Tom Becht: Industry Satcom Providers Should Form Consortium to Offer Services to DoD

Tom Becht, interim director of the military satellite communications directorate at the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center, has said he believes commercial satcom providers should offer their services to the Defense Department as a group, SpaceNews reported Wednesday.

“We would be looking for a consortium view on how to supply DoD more commercial capability,” he said Wednesday at the 2018 Global MilSatcom conference in London.

Becht’s suggestion stems from DoD’s need to have flexibility when it comes to acquiring managed satcom services from many providers instead of having a lock-in arrangement with a single vendor.

“We still see a lot of independent commercial offerings from satcom providers. They are all good,” he noted.

“But it would be nice, instead of having 135 terminals, that we could figure out how to do this from an enterprise perceptive.”