USSF Wants to Get Battle Management Tools from Lab to Operations Faster

The Space Force team responsible for developing advanced battle management capabilities wants to create a better pipeline for mature space domain awareness tools to move from the lab into the hands of operators. 

Lt. Col. Collin Greiser, system program manager for advanced space battle management, said the service has already taken a key step toward strengthening that connection by moving a key experimentation lab under his portfolio—the Space Domain Awareness Tools, Applications, and Processing Laboratory, or SDA TAP Lab. The hub was established in 2023 to help hone new C2 tools from industry and academia and quickly deliver them to users. 

Speaking Feb. 19 during a SpaceNews webinar, Greiser said that over the next 18 months, his team is working to funnel more of those SDA TAP Lab tools, as well as other capabilities from industry, into a key space battle management system called Kronos. 

“We have to get things to a program of record or, at the and of the day, it just doesn’t matter to me or the warfighters,” Greiser said. “Moving the lab underneath Kronos has really started that transition. . . . In the short-term, my goal is really to boost the amount of capability that we’re taking from the lab and putting in my program.”

Through Kronos, the Space Force has been consolidating legacy systems that provide operators—battle managers in particular—with intelligence tools and command-and-control capabilities to help decipher threats and make rapid decisions about how to respond. The system is used by the National Space Defense Center, Space Force component commands, and the multinational Combined Space Operations Center.

In November, Space Systems Command released a commercial solutions opening for Kronos, a mechanism to draw in more innovative tools from industry on a faster and more regular cadence. Specifically, its looking for solutions across three areas: command and control, battle management, and space intelligence. These include advanced cloud-native services and infrastructure, AI decision support tools, and a “space attack planning toolkit” meant to improve coordination between tactical and operational units and speed up decision-making.

Maj. Sean Allen, who leads the SDA TAP Lab, said tools that increase automation and shorten decision-making timelines are particularly important for space battle managers who must make sense of indications and warnings and determine what’s a threat and what isn’t. 

“Prior to a military action, all of the intelligence prep of the battle space, all of the hostile intent assessments, all the planning that goes into how to I respond, all those nonlethal actions—there’s a great deal of opportunity to integrate services together into automated workflows to aid the human in interpreting that data,” Allen said during the same event. 

The program received a flood of responses to its November notices and is holding an industry day next month to give companies more insight into its vision. 

While creating stronger integration and collaboration is a near-term goal, in the longer term, Greiser and his team are considering building an unclassified environment where tools matured through the SDA TAP Lab can be funneled even more directly into Kronos. 

“We’re looking at, do we build an environment—unclassified—that has a natural pipeline to Kronos, it’s already connected, so that once applications are done, they just click a button and move them right over if they’re ready,” Greiser said. “Then, by nature of being under a program, you now have access to contracting resources and funding and kind of more government support that can really help some of these companies.”

Greiser noted that the commercial solutions opening will help build a pool of capabilities that can be accessed as needs arise and new threats emerge. Allen noted that the TAP Lab, similarly, has a catalog of tools on standby. 

“We’re basically lining up the lab and the Kronos program to be able to have that catalog so that when an operator comes to me, because I talk to them all the time, and says, ‘I need an answer to this challenge,’ I can be like, ‘I’ve got one right here. Let’s work on getting that on contract,’” Greiser said.