Preparing for space wars, the Pentagon and intelligence community are developing plans and a high-tech operations center able to fend off foreign attacks on U.S. satellites.
The operations center, to be opened within six months, will gather information from satellites belonging to all government agencies, Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work said Tuesday at an annual intelligence conference, known as GEOINT,
Defense One reports.
"[W]e are going to develop the tactics, techniques, procedures, rules of the road that would allow us … to fight the architecture and protect it while it’s under attack," Work said.
"The ugly reality that we must now all face is that if an adversary were able to take space away from us, our ability to project decisive power across transoceanic distances and overmatch adversaries in theaters once we get there … would be critically weakened."
The new center will back up the military’s Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, Defense One reports.
Work said he hopes the center will bolster America's technological advantage over China and Russia – a nation that "represents a clear and present danger."
In particular, Work said, the Defense Department intends to "double down" on geospatial intelligence.
"We want to be able to establish patterns of life from space. We want to know what the unusual looks like," he said.
"If, all of a sudden, a lot of cars show up in a parking lot of an adversary’s missile plant, we want to know about it and we want to know about it quickly. If, suddenly, small boats are swarming in the Gulf or pirates are starting to congregate off Aden, we want to know."
"If Russian soldiers are snapping pictures of themselves in war zones and posting them in social media sites, we want to know exactly where those pictures were taken," Work said.
"If [we see] a ship that we suspect might be carrying illicit materials, we want to know how deep it’s sitting in the water so we can know how much cargo it’s holding. On top of all of that, we need this information more quickly than in the past."
Space, once a "virtual sanctuary… must now be considered a contested operational domain, in a way we haven’t in the past," he said. "We must be prepared now to prevail in conflicts that extend into space."
The new facility is part of a $5 billion boost for space security included in the Defense Department’s 2016 budget proposal, Defense One reports.