the unclassified remote sensing situational awareness capability are scheduled for June of 2012.

COSPAS/SARSAT [Cosmitscheskaja Sistema Poiska Awarinitsch Sudow (Russian: space system for search of vessels in distress)/ Search and Rescue Satellite Aided Tracking] is a multinational system that provides search and rescue operations on a worldwide basis by providing accurate, timely and reliable alert and location data. COSPAS/SARSAT detects and locates distress beacons using satellite and ground networks to distribute distress locations to search and rescue coordination's around the world.The program is credited with saving over 27,000 lives since inception in 1982. It also provides Canadian forces with a minimum of $10 million per year in search and rescued flying cost savings.

As part of the COSPAS/SARSAT Treaty, Canada provides SAR repeaters with which are hosted on NOA LEO satellites. Our program is transitioning to a MEO satellite host, and we're very excited about the possibility of having our repeaters on GPS Block III satellites.

Over the past two years, we have developed a SATCOM roadmap that defines the user community's requirements in both terms of survivability and capability. The roadmap exposed the various options for implementation to include lease capabilities, wholly-owned systems and cooperative arrangements with our allies.

The protected military SATCOM project will provide protected, survivable capabilities for critical command and control. It's based on our partnership with the United States Air Force on advanced extremely high frequency constellation. IOC for us is planned for 2012 and FOC sometime in the 2017 time frame.

Mercury Global Military Wideband SATCOM will address the domestic and expeditionary wideband communication requirements of the Canadian forces. Mercury Global is just finishing an options analysis phase, and we have identified a series of potential options to meet the requirement which include hosted payloads, commercial leasing, and partnership with allied systems and cooperation with other government department programs. You will note here it includes a 24/7 wideband SATCOM capability in the high arctic.

As I mentioned earlier our PNT program will not develop a Canadian-based capability but rather we are looking at establishing a structure approach to ensure the delivery and sustainment of the highest precision PNT capability possible from available systems. To that our end, our PNT program is developing doctrine tactic techniques and procedures.

We are also participating in the multinational NAVWAR MOU program focused on assuring PNT operation dominance in our systems.

With sustained Investment over the last ten years, Defense Research and Development Canada has created space-based and microsatellite mission expertise that is second to none. This expertise is yielding significant dividends as we operationalize Polar Epsilon projects and begin to design the next generation of space-based radars and microsatellite-based sensors.

The R&D community is developing the defense-based R&D roadmap to direct continued investment in space-based radars and optical exploitations, sensor design, as well as space situational awareness, passive protection measures, satellite communications and satellite operations. Studies will continue to explore the feasibility of an indigenous launch capability for small and micro-sized payloads. Defense R&D will continue to synchronize with the Canadian Space Agency to leverage collaborative opportunities with allies to maximize the effects of our R&D investments.

The national defense-based strategy cert object is assuring freedom of space operations supported by the surveillance and space project which is delivering the sapphire satellite. The project represents Canada's return to space surveillance mission that has been in hiatus since the closure of our two film-based terrestrial systems more than 15 years ago. It is expected that sapphire satellite will be a contributing sensor to the U.S. space surveillance network providing data on orbiting objects in the MEO and GEO orbits. Launch is scheduled for mid-2011 and operationally takes its taskings from the U.S. JSpOC and provides its observations to assist in building increased space situational awareness.

As a side, we have entered into discussions with the SBSS crowd to see how we can better synchronize and coordinate our follow-on programs.

Another space surveillance system we are implementing is a near-earth orbit surveillance satellite or NEOSAT. This is a demonstration project being jointly built and operated by Defense and Research Development Canada and the Canadian Space Agency is a unique dual mission system to support space situational awareness research and near-earth asteroid detection and the first flight of the CSA developed multi-mission micro sat bus. It's also scheduled for launch in 2011.

Our ultimate objective for reengaging space situational awareness is to make a contribution to the space common operating picture. We are currently investigating concepts for the Canadian Space Operations Center, or CanSPOC, to manage our space operations. The center would support the use of the space cop in managing and tasking our space assets to support operations.

We intend to fully explore collaborative opportunities, particularly in the context that would distribute combined space operations construct that has been in business through the Schriever war games.

Finally, no matter how sophisticated, technology only provides the most fundamental tools to support our forces in the field. A space-based-enabled military requires well-trained and motivated personnel to get the job done.

This slide highlights where we have personnel deployed in space activities today from Thule, Greenland, to Kabul, Afghanistan, where we have men and women deployed in support of Canadian, American and NATO operations.

Canadian forces are in the middle of a floor structure review, and we anticipate the results -- as a result, additional will be allocated to the space mission to populate capabilities like the Canadian Space Operations Center.

The challenge, however, is to ensure these soldiers, sailors and airmen not only have the right tools, knowledge and experience to provide the CF with the required operational skills, but also to manage and track their space careers within the CF structure.

Until recently training was mostly just in time specific assignments. We are moving towards establishing a Canadian forces wide pool of experience, personnel we can draw on. This pool of trained personnel will form the foundation of our future space program.

In conclusion, there are two things I want to leave you with. First is that Canada is developing a comprehensive national defense space program in line with our national strategies and policies. The development of this program is enabled by the Canadian civilian and military leadership recognizing the importance of space and meeting the security and sovereignty challenges of Canada.

The second is that we are well aware that we cannot meet all of our military space needs alone and recognize the need for close collaboration both with other government departments and with our close allies. We look forward to building on our existing relationships.

Sir, thank you again for the opportunity to provide this address on our military space program. Hopefully I've provided some insight as to our goals and objectives for space and the path we intend to take to achieve them.