Long-Term Satellite Bandwidth Contracts Close, Says DISA Official

The military is moving toward using long-term bandwidth contracts for satellite communications in place of annual leases, Bruce Bennett, the director of satellite communications at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) said at the Military Satellites Summit in Vienna, Va. DISA has wanted longer contracts for years, but the holders of congressional purse-strings have resisted. But “Congress is weakening,” as DISA and industry have increased lobbying for changes in the system, he said. Longer contracts are part of a major effort to modernize satellite communications networks and acquisition, Bennett said.

The government would pay cents on the dollar if it could use long-term contracts on satellites, and buying services before launch might cut costs in half, Bennett said. “We are working with Congress to move commercial bandwidth to longer term” so the Joint Chiefs can allocate the money needed, he said. Some contracts for satellite capacity in southwest Asia are up for their eighth or ninth annual extension, Bennett said.

The growing consumption of bandwidth makes old acquisition methods unsustainable, and DISA is taking a fresh look at how the government has bought satellite services in the past and how it can going forward, Bennett said. The increasingly popular idea of hosted payloads, adding military or government payloads to commercial satellites, wasn’t being considered a decade ago and is an example of how much things have changed, he said. “That’s how” the process “is evolving. We can’t think the same way we have in the past,” Bennett said.

DISA is still scheduled to begin the Future COMSATCOM Services Acquisition (FCSA) program for new contracts this summer, Bennett said. The program combines the satellite-communications acquisition processes of the DISA and the General Services Administration while increasing the bidding pool among commercial companies and is hoped to lower costs for the process. FCSA is the beginning of reshaping the government’s acquisition process.

The goal is a system that relies on networks rather than circuits, Bennett said. A major step would be connecting major Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls information sites with broadband via high-speed links and into the defense information systems network backbone to transmit the information around the world. “Moving away from circuits to IP structure requires a different mindset,” he said. he ultimate goal is to get information to flow from any source to any gateway across any hub to any uplink to any satellite to anybody, said Bennett. That kind of flow is possible, but further integration is needed, he said.