NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Air Force Global Strike Command will help modernize the Pentagon’s nuclear command-and-control architecture by creating a new force development concept, according to a senior official.
The Pentagon is concerned that peer adversaries such as China and Russia could put today’s systems at risk with anti-satellite weapons, electronic warfare tools, and other capabilities.
“If we are being honest about [great power] competition, we need to take NC2 in a very different direction,” Gen. Timothy Ray, the head of the command, said Sept. 16 at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space, Cyber conference at National Harbor, Maryland. “We are going to write a force development concept that gets us through that.”
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein said in June that the service is eyeing bringing commercial satellites into low-Earth orbit for more agile and resilient communications networks. It wants to reap cost savings by leveraging the commercial space industry.
“Whether it”s Silicon Valley or commercial space, there are unlimited opportunities ahead right now for us in terms of how we think differently on things like nuclear command-and-control,” he said at a Mitchell institute for Aerospace Studies event.