U.S Army wants ability to tap into commercial satellite networks

The Army’s program executive office has announced plans to upgrade their satellite modems to be compatible with multiple satcom network carriers. They describe in their request a singular box that will be able to communicate with all military and commercial satellites. The box will need to work with multiple waveform vendors that use proprietary waveforms. The box would also need to be compatible with existing vehicle interfaces called CMOSS. The Multi-orbit modem would make it easier for the Army to deal with emergencies such as when theres a network outage and they need to move networks. Currently that process would take weeks and would need to be done with a Satellite Access request and a gateway access request.

The Army’s Program Executive Office has also announced a pilot program called satcom as a managed service. This program will explore the idea of having the army use commercially leased satcom networks instead of buying and maintaining their own. This would put the entire U.S Army satcom network into the hands of commercial companies. This is an interesting choice to pursue after what happened with SpaceX and Ukraine.