{"id":49367,"date":"2025-04-10T21:45:41","date_gmt":"2025-04-10T13:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/bringing-together-commercial-operations-for-military-use-hinges-on-integration-roadmaps\/"},"modified":"2025-04-10T21:45:41","modified_gmt":"2025-04-10T13:45:41","slug":"bringing-together-commercial-operations-for-military-use-hinges-on-integration-roadmaps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/bringing-together-commercial-operations-for-military-use-hinges-on-integration-roadmaps\/","title":{"rendered":"Bringing Together Commercial Operations for Military Use Hinges on Integration Roadmaps"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.<\/em> \u2014 Commercial space and military leaders are working through challenges to achieve greater integration of private sector capabilities for military use. Col. Richard Kniseley, senior materiel leader of the Commercial Space Office, Space Systems Command <\/b>(SSC), said Thursday at Space Symposium that it sometimes feels like a \u201cgrassroots movement\u201d working together across the commercial business community. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt was about bringing together industry, those commercial enablers,\u201d Kniseley said. \u201cNow we\u2019ve got to get commercial more into our space architecture. And we\u2019ve got a lot of different things going on right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kniseley said Congress sent a letter instructing all of the U.S. Department of Defense<\/strong> (DoD) program executive officers to break apart all mission area requirements and show what can go commercial, what can go international, and what needs to be military purpose-built in-house. <\/p>\n

On Wednesday, President Trump released an executive order aimed at modernizing defense acquisitions, with a \u201cfirst preference\u201d for commercial solutions. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve had a lot of great success over the past two years, but now we are really going to kick it into overdrive.\u201d Expectations are going to be high, Kniseley said, and hopefully, with that a budget comes along, the resources come along and the road maps come together to show how everything will start to be integrated.<\/p>\n

Part of Col. Eddie Ferguson\u2019s job is executing the commercial integration strategy for the U.S. Space Command <\/strong>released last year. Ferguson is the command\u2019s chief of Advanced Warfighter Capabilities and Resource Analysis Division.<\/p>\n

That Space Command strategy includes bringing commercial capabilities in for the warfighter\u2019s use, and doing modeling, simulation, and analysis. \u201cOur job is to write requirements and advocate for resources,\u201d Ferguson said. \u201cWe have a 2027 timeframe that General Whiting gave us, and that largely means that we have to try to use commercial partnerships, preferably with dual use technologies, because that\u2019s what\u2019s going to deliver in the timeframe that we\u2019re looking at.\u201d<\/p>\n

From the side of industry, Christina Agnew, vice president for Space at Palantir<\/b>, said Palantir has \u201cfought the hard battle to be where we are today in delivering commercial capability for the defense ecosystem.\u201d<\/p>\n

She acknowledged that the company has faced roadblocks about accreditation and access to the customers. \u201cBut the shift we have seen with our community of partners, commercial and defense, has unlocked a lot of the access that really, in the past years, wouldn\u2019t have been possible,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Todd Gossett, vice president for Space and National Security Initiatives with SES Space and Defense<\/b>, said that his organization has been integrated for years. \u201cWe\u2019ve been there,\u201d he said. \u201cBut now, as we\u2019ve seen over the past decade, there is a much more purposeful integration of these commercial capabilities into the military, alongside the military\u2019s purpose-built capabilities and what we now call space architecture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gossett said that people in positions of authority in government say that they can do this commercial integration. \u201cBut their incentive is to make a performance cost schedule in those acquisition programs,\u201d he said. \u201cI think getting over how they have been rewarded in the past, and how they can get incentivized to better adopt a new way of thinking, has been a challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another challenge to integration are the adjustments in requirements to use commercial services in a military context, noted by Michael Madrid, chief growth officer of Starfish Space<\/b>. \u201cWe feel that as a commercial company there is a fundamental tension in the relationship where we are developing something that we think is the best way to solve a problem, that may be different than what a government customer has asked for or has envisioned for that need. There may be things that our commercial customers don\u2019t need that a government customer does need,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you react to that tension by just doing whatever our government customer wants, I think we lose some of the benefit of it being a commercial service in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t really want to be called a commercial company,\u201d argued Joe Morrison, vice president and general manager of Remote Sensing at synthetic aperture radar (SAR) startup Umbra<\/b>. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we collaborate with our government partners, most of the great features we\u2019ve built into our products have come from talking to customers,\u201d Morrison said. \u201cThey tell us a need, and then we build to the need.\u201d<\/p>\n

The challenge for the government is to \u201cnot sit back and get lectured by companies about how you should meet your mission,\u201d he said. \u201cThat makes no sense. You\u2019re the expert in your mission. You\u2019re the expert in acquisitions. The challenge is \u2014 Can you develop enough trust? If you\u2019re not willing to share with us your actual needs because you don\u2019t trust us, then we won\u2019t be able to help you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kniseley said that bottom line, commercial is a trusted asset and partner in wartime. \u201cThey\u2019re providing extreme capability right now. They\u2019re taking that business risk from an enemy standpoint who already views them as a threat.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. \u2014 Commercial space and military leaders are working through challenges to achieve greater integration of private sector capabilities for military use. Col. Richard Kniseley, senior materiel leader of the Commercial Space Office, Space Systems Command (SSC), said Thursday at Space Symposium that it sometimes feels like a \u201cgrassroots movement\u201d working together across the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49368,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49367"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49367\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}