By Franz-Stefan Gady
The American military will set up a new command center to better coordinate responses to attacks in space.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work announced on Tuesday at the 2015 GEOINT symposium—an annual conference convening leaders from the American geospatial intelligence community—that the Pentagon will set up a new joint command center to better coordinate responses to attacks on U.S. military space assets, Marcus Weisgerber over at Defense One reports.
Space, Work emphasized in a speech, was once a “virtual sanctuary,” but should now “be considered a contested operational domain in ways that we haven’t had to think about in the past. (…) We must be prepared now to prevail in conflicts that extend into space.”
Consequently, Work and other senior Pentagon officials are pressing hard to setup a new joint coordination and planning cell, which will receive data from satellites belonging to all U.S. government agencies and should be opened within six months. The new operations center is part of a $5 billion increase for space security as outlined in the FY2016 Defense Department budget request, Weisgerber notes.
Read the full story at The Diplomat