ALESIA ENGINEERING LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: AF222-D008

Description

Satellite communications (SATCOM) are widely used throughout the Department of Defense (DoD).  For some systems (e.g., remotely piloted aircraft -- RPA), it is a fundamental requirement and without reliable SATCOM, these systems cannot operate.  In spite of this, SATCOM does not receive the attention allotted to other military logistics.  Often, it is purchased and operated in per-mission stovepipes.  As a result, it is poorly coordinated, nor optimized, nor evaluated against a thinking opponent.  The outcome is an architecture that is inefficient and fragile, susceptible to the effects of increasing congestion and aggressive adversaries. Until recently, the environment was benign and poorly coordinated services were adequate, for military and commercial users.  Current events make it clear: the electronic warfare (EW) fight is on, and the United States (U.S.) is ill-prepared to win.  The lack of understanding of SATCOM vulnerabilities will increase the odds of the U.S. being significantly challenged during combat operations in an Anti-Access Area Denial (A2AD) environment.  Likewise for civilian and commercial users, we have seen with Russian EW attacks in Ukraine, that the battlefield is not limited to military operations and commercial television providers were targeted and infrastructure items like windmills were damaged. In this document, Alesia Engineering LLC proposes the development of a SATCOM Survivability Analysis Toolkit under project SHELL GAME to identify and quantify all impacts that have the potential to degrade, deny, intercept, or geolocate activity on current or future SATCOM links across any physical domain (land, air, sea, space) to support defensive, offensive, and wargaming purposes.  SHELL GAME will develop a suite of analytical tools to develop a deep understanding of the EW perspective for the SATCOM environment, thus enabling users to develop robust plans in the face of demanding requirements and resource constraints.  This toolkit will ingest and sanitize heterogeneous data, support complex queries (e.g., geolocation), reduce analysis effort, and speed timelines.  SHELL GAME will enable the U.S. to prepare the SATCOM battle-space, to practice in simulated contested environments (e.g., war-game) and if necessary, “fight” SATCOM at the speed of battle.