Space Force chief: Commercial imagery analysis aided Niger withdrawal — just don’t call it ‘intel’

AFA 2024 — A Space Force pilot program provided rapid “situational awareness” reports, written by commercial imagery analysis firms, to security forces on the ground during the US military’s recently completed withdrawal from Niger, the Chief of Space Operations said here this morning.

“Last February, I told you we’re kicking off a pilot program for tactical surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking for TacSRT,” he told a standing-room-only audience at the Air Force Association’s massive annual conference. “This $40 million effort was intended to support AFRICOM requirements … [and] complement the exquisite work done by the intelligence community with unclassified operational planning products delivered on tactically relevant timelines.”

Since then, the pilot has provided updates on flooding in Kenya and extremists in central Africa, Saltzman said. “But,” he said, “the thing that stands out most to me was the Space Forces Europe used TacSRT to support us forces as they completed their withdrawal from Air Base 201 in Niger [this] August.”

“Throughout the withdrawal, the team maintained overwatch of everything within five kilometers of the base,” he said. “On average, the timeline from collection on orbit to delivery into the hands of security forces was about three and a half hours — but the team got it down to as little as one and a half hours … by the end of the event.”

Peppered with reporters’ questions at a subsequent roundtable, Saltzman took pains to distinguish what TacSRT did from traditional intelligence provided by US spy agencies, let alone military targeting.

“This is not like traditional collection and purchase of imagery, It’s something different,” he emphasized. “It’s not about targeting. This is about providing situational awareness.”

Saltzman may have been treading carefully here because of ongoing tension over whether Space Force was treading on others’ space imagery turf.

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Under current law and policy, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has responsibility for buying imagery from private firms, while the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) buys commercial analytic products, such as computer models and digital maps. (In fact, NGA just announced a contract for them worth up to $290 million.) At least some officials at these long-established satellite intelligence agencies have pushed back against the Space Force’s ambitions for commercial satellite imagery. Saltzman has touted how Space Systems Command has provided “near-real time information and support” in earthquakes, floods, and wildfires around the world.

TacSRT, he said, “was a pathfinder, with the idea being that we could expand the program if it proved to be value added, and that’s exactly what it did.”

Through a virtual “marketplace” of vetted commercial providers, Saltzman explained, the Space Force puts out broad requests and gets, not raw images, but situation reports. In the Niger case, he said, they asked for anything anomalous occurring within “five kilometers” around the air base.

“TacSRT doesn’t buy imagery,” he said. “What TacSRT has done, in this pilot in particular, is we simply ask a question into the marketplace: ‘Hey, what generally does it look like around Air Base 201? Are there any items of interest? Trucks that are massing, or do we see people that are milling around?’

“We simply ask the question, and commercial industry provides us products that try to help us answer the question,” he summed up. “This is just situational awareness, again, operational planning products, not  intelligence products.”

Now that TacSRT has proved its value in real-world operations, Saltzman said, his plan is to scale it up. That could escalate a budgetary battle already underway in the appropriations committees on Capitol Hill.

“The next step is just giving [them] more money so we can expand,” he said.