By Chris Forrester
Kimberly Morris (Deputy, Space Operations, Naval Network Warfare Command) supplied delegates to the Silicon Valley Space Week and its MilSat Symposium with an impressive overview on her role at the Warfare Command.I n this role, she has supervision of Navy SATCOM Operations. She supervises the asset allocation and mission planning of the Navy’s Commercial Broadband Satellite Program. She is currently leading an initiative to demonstrate resilient SATCOM through proactive management and control techniques by using pre-allocated MILSATCOM compatible commercial capabilities as manoeuvre space. She retired from the US Marine Corps in 2014 after 20 years.
It was her birthday on the day at the symposium and she thanked the organisers for NOT putting all of the candles on the cake they presented her with!
She reminded delegates that one of the challenges of having these naval responsibilities was being at sea, and thus not being able to run fiber-optic from the shore! “So Satcom is a huge part of what we do and thus space is a huge part of what we do and dealing with those constraints.”
Her responsibilities extend to space situational awareness, space training and liaison with the DoD and joint space organisations on behalf of the navy as well as tactical communications for the navy across the globe.
Morris said that in the past we were more or less king of the hill. That isn’t the case anymore, and the more people we have on the hill then the more elbows we have to contend with. She displayed recent news articles that summed up the position the military was now having to respond to. One ssid: “Russia escalates rhetoric on commercial satellites, calls them ‘legitimate targets for retaliation’ (Bloomberg News, October 27). Her comment was that some people were talking about being at war in a couple of years. “No, we’re engaged right now.” Another news alert talked about how Chinese satellites were breaking the US monopoly on long-range targeting.
She said these stories did not – yet – have a body count, but I have a front row seat to what’s happening. “Now, today, in October2 024, our ships at sea are engaged in the biggest set of combat operations since World War II.”
She explained that for obvious reasons there was very limited real estate on ships. “There’s a lot of electro-magnetic signatures on board a vessel, and we work in a very tough environment. And there’s no place to hide. Thene there’s the weather with its own set of constraints. Then there’s the everyday management of a strike force. We can be in the process of being moved to a location, perhaps a danger zone, and then things happen elsewhere, and we can be dispersed almost overnight with a new mission.”
She expected the navy to stay very much involved in narrow-band (“at least while I am in the navy”) but the major aspect is the weapons systems themselves and what they need. But when it comes to high bandwidth or low bandwidth we have to know what is best and most relevant for each application and use. And then have the means to immediately select the right one for the task. We are refining this all the time.
However, she said that using commercial SatCom space was once not on the agenda. Now, and in dialogue with the other services, we are dealing with how we can use some of their warfighting techniques with the resources available to us. We also realise and understand that we need deeper, more robust conversations with our other colleagues in this regard.