A Future Without T-sat

摘要

The U.S. Defense Department's decision to cancel the Air Force's Transformational Satellite (T-Sat) communications system was the right call given the impending defense budget squeeze and the cost and risk associated with the futuristic system.rnHowever, the military's soaring demand for secure satellite communications capacity remains, notwithstanding the pending overhaul of the U.S. Army's Future Combat Systems program, a bandwidth-intensive collection of ground and aerial vehicles tightly networked together for coordinated operations. While the restructured program likely will feature less-complex platforms, the mobility and connectivity requirements remain. The same holds true more broadly for the U.S. military, which Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been tasked with reshaping to focus on the types of wars it is likely to fight in the future: low-intensity and guerilla conflicts - as opposed to classic conventional battles - where information and mobility are at a premium.