CAPITOL HILL: The experiments underway by the Air Force, the National Reconnaissance Office and the rest of the space-centric Intelligence Community under the auspices of the Joint Interagency Combined Space Operations Center (JICSPOC) are clearly demonstrating how much space warriors need to change the way they do business.

That was the unspoken but logical conclusion of a series of remarks this morning by John McNellis, deputy assistant Defense Secretary for space, strategic and intelligence systems. For example, when I asked McNellis if the Air Force and IC were having to develop new data standards so they could better share information between their various systems — which have rarely, if ever, directly shared information — he spoke around it.

John McNellis

We have a huge amount of data coming from a “large number of sources.” And he said much of it can be integrated, “but in some cases it’s a bit manual.” I have heard from usually reliable sources that some of the Intelligence Community data is literally hand-carried in some cases and transferred from one system to another, but the sensitivity of the subject is such that I don’t think we’ll hear much about this until the problem is solved and they can trumpet that fact.

McNellis said, “I think the most interesting part of what has to evolve (as the JICSPOC experiments progress) is Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs) for taking the information from all those feeds and then being able to rapidly process decisions about what we’re seeing and what do we do do about it.”

The mention about rapidly processing decisions prompted a question from Eric Thoemmes, one of Lockheed’s top space guys, about how great is the need for computer-assisted help as humans make decisions about what is happening in space. McNellis’ answer, in brief, is we need to speed things up a lot.

He noted that, “when we have something go wrong on a satellite today the assumption is, we have an anomaly. And everybody is going to gather together and we are going to study this for a while, and then we’ll make a decision about what to do. While there’s urgency, we’re going to work it to death. That doesn’t work so well when things happen a lot faster.”

The answer? “More rapid data fusion,’ he told us during the Mitchell Space Breakfast. As Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work has stressed about most technological advances, “there will still be humans in the loop,” McNellis said. But space warfare is fraught with so many uncertainties and the consequences to our national security can be so grave that machines must help us reach those decisions quickly and efficiently. “It’s an interesting and challenging environment from a situational awareness perspective. How do you really know what the other person has done. How do you really know what the appropriate response is,” McNellis noted. Computers, crunching enormous amounts of data at great speed, and armed with decision-making software, could help those friable humans.