In a contributed article for MilSatMagazine, Inmarsat Government’s Senior Vice President of Government Strategy and Policy, Rebecca Cowen-Hirsch, highlights the role of the U.S. Air Force’s Analysis of Alternatives (AoA) in leveraging commercial satellite communication (SATCOM) services in an integrated architecture to best support critical military missions.
As the Air Force searches for a follow-on wideband system to, in part, replace the legacy Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS), Cowen-Hirsch discusses how the AoA supports the use of COMSATCOM in current and future military missions. She explains that given the increasingly dynamic operational and threat environment in space, there is an urgency to transform the current SATCOM architecture using a progressive approach to get where the military needs to be — sooner rather than later.
“On the commercial side, we have demonstrated that we are, indeed, unwilling to postpone. We have devoted ourselves to this transformation for years and are moving at the speed necessary to meet both today’s and future requirements,” Cowen-Hirsch writes.
“As we pursue these objectives at an accelerated rate, we strive toward a new business model that will prove essential for the military in the near-present and indefinite future: SATCOM as a Service. Engineered for global mobility, SATCOM as a Service provides an end-to-end, communication infrastructure from resilient satellite systems to a robust ground infrastructure, as well as terminals that are type approved to work on that network.”
Read the full article at: www.milsatmagazine.com
