Pentagon Weaning Itself from Controversial Bandwidth Lease

摘要

The U.S. Defense Department, which was criticized last year for using satellite capacity that was indirectly leased from a company with substantial Chinese government ownership, expects to fully extricate itself from that arrangement by May, a senior official said. In written testimony to the Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee March 12, Doug Loverro, deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy, said the Pentagon has made "significant progress" in moving satellite communications leases from the Apstar satellite system to other commercial satellite providers in the region. In April 2013, Loverro and other Defense Department leaders came under fire from a House subcommittee for using transponder capacity aboard the Apstar 7 satellite owned by APT Satellite Holdings Co. of Hong Kong. APT is nearly 40 percent owned by the China Aerospace Corp., which is in turn owned by the Chinese government.