The U.S. Navy plans to decommission its 11 oldest cruisers over a six-year period, starting with the USS Mobile Bay and USS Bunker Hill guided missile ships in 2020, Defense News reported.

A decommissioning schedule obtained by Defense News says the 11 Ticonderoga-class cruisers will leave the Navy fleet by 2026, when they reach the end of their 35-year service life.

A source told the publication that none of the Navy’s force structure assessments require the military branch to extend the service life of the 11 cruisers to help the achieve its planned 355-ship fleet.

Lt. Seth Clarke, a Navy spokesman, said that the scheduled decommissioning effort aligns with the congressionally mandated ‘2-4-6’ cruiser modernization plan.

The ‘2-4-6’ plan requires the Navy to keep two ships inactive at a time for no more than four years, and put only up to six ships in the idle status at one time.

The service branch also aims to decommission USS Cape St. George in 2038 after 40 years of active service, including approximately four years in “phased modernization,” the report noted.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers has introduced legislation that would reauthorize and reform a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that permits the National Security Agency to monitor communications of non-U.S. citizens outside the country as part of counterterrorism efforts.

A press release posted Friday on Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s (R-Virginia) website stated that the USA Liberty Act would establish a new framework of protections and transparency standards to help ensure that government agencies preserve individual liberties while using FISA’s Section 702 for surveillance.

The proposed bill would create new accountability measures to address the disclosure of U.S. citizens’ identities and enforce reporting requirements on the number of Americans that have been monitored under Section 702 surveillance programs.

The legislation would also increase penalties for persons who leak classified information as well as foster information sharing between intelligence agencies and allies to fight terrorism.

Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson has said there are several things the service needs to address in space operations and one of those is the establishment of a common system for command and control in an effort to build up situational awareness in space, Federal News Radio reported Thursday.

“In the future as we update satellites that are going to be an open architecture system and we are no longer going to buy satellites with exquisite, kind of science experiment control systems,” Wilson said Thursday at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event.

“You have to have a common system for command and control, so if it doesn’t plug into the common system we’re not going to buy it,” she added.

Wilson noted that the U.S. government should prioritize the establishment of a policy in order to deter future attacks in the space domain and collaborate with international partners to develop rules on the use of space.

“How do we establish norms of behavior in what will be a much more congested domain?,” she said.

“This will take some time, but it’s not an unknown thing; it’s not completely new.”

Secretary Wilson will be addressing the Potomac Officer’s Club as a keynote speaker at the 2017 Space: Innovations, Programs, and Policies Summit to be held Oct. 18, 2017 at the Ritz-Carlton Tysons Corner in McLean, VA.

“Our strategic competitors are actively threatening our space capabilities and we must be ready.”

-@AFSpace, April 4, 2017

Space superiority, with little to no certainty, is a war-fighting domain–not because we want it to be but because our enemies are seeking to conquer, not come together.

Before the 1967 Outer Space Treaty banned the placement of weapons of mass destruction in low-Earth orbit (LEO), the U.S. was testing nuclear weapons in space, with the Soviet Union working on the kinks in their self-detonating spacecraft targeted at American spy satellites. Although no treaty on the use of space weaponry by spacefaring nations currently exists, Russia and China have proposed a treaty to ban space weapons–rejected only by the U.S.

The kind of confidence that the U.S. Air Force Space Command wants to cast out into the atmosphere–best emulated by a man like vice commander and Maj. Gen. David D. Thompson–is the kind of space that we as a nation should want to occupy.

Like others in the U.S. military space sector, it is Thompson’s job to ensure that the country is prepared for attack, or anything detrimental to matters of national security. It is his belief, however, that the military can no longer afford to have programs that are “years behind schedule and billions over budget.”

“To be frank, the government approach, and our approach to space operations and our relationships with the industrial sector–while they’re strong–have to be relooked at, renewed, refigured and refreshed,” commented Thompson at a meeting of the Aerospace Industries Association and U.S. Chamber of Commerce in June.

The air (or lack thereof) needs to be cleared, as the shifting and changing threat environment in space is forcing the Air Force and Department of Defense to make some serious changes in their priorities. Thompson agrees, for the most part, that there needs to be a shift.

“For years we have been focused on keeping the trains running on time. Our job now is to understand the threat environment and be able to react to it,” Thompson said in his talk at SATELLITE 2017. “We need to focus on what we are truly commissioned and designed to do–fight [adversaries] in a contested environment.” 

To increase operational resiliency where the satellites float free, it is the General’s recommendation that the military increase their use of COMSATCOM services, that solutions to current problems might be found in that shared consortium between commercial and industry partners. Many value his opinion–is this evidence of a time to change?

“A diversity of options that are space based will also make for more resilient architecture…increasing the distribution of [systems] in the SATCOM world and the diversity across capabilities–both military and commercial–will surely help us increase the resiliency of those systems.”

Thompson is literally and figuratively breaking barriers in the aerospace and aeronautical defense industry, remarking to members of the media after the successful launch of the WGS-9 spacecraft from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in March:
“Right here in 1950, the United States started breaking the barrier of space…ever since then, the Air Force, our nation and [later] our partners at NASA have been breaking barriers and advancing the frontier of space. That is the spirit of innovation that is the United States Air Force Space Command.”

Maj. Gen. David D. Thompson assists in organizing, training, equipping and maintaining mission-ready space and cyberspace forces and providing missile warning, positioning, navigation and timing, communications and cyber capabilities for North American Aerospace Defense Command, U.S. Strategic Command and other functional commands. He is also an Olmsted Scholar, graduate of the Senior Acquisition Course and Level III-certified Program Manager and was commissioned in 1985 as a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Maj. Gen. Thompson will be addressing the Potomac Officer’s Club as a keynote speaker at the 2017 Space: Innovations, Programs, and Policies Summit to be held Oct. 18, 2017 at the Ritz-Carlton Tysons Corner in McLean, VA.

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President Donald Trump has signed a memorandum that seeks to advance analysis, integration, sharing and use of classified data on threat actors and their networks in support of national security missions.

The White House memo published Thursday would direct the U.S. attorney general, Department of Homeland Security secretary and director of national intelligence to lead the creation and enforcement of technical architectures and policy frameworks to facilitate use and sharing of identity attributes and associated derogatory data related to evaluated information on threat actors.

The document also calls for the Defense Department secretary to work with the attorney general, DHS chief and DNI to identify the agency that will serve as executive agent for each category of threat actor information.

The Commerce Department secretary shall oversee an interagency effort to set up frameworks for data exchange and application profiles for identity attributes.

The policy would require DNI to collaborate with the Intelligence Community to implement platforms for the publication of identity attributes in machine readable formats as well as direct the director of the office of science and technology policy to work with other agencies to align federally funded research and development programs that aim to streamline the use, integration and management of threat actor information.

The attorney general, DNI and heads of DHS and DoD should submit to the president within 270 days a plan on how to implement the memo’s requirements.