The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) along with other groups and teams within the U.S. military such as the Space Warfighting Analysis Center (SWAC) and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) have been working towards the goal of having a hybrid SATCOM internet-like infrastructure through various programs and projects. The most recent being led by an AFRL team named the Rapid Architecture Prototyping and Integrated Development (RAPID) lab which was created in 2022 and hopes to finally bring this goal of an interconnected multi-orbit air vehicle network to fruition.
The problem that the Air Force is solving by creating this hybrid satcom infrastructure is that of beyond line-of-sight communication which allow for geographically distanced aircraft or command units to share data with one another when it previously would not have been possible. This network is planned to not only consist of one constellation of satellites, but to allow both commercial and government satellites to communicate with one another to hopefully find the shortest possible path to the desired destination of the data.
The combination of commercial and military assets sounds all good and dandy of paper until you begin to think about some of the implications of what type of data is being transmitted. Since this data is most likely going to be warfare critical information is it wise to be sending it out into outer space ether where any RPO satellite could be waiting to listen to data coming by. SATCOM providers such as SpaceX, Oneweb, and Telesat are all mentioned in the article as working on a related AFRL hybrid SATCOM project called Global Lightning and it is likely that they would all be involved in this project as well. Without any knowledge into what cybersecurity steps are being taken by these private companies to secure their data links and satellites how can we be sure that there is not a possible insider threat scenario or any other potential attack vector an adversary would want to take.
By its very nature a proliferated SATCOM network of this size opens itself up too many new attack vectors for an adversary to take advantage of. These SATCOM networks may allow for beyond line-of-sight communications but is it worth it if the system is compromised or otherwise eavesdropped on?