Rick Scott Asks Top Air Force Official About Importance Of Satellites For Missile Defense System

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During a Senate Armed Forces Committee hearing prior to the Congressional recess, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) questioned General B. Chance Saltzman, the Chief of Space Operations at the USSF, about the role of satellites in missile defense.

Transcript

00:00As you know, we have our adversaries Russia, China, Iran are doing more and

00:04more in Latin America. Cuba's 90 miles away. We've got China. We have all of them

00:11are doing bad things down there. So can you just talk about the importance of

00:15Homestead Air Force Base and what you think the future of Homestead Air Force

00:19Base is? Homestead is of course has been a long time very important base for the

00:28Air Force and for the nation and and will continue into the future the very

00:31supportive community. They run a great mission down there and so I believe

00:35Homestead is is one of those that you should be very proud of the community and

00:40the mission there that they that they conduct. So you both believe it will

00:44continue to be an important a crucial military asset? Yes Senator I do. All right

00:51next General Saltzman. How important are is our satellites for communications

00:56missile detection operations? Very important. So the satellites were

01:01dependent on if if China was able to just destroy a dozen or so and leave all

01:11that debris in space how big how big of an impact would that have? I believe the

01:16Joint Force would struggle to meet its objective certainly in the Western

01:19Pacific and maybe elsewhere. Okay so a couple things when our when systems are

01:24compromised is it harder to disable a large distributed satellite network?

01:29Indications are that the more targets you have to disrupt or destroy in order to

01:34achieve a mission effect the more resilient that architecture is. Yeah so if

01:37they were smaller or more distributed that'd be better for us right? They'd be

01:41more resilient. Yeah so also we we face a lot of procurement delays like we do

01:47seems like everything in the military is that does that impact your ability to

01:51defend our country? Yeah the slower the capabilities are delivered to the war

01:56fighter the less they can use them obviously. Do you think we need to do more

02:00public-private partnerships where we have private companies are willing to

02:04invest their own capital and scale up quicker than what we're doing? We've got

02:10tremendous efforts already trying to get as much IRAD as much industry

02:14investment in R&D as possible to try to drop the technical risk associated with key

02:18platforms so there is a tremendous amount of investment but more is always

02:21better I think in this area. Are you using agencies like the space development

02:26agency to work with commercial players who are ready to deliver quickly with

02:29the scale speed and innovation we need to stay ahead of our adversaries and

02:33maintain peace through strength? Yes sir we got substantial investments as I

02:37mentioned in the commercial sector to develop those technologies the space

02:41development agencies sole acquisition model the strategy is about

02:45leveraging rapidly what commercial industry is producing in order to go

02:49fast to put capabilities in the hands of our warfighters. So are you

02:52optimistic that we're going to be able to afford to put the satellite systems up

02:57that we'll be able to make sure that we that China is not able to destroy our

03:01ability to communicate or missile detection any of these things?

03:05The resiliency is not cheap I can tell you that obviously we have a lot of

03:08architectures to redesign so they are more resilient but I think the space

03:12development agency is a perfect example where they are moving fast we have the

03:16funding we need to put tranche 2 in in orbit that'll give us an initial

03:20operational capability that demonstrates that kind of resiliency. And are there

03:23quite a few private companies that are willing to put their money at risk to try

03:27to to put systems up that you can work with? I can't really speak to how what

03:33their risk tolerance is but I can tell you there's a great interest in the

03:35commercial sector to engage with the government. All right I want to thank each of

03:39you for your service.

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