Defense Science Board Offers Commercial Pathway to Integrated Deterrence

In November 2022, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering commissioned the Defense Science Board (DSB) to study the commercial space market and how their systems can be leveraged to support Department of Defense (DOD) objectives.

The study came in direct response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier that year, when commercial space systems provided critical capabilities in support of Ukraine’s defense. However, the use of these commercial space systems in Ukraine was not planned in advance, but rather occurred organically at the onset of the invasion.

Now, the DOD wants to apply the lessons learned in Ukraine to capitalize on similar opportunities to integrate commercial space capabilities into their own military requirements.

In this episode of, “The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security,” Mike Dickey, Founding Partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy, joins Dr. Brad Tousley, a partner at Elara Nova and member of the Defense Science Board (DSB), to explore the DSB's "Final Report on Commercial Space System Access and Integrity," which offers a pathway toward integrating commercial space capabilities into military planning and requirements.

"The Elara Edge" is hosted by Scott King and produced by Regia Multimedia Services. The full story can be found on Elara Nova's Insights page here. Music was produced by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio.

"The Elara Edge" is hosted by Scott King and produced by Regia Multimedia Services. The full story can be found on Elara Nova's Insights page here. Music was produced by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio.

Transcript

Host: Scott King (SK) 

SME: Mike Dickey, Founding Partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy (MD)

Dr. Brad Tousley, partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy and Defense Science Board member (BT)

00:02 - 01:43 

SK: In November of 2022, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering commissioned the Defense Science Board - or DSB - a Federal Advisory Committee serving the Office of the Secretary of Defense, to study the commercial space market and how their systems can be leveraged to support Department of Defense - or DOD - objectives.

The study came in direct response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier that year, when commercial space systems provided critical capabilities in support of Ukraine’s defense. The use of these commercial space systems in Ukraine, however, was not planned in advance - but rather occurred organically at the onset of the invasion.

Now, the DOD wants to apply the lessons learned and capitalize on similar opportunities to integrate commercial space capabilities into their own military requirements.

The study concluded in May of 2024, when the Defense Science Board published its “Final Report on Commercial Space System Access and Integrity,” which provided five recommendations toward what the DSB determined to be its bottom line objective: “Integrated Deterrence Requires Integrated Operations.”

Welcome to "The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security.” I’m your host, Scott King, and today we’ll be exploring the Defense Science Board’s Final Report and how its recommendations offer a pathway toward integrating commercial space capabilities into military requirements. 

Returning to The Elara Edge today is our first guest: Mike Dickey, Founding Partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy and the former Chief Architect of the United States Space Force. 

Mike, welcome to the show!

01:43 - 01:44  

MD: Well thanks, Scott. Glad to be back. 

01:45 - 02:01 

SK: We’re happy to have you.  

And our second guest today is Dr. Brad Tousley, who in addition to being a partner at Elara Nova, is a member of the Defense Science Board and directly contributed to the Final Report we’ll be discussing today.  

Dr. Tousley, thanks for taking the time to join us today.  

02:02 - 02:03 

BT: Thanks, Scott. It's a pleasure to be here. 

02:04 - 02:29 

SK: Now, the Defense Science Board’s Final Report comes at a time when the budding relationships between the military and the emerging commercial space market is drawing more and more attention. 

I’d like to begin by understanding how we reached this point. Why are commercial companies - and the institutional investors financially supporting them - entering the space domain? And why has this development captured the DOD’s attention? 

Mike, let’s start with you. 

02:30 - 04:03 

MD: Yeah and it’s very interesting. This is what we call dual-use technology. Those technologies that the commercial world is maybe focusing for commercial purposes can be transitioned into military use and vice versa. 

Just a couple of examples, in the communications business, the military needs communications worldwide so that they can transmit orders from commanders to troops in the field, ships at sea, airplanes in the air. But it's also the same technology that brings you the World Series, for instance.  

And in the imagery market, the imagery can be used to find Russian convoys on highways in Ukraine. And it can also be used to monitor crude oil movement through ports around the world, which has obviously important impacts on the market.  

PNT - positioning, navigation and timing. You use that to put bombs in very precise places to limit collateral damage. You also need that for precision farming, so farmers can increase yields in their crops by knowing where exactly to put fertilizer.  

So, all of these technologies have a whole bunch of markets they can address. So when you're an investor, you look at total addressable market and, by doing both military and commercial things with your technology, you get access to much bigger markets and coupled with the reduced barrier in access to launch, has made it cheaper to get to orbit so now something that's more doable from an investor's capital.  

But those are the kinds of things that have driven the ability for commercial to come in and play in this world and not just sovereign governments. 

04:04 - 05:11 

BT: I would just add two minor points to that. 

Number one, there's a physical attribute within space that's a little bit unique here, and that is that in other, I'll say, warfighting domains, you can separate capabilities, military and commercial capabilities. But in the space domain, because of orbital dynamics, everything is intermingled. So what that means is - if I already have commercial capabilities in space and they're growing because of the market pull, like Mike talked about, those systems are going to be physically GEO-located with military needs. So I think that's one reason why you're seeing this growth.  

The other is the cost of launch, particularly in the last 15-20 years, has come down so much that as interest rates stay low, the private capital that's always seeking the maximum return in a capitalist society - that return is going to be seen as promising. 

And I think space has seen that. And when the fact that when launch comes down by a factor of ten and interest rates drop, all of a sudden you see these opportunities, venture capitalists are going to take that money, they're going to flow it wherever they think there is a return. And space has been really arguably the hottest area of growth the last five years and all of the market projections indicate it's not going to slow down for 10 to 15, 20 years.  

05:12 - 05:52 

MD: In the government's Fiscal Year of 21, which was kind of the peak of where commercial investment was before the pandemic and a bunch of other things, the commercial market was investing in those dual-use technologies about $15 billion a year. 

The Space Force’s budget in Fiscal Year 21 was $15 billion a year. So you literally had two Space Force’s worth of budget that you could apply to the problems that that the military had if you did that in the right way. And so that's a huge opportunity for the Department of Defense to leverage that kind of investment. 

And we'll talk about all the different ways that they can leverage it. So I think we're still in a long period here of a lot of outside money coming into the space business. 

05:53 - 06:22 

SK: These market developments have sparked a series of commercial space strategies across various DOD organizations. 

But effectively integrating commercial space capabilities into military strategy also presents complex challenges, the first of which is the somewhat broad understanding of what actually defines quote - unquote “commercial space.” 

Dr. Tousley, can you explain how the Defense Science Board defined “commercial space?”  

And how does this understanding influence the government’s relationship with the commercial space market? 

06:23 - 07:12 

BT: Within the Terms of Reference and within that study, we really defined “commercial” in four buckets. We defined things as commercial innovation, which is more on the research end - which think of AFWERX and SPACEWERX and DIU and the things they are funding. 

Then the second bucket we kind of identified is commercial development. So think of commercial systems that are being built and the government is trying to buy them in bulk for government use.  

Then the third thing is essentially buying a commercial product, which means systems the commercial world is already building, and we just want to buy copies of it. 

And then the last is services. The commercial world always builds things and offers them to customers for services, in this case the Department of Defense, the Space Force, the intelligence community.  

They want to be acquiring these services, so we think of them in terms of those in bulk: innovation, development, products and services.   

07:13 - 08:26 

MD: The language here is really important because companies will come in and say, ‘Well, I'm a commercial company.’ So they think that that opens up a new world for them. But again, the language is important. What makes you a commercial company? If the government wants to think that when you say you're a commercial company, you have something with a big market and you want the DOD to be one extra buyer in that market, and so you can just kind of buy at the margins. 

That's typically not been the case with some of these space companies, because the commercial markets in space have still not truly matured except in communications, probably, you can say that that's a mature market.  

But all the other markets, it's still not mature. So really what these companies typically want is for the government to kind of be an anchor customer, to be their first customer, to be the biggest buyer of that product or that service. 

And then allow that to be a demand signal to the rest of the world that a commercial market is possible through these products and services. So, it really starts the conversation, perhaps in a bad place because you can be one of those where you're just one of many buyers or you could use the Federal Acquisition Regulations to buy in a commercial way and I think a lot of times that conversation will kind of spiral and slow down the progress between the commercial companies and the government.  

08:27 - 09:33 

BT: With the emergence of this robust commercial market. We think it's important for the government as a wise customer to understand how they can affect the market in a good way or a bad way. 

You have these companies, they want to grow into all these addressable markets. And yet the government what you really want long-term is you want a good, robust ecosystem of competitors. 

So the prices stay in a margin range that's acceptable. You can understand it. And so as some companies succeed and some fail, you aren’t totally reliant on one company. So the concern is that depending upon how the market unfolds, the government needs to be careful not to get themselves locked into a vendor lock.  

Now, if I'm a commercial vendor, I want vendor lock. I want you to buy everything I have and don't buy anything from my competitor. That's capitalism. That's my market drive.  

But on the government side, when you're supporting the warfighter and delivering operational capability. You want the capability, you want the best, but you also don't want to be dependent on one vendor because you don't know what will happen down the line. 

You want prices to stay in control, and you want competition. I mean, that's good. So there's that balancing act that the U.S. government has to be concerned about and that's kind of what we call out in terms of being careful of vendor lock. 

09:34 - 10:40 

MD: There are ways to navigate through that. It can get complicated and it's tough, but an anchor tenant really means that, ‘I'm going to go in and I will put down the first investment in this technology. I'll be the first customer. You know, I'll be 51% or more of what you're doing with the anticipation that other markets, the other markets are going to mature, other customers will come and you're part of that customer pie will reduce over time.' 

You know, the government's been bitten by this a little bit. And even in space with the first commercial imagery contracts, there were a couple of providers for that. As the government's fiscal situation changed over time, the government couldn't be anchor tenants for two. That sort of reduced to one and then now you get into this conversation, well have I created vendor lock because I was an anchor tenant? 

So there's a real concern, I think some of that gives the government pause on wanting to do that again. But I think they can find ways to back out of that. 

You can have on-ramps for other vendors. You can switch to a different type of a model where, ‘Okay, the government's going to have to start just defining requirements,’ kind of like we used to do back in the day. But those things are all sort of painful for all parties, but it's a necessary part of maturing what it is we're trying to do here.

10:41 - 12:49 

BT: One of the other things that we discovered in the course of this study was there is not unanimity of understanding across the Department, and I mean all the services of what the law and what the policy allows the United States government to buy or to leverage. 

And what I mean by that is we actually went to some of the general counsels of the services and said, ‘What do you understand as inherently governmental functions in space? And you did not find agreement across the board. And specifically what we discovered was it was very explicit in the law, in that pretty much the only thing required for the U.S. Air Force, I'll say with the Air Force is nuclear command and control is a military and a government function. Period. 

That will never, ever be commercial. But there are a host of other things that said, ‘No, that could be commercial, no it can’t.’ And what we discovered was that the difference in interpretation comes down to what’s the law say versus what is your policy. And unfortunately right now there's not complete concurrence across the Department that's causing part of the concern. 

For example, is missile tracking, is that only military or could there be elements of that that could be commercial? Well, in fact, there are elements of that could be commercial. The law doesn't specify missile tracking as being only military, and but the policy does. And so if there's commercial entities out there, for example, that are developing infrared sensors for crop monitoring - is that commercial? Well, no, that's only military.  

So the reason I bring it up is that it's important in understanding the emerging market dynamics for the government to be able to understand and operate that way. And unfortunately, we're not there yet. But one of the things that we recommend is that there being careful look at the integration of capabilities. 

And the other term we came up with was, integrated deterrence, which means that capabilities of the entire United States between military and commercial requires integrated operations early on. 

We've identified that integrated operations are not happening in the planning phase upfront. So what happened in Ukraine. It wasn’t planned in advance. Our recommendation is these sorts of capabilities are emerging quickly now. Let's think about integrated operations, upfront integrated contracts, all that. Get that laid out now and not try and have to respond later. 

12:50 - 13:05 

SK: And within those four definitions to “commercial space,” the Defense Science Board placed a specific emphasis on what it described as the more near-term elements: commercial products and commercial services.  

Dr. Tousley, can you explain why this emphasis was necessary? 

13:06 - 14:12 

BT: Frankly, when we started digging in on it - in those four buckets we identified from a near-term standpoint. There's tremendous opportunities, particularly in commercial satellite communications and communications as a service. 

There's particular opportunities there right now. There's still questions about how that service model operates and how much the Department should leverage. There was concerns about essentially multi-year funding and color of money and working capital funds in terms of how those models could be implemented.  

The second was there was a variety of products that you can buy right now. And in fact, whether you consider it a product or a service the, you know, what was going on in Ukraine was very clearly something - it's happening quickly - so from an near-term standpoint, helping the Department arrive at a set of recommendations to implement that right now, you could think, ‘Well, why didn't you go into more refined evaluation of Space Development Agency with commercial development or DIU and SpaceWERX and innovation’ like that's already going on quickly. 

We're not necessarily going to stop or change any of that or we don't have major recommendations at the moment. But on the services and the product side, there's stuff already happening and we thought the Department needs to address that quickly.

14:13 - 14:40 

SK: Now, to this end, the Defense Science Board - led by retired General Ellen Pawlikowski and Mandy Vaughn - published five recommendations toward integrating commercial space capabilities into military requirements. 

The first recommendation calls on the government to “implement an end-to-end framework to better integrate existing and planned commercial capabilities into national security architectures.”  

Dr. Tousley, can you elaborate on how the DOD can do this? 

14:41 - 16:05 

BT: The most direct one is to work within a working capital fund within a commercial services market - do the integrated operations upfront and tie those into the warfighting Combatant Commander's plans - those are not done today. 

When a commercial company wants to set up a service-based contract, that's typically a multi-year process. Yet within the, you know, Plan, Program, Budget, Evaluation process. We do that every year. There's colors of money, there's appropriations within Congress, all that's very carefully prescribed by law. The problem is when the law sets it up this way. 

But the commercial world operates in a multi-year service contract. How in the heck do you make that work out? General Pawlikowski was very explicit that that has been worked in the past. She had to work that in her time as the head of acquisition for the Air Force and the phrase she uses is 'working capital fund.'

There are working capital funds that have been set up across various parts of the Department of Defense that are used for just this purpose: to establish, essentially, funds that allow services to be executed in a multi-year process where the equities of the government's appropriation process are respected.  

And her recommendation is that - the Board's recommendation is that - it more broadly gets adopted by the Department and really robustly attack the working capital fund as a model to operate that. But it's color money, color money, it's appropriations. It’s the way our government operates, the commercial world just doesn't operate that way. How do you get the benefit of both? 

16:06 - 16:27 

MD: So General Pawlakowski is certainly right. I mean, in space, the commercial, the communications market over which 80% of the Department of Defense communications travels is all done under a defense working capital fund that in the last few years, that's been on the order of $8 billion for a bunch of different communications services, so that model is there and it's a good way to proceed.  

16:28 - 16:54 

BT: And I think part of the reason that we we picked up on the near-term challenge and opportunity in SATCOM because as Mike said, the commercial SATCOM leveraged by the Department of Defense is such a dominant point, that getting that more integrated upfront is, to us from a model standpoint, that's the number one recommendation we came up with. 

Can be done, should be done. There's an example of how it works financially. It will leverage the most out of the commercial market and it will provide the biggest benefit to the Department of Defense. 

16:55 - 17:14 

SK: The second recommendation is to “integrate evaluation of and provision for commercial space services into institutional processes.” 

This recommendation ties back to the PPBE process that Dr. Tousley - you referenced earlier - so in what ways might commercial space services be factored into the DOD’s budgeting process? 

17:15 - 18:26 

BT: Part of what's happening is from a Combatant Command perspective. That is not necessarily done upfront. It's done after the fact. And so from an annual standpoint, if they're going to budget within the support of working capital fund, that it needs to be prescribed by law in a way that the Department recognizes it as part of the Space Force budget. It's identified appropriately. It's also clearly understood by the commercial market as an addressable market. 

Part of how you get the best out of the commercial marketplace is to make sure that the addressable market, which is how they evaluate what they're going to spend money on, make sure it's clear to them what the addressable market is. In many cases, there have been not necessary communications, but in other, I'll say, remote sensing, sometimes the commercial markets, like I don't actually know what the Department's going to spend. 

Or they'll say one thing and then six months later, when the actual budget actions go through, it's one-tenth of what they said. And so that lack of transparency makes it difficult for public or private investors to figure out just how big is the market going to be and how much capital can I deploy. 

Given that this is an emerging market and the United States has a tremendous amount of private and public capital that can be brought to bear. It's the government's interest to leverage that to the maximum effect. 

18:27 - 18:57 

SK: Now, the PPBE process was the topic of our previous episode on The Elara Edge, when Elara Nova partner Shawn Barnes discussed the findings of a Congressionally-mandated Commission on PPBE Reform. 

The Commission on PPBE Reform advocated for the creation of a new budgeting process it called the “Defense Resourcing System.” But whether or not the Commission’s findings are implemented, how do the recommendations similarly coming from the Defense Science Board remain relevant to whatever budgeting process the DOD adopts? 

18:58 - 20:22 

BT: So I'll be going on a limb here because we didn’t actually look at that. But here's one way to think about it: If they're able to adopt a multi-year acquisition reform and they're able to tie into working capital fund-like models, I think it'll be great because I think coming back to the point, the commercial market just needs clarity of what the market is. 

So that's their interest here and you always want to think of this in terms of constituencies within our system of government. So, the industry partners would like the clarity. So if it's able to be laid out as a multi-year approach, it'll more carefully align with services. From a Congress perspective, as long as the appropriations process, they get to review it and look at it as a multi-year appropriation. 

And they get to assess and evaluate it. I think their equities are served. The Department's equity is going to be served. If we can set up a working capital fund model, because that means they'll understand year-over-year what's the burden on their budget.  

And you know, from a Combatant Commander's perspective, or the supporting command’s perspective, if they know what's going to happen over a multi-year process, it allows them to support the operations plans better. 

I'm sure they don't want to go through the process wondering every year, ‘Well, Congress appropriated this, but not that. How does that support my need? I don't have it.’ So I think it's great all around.  

I just I think the PPBE annual process was set up long ago when technology did not innovate as quickly, but now the technology, particularly in space, is innovating so quickly. 

How do we respond to that? So I think it's great.  

20:23 - 21:00 

MD: And I'll say another aspect of the multi-year. So we talk about working capital funds. So the working capital fund basically creates a checkbook that the government can use each year, but it's using at, in the spot market basically. So a requirement comes up. And now, we go ask the commercial servicing providers to give bids and then we select one. 

But that bid is for today and you don't get the best pricing. If you can say, ‘Look, I'm going to do this, but I'm going to, I want to do it for two or three years.’ You're going to get much better pricing. The cost will go down for that service to the government and it provides the benefit of giving transparency and clarity to the investors and the companies. 

21:01 - 21:40 

BT: Scott one other thing I think was in, in our recommendation, in terms of working more effectively within PPBE, was the ability to allow program executive officers to move funds in between program elements year-to-year, because sometimes one program might under-spend on a service or product, the other might have a need. 

And so that was one of the things we recommended that within a broader portfolio, the Department go to Congress and say, ‘We'd like to have more latitude of shifting funds from one to the other, because in many cases, the funds were underneath the program executive officer in total, but not within specific elements, because some programs are doing better than others.’ So we recommended - provide that flexibility. 

21:41 - 21:59  

SK: This leads us to the Defense Science Board’s third recommendation: “incentivize trust and build resilience among commercial providers.” 

How does trust factor into this budding relationship between the military and its commercial space partners? And are there any examples of how the DOD can effectively do this? 

22:00 - 23:05 

BT: We identified a few things. 

Number one it’s kind of a top level framework on the resilience and trust. The government has concerns about whether or not they can trust the performance and the security and the reliability of a commercial system. On the other hand, the commercial world knows that they depend on the government to help provide some clarity about the threat situation. 

So there's a need to work together on both sides. And we thought that one way of thinking about it is from a market perspective, include resilience as a quality of service requirement. The government and the contractors acknowledge it's going to cost more for that. But as long as that's priced in and considered a part of the economic model, then the vendors know what they have to do. 

The government knows, ‘Okay, I'm going to get this enhanced capability as a function of increased pricing.’ I think that's good and that'll establish that market for premium pricing, which doesn't exist today. There's - it’s a gap in understanding. 

And then I think, you know, without getting into further specifics, just to improve sharing of indications and warning, because the government has an awareness from a rapid timeline of what's happening more than the commercial world does. Having said that, as proven in Ukraine, many aspects of the commercial world, once they know the situation, they can respond very quickly.

23:06 - 24:36 

MD: The Department specifically, U.S. Space Command has a commercial integration cell that sits at Vandenberg that's been very focused, for obvious reasons on SATCOM over the years it's been in existence. 

And in that case, there are representatives from some of these commercial communication providers that sit with the U.S. Space Command and are aware of ongoing operations, are aware of threats. They have clearances and so they are able then to go back and translate those potential issues into enhancements or upgrades or defensive cyber operations or whatever on the commercial side to be able to continue to provide the service.  

That has got to grow and they recognize that has got to grow. There's now, I think some remote sensing providers in that, as well. 

In addition to that, which is probably the deepest level of integration, there's also the Space ISAC. There's a set of these ISAC information sharing organizations across a bunch of different infrastructure elements within the U.S.  

Space is one of those - the Space ISAC is the Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center - and they share things that they're seeing amongst themselves, at an unclassified level to help everybody sort of up their game in defense and understanding what's, what's coming at them so they can provide a more robust product. So there's a lot of data-sharing that has to go on. 

It is happening and, U.S. Space Command is going to expand as the markets expand for more access to these different mission sets with remote sensing, PNT, whatever else we get, is going to expand to commercial integration cell, too, in response.  

24:37 - 25:04 

SK: Now, the fourth recommendation requests that the government: “develop a suite of capabilities to monitor, assess and respond to adversaries and adversaries' use of commercial space capabilities.” 

This recommendation explicitly acknowledges that just as the DoD wants to leverage the commercial space capabilities available today, there is a risk that our adversaries can do the same.  

Why is this acknowledgement important and how can the DOD mitigate that risk? 

25:05 - 25:57 

BT: Yeah. So this is one where most of our discussions and recommendations are not in the open document. There's some classified stuff, but, I'll put it this way. The commercial world and the U.S. government acknowledge that adversaries will also want to use some of the same commercial capabilities that we would want to use.  

That's pretty obviously known because if part of the commercial market for a commercial capability happens to reside over a foreign territory of concern to the U.S. government, then you have to know that multiple parties are going to try and use that capability, so that was an acknowledgement - everybody knows it. And yet the commercial vendors, particularly those in the United States, are very concerned about making sure the U.S. government is happy - happy in general. 

So I think other than that, we've acknowledged that and there were a variety of discussions happening behind the scenes about how to best protect the U.S. government's interest in this area and not damage commercial industry. I'll just leave it at that. 

25:58 - 26:21 

SK: The fifth and final recommendation of the Defense Science Board’s report states the government must: “account for maturity of the commercial market when making decisions on how it regulates, invests and buys commercial space services.”  

In what ways can the maturity of a given space capability influence how the government approaches its relationship with those relevant commercial partners?

26:22 - 29:02 

BT: This is all in the vein of how can the U.S government leverage this capability while not damaging it and at the same time support the robust growth in the commercial sector?  

I think the first thing is the DOD has got to account for maturity. And I'll give you an example of the commercial market: the GEO commercial SATCOM market. It's pretty mature. I think the government knows that. The government relies on it. pLEO market a little less mature. Cislunar market, very immature.  

So my point in making those three comparisons is that when the government is making decisions on how it's going to, you know, regulate, invest and buy these services, the government as a wise consumer of the commercial market needs to account for the maturity of those systems. 

It's just important for the government to constantly do that maturity assessment of these different markets to figure out if it's going to regulate, invest or buy because the government is a dominant player. As Mike said, if the government's 51% of your customer, that's very important to the commercial sector. So that also means the government can be a damaging influence if it's not careful. So I think that's the first thing - account for maturity. 

The second is I think just to avoid over-regulation, the commercial sector is always going to complain about regulation and anything that can inhibit their approach to work to obtain as much of the addressable market as they can because that's their capitalist tendency. But avoid the over-regulation because a lot of commercial entities in the United States are concerned about over-regulation inhibiting their competition internationally. 

You know, because if the government's concerned about over-regulation, because there's a perception of, ‘I got to do this, I go do that to protect my own equities,’ but then you damage the very commercial company you need to depend on. 

Then at the end of the day, you're left with an international company and nothing domestically. And I've talked about this with the vendor lock. Invest for market creation - now that’s a very sensitive statement. Not market monopolization. You don't want market monopolization, not because of any particular vendor, I don't think and I don't think anybody the DSB believes that a dominant vendor is - without competition. 

I don't think anybody would think that's in the best interest of the Department of Defense in the long-term. Maybe in the very short-term - it's fine. But long-term, I don't think anybody would think this ever works out well where you have a monopoly. It isn't. So I think the government as a wise consumer and customer needs to think about ‘How do you invest for market creation and not market monopolization?’ 

And then the last thing is, this gets back to the law-policy, 'what's inherently governmental?' Be careful and try and minimize unique requirements when you're buying commercial services. In order to maximize the commercial service, you've got to keep the requirements within what's feasible, as close as possible to that commercial product, or the commercial service, because that allows you to keep the costs down. 

29:03 - 29:18 

SK: The Final Report concluded with a specific emphasis on what it viewed as its bottom line: “Integrated Deterrence Requires Integrated Operations.” 

Dr. Tousley, how do each of these five recommendations align to that bottom line objective?  

29:19 - 30:39 

BT: The bottom line about ‘Integrated Deterrence Requires Integrated Operations’ means I'm gonna put myself in the Combatant Commander's shoes. In order to do an effective job of planning in advance, because you always want to have your plans all set to deal with potential contingencies. 

If I'm going to have my plans well-crafted and articulated in advance, the commercial sector, if I plan on using them, needs to be a part of that plan upfront. It can't simply be something I'm going to respond to.  

For example, in Ukraine, that only happened as a happenstance. That was not planned in advance. The whole point of integrated operations and integrated deterrence means all kinds of capabilities like that. We ought to be doing plans, the budgeting and the work in advance, to provide the maximum capability to the warfighter.  

The way I view it is, economic power is a critical element of our national and our military power. And if the commercial sector has capabilities that can support the United States Department of Defense and the intelligence community, we're going to want to do all this planning and the work upfront to have the capabilities integrated.  

You should be doing warfighter training right now. I don't believe that we do a lot of training with the warfighter on the leverage of commercial communications in all of our war games today. But we should. So that's kind of the foot stomp. Let's get to work. Let's we've got a lot of capabilities that could be integrated today. Let's get to work and do it. Let's do all the work upfront. And let's not just wait for the next conflict to figure it out on the fly. 

30:40 - 31:01 

MD: Yeah, kind of the bottom line is that several of the military leaders have expressed is you want the adversary to look up into space and say, ‘Wow, that's a lot of stuff I have to deal with and it's frankly too hard. I'm gonna have to pursue my objectives in other ways and not take the fight to space.’ That's the integrated part of this. We could have the same conversation about partnering with Allies as well.  

31:02 - 31:25 

SK: Going back to the purpose driving the Defense Science Board’s study, to facilitate the DOD’s understanding of the emerging commercial space market and how it can serve national security objectives - how does this also pertain to the expertise found at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy? 

And how can Elara Nova partners support these efforts at the cross-section of commercial space capabilities and military requirements? 

31:26 - 32:09 

MD: Elara Nova lives at the intersection of the three things we've been talking about here today: the government, the industry and the investment markets. And also with international partnerships is another part of integrated deterrence. The people that we have on the Elara Nova team and all of our partners, Doctor Tousley and many others. 

They spent time in government and or they’ve spent time in industry and or they've spent time in the investment markets and that expertise, all of that expertise doesn't exist in any one place, either in the government or the industry. And so we offer an opportunity for those different players in this space, to have that conversation to mature the discussion to come up with specific recommendations and I think that's where we can help out. I hope Brad sees it the same way.  

32:10 - 32:25 

BT: Absolutely. Yeah. No, I think that Elara Nova, we're a bunch of like-minded people that really want to see us, know U.S. capability pushing forward for integrated deterrence. We want to support the marketplace. And obviously, in order to do that, we are laser-focused on helping our customers achieve maximum success in doing that.

32:26 - 33:02 

SK: This has been an episode of The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security. As a global consultancy and professional services firm focused on helping businesses and government agencies maximize the strategic advantages of the space domain, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in space security. 

If you liked what you heard today, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a rating. Music for this podcast was created by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio. This episode was edited and produced by Regia Multimedia Services. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at The Elara Edge.