By Dave Sterling, CEO of Royce Geospatial Consultant
This week, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) again escalated aggression in the South China Sea with kinetic actions including blocking, harassing, and using water cannons against vessels from the Philippines, resulting in four wounded sailors. The latest incident is the culmination of months of increasingly aggressive behavior by the Chinese in the South China Sea, which included the use of lasers and the ramming of Philippine vessels.
At home, we continue to see Chinese cyber intrusions hitting ports, utilities, communications, and other infrastructure. Additionally, China has surpassed the US with the number of international Space Stations as well as with the number of surveillance satellites it has in orbit.
As China continues to ramp up its aggressive activities, the U.S. must unleash the commercial satellite data layer and advanced technologies needed to monitor China’s behavior and maintain our intelligence advantage in the region.
What if we could automate and scale advanced analytics to take streams of disparate geospatial, signal, human, open source, and cyber intelligence data, and turn them into actionable insights within minutes for the U.S. military and intelligence agencies?
Video Analysis: US Defense of Taiwan
More specifically to the China threat, what if advanced commercial space-based systems and computer algorithms could monitor and report on the PRC’s global activities in Latin America, Africa, and the South China Sea in real-time?
The answer to both is, unequivocally, we can. Existing technologies model the commercial space layer of hundreds of space-based collection assets and provide the warfighter the ability to task those specific assets. Additionally, analysts and warfighters can autonomously monitor thousands of locations through data-driven tipping, queuing, tasking, and automated exploitation via artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The result is significantly greater situational awareness within minutes of collection.
Last year, using commercially developed technologies, our team worked with the U.S. Army to successfully demonstrate the ability to automate remote sensing, object detection, and commercial imagery tasking in support of the Vanguard 2023 demonstration and experiment organized by the U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence at Fort Huachuca.
In the IC as well, use cases abound. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Economic Indicator Monitoring Program is a resounding success as a result of using commercial data and technology solutions to monitor global activity and deliver insights into economic impact, trade trends, natural impacts, and international commerce trends.
The program is delivering more actionable intelligence, more quickly, and decreasing demand on analyst resources. Additionally, the program has set the standard for speed and flexibility and serves as a model for how government and industry should collaborate to harness the power of commercial satellite data and analytics to solve national security objectives.
China’s aggression in the Pacific, specifically, isn’t going away and stands to increase significantly as saber-rattling over the fate of Taiwan continues at a fever pitch. Unlike the Global War on Terror, the United States cannot rely upon the uncontested air superiority that heavily informed our critical intelligence-gathering operations and helped define that conflict.
We must adjust if we are going to maintain an intelligence advantage in the region, we must use all the capabilities at our disposal. The proliferation of commercial satellite assets, the data they provide, and advanced analytical capabilities powered by the latest in AI are a natural pivot point to gather intelligence and inform the political, economic, and military decisions that could be the difference in avoiding the next global conflict, or winning one should it occur.
The commercial satellite data layer and enabling technologies are essential to maintaining our intelligence capabilities in the Pacific and curbing China’s aggression. The time is now to do what is necessary to unleash their full potential.
Dave Sterling is the Founder and CEO of Royce Geospatial Consultants, Inc., the Arlington, Virginia-based startup revolutionizing and democratizing advanced analytics for the Department of Defense and the broader Intelligence Community.
