NEWS TRANSCRIPT from the United States Department of Defense
DoD News Briefing
Under Secretary of the Air Force Peter Teets
Thursday, Feb. 7, 2002 - 1:02 p.m. EST
(Also participating were Dennis Fitzgerald, deputy director,
National Reconnaissance Office; Maj. Gen. Joe Sovey, director of
Air Force Space Acquisition; Lt. Gen. Brian Arnold, program
executive officer for Air Force Space and commander of Space and
Missiles Systems Center; Maj. Gen. (Select) Michael A. Hamel,
director of National Security Space Integration; Vice Adm.
Richard W. Mayo, director, Space, Information Warfare, Command
and Control, OPNAV (N6); Lt. Gen. Joseph M. Cosumano, Jr.,
commanding general, U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command;
U.S. Army Space Command; and National Security Space Architect,
Brig. Gen. Stephen J. Ferrell)
TEETS : The mission that I've been tasked with is to bring together the
military and national elements of space to assure that we're
providing the nation with the best national security
capabilities while still being good stewards of the American tax
dollar.
Our vision for national security space is one which takes
advantage of the best we have to offer from both the military
and the national space communities, and I intend to create an
integrated national security space capability that's better than
anything that we have today.
Here is a chart that kind of summarizes our
key goals to provide this nation with, first of all, . And I'll just say, in universal
situational awareness, that word "universal" has a temporal
component as well as a spatial component.
I think what
we've found is that in moving ahead with this war on terrorism,
it's going to be important for us to have persistent
intelligence -- universal in terms of time, but also universal
in terms of space, and on the surface, under the surface, et
cetera. And so, it's going to be important for us to develop
some breakthrough technologies and implement techniques that use
the best of both military and national systems to implement the
mission, all, of course, in an effort to support the joint war
fighting concept that has been so effective in Afghanistan.
It's important that this vitally important space asset be
assured -- that is to say, that we have
-- and that we also are able to protect those assets. I think
it vitally important that we have a cadre of space professionals
that are dedicated to this mission, and I'm on a course to make
certain that we have the best and the brightest involved in this
national security space endeavor. We also need to integrate the
cultures of our military and intelligence community space
professionals. And clearly, our focus will be on mission
success.
Now, to make this vision a reality, my first objective is to
implement the recommendations of the National Security Space
Commission. And to do so, we're going to begin exploiting the
best practices of the military space and the National Reconnaissance Office communities to make the world's best space forces even better. We're also
making a few organizational changes to make this transformation
smoother and transparent for our national and military
customers.
As I begin to focus on the larger national
security space equation I have also decided to create a new deputy for
military space so that we can have some focus on the military
side of the space equation all the time.
Finally, Brigadier General Steve Ferrell. Steve is the new
national security space architect. And he brings not only
impressive space credentials, but a to space.
One of the things that I think we've
learned well from the conflict in Afghanistan is that while the
intelligence collection capabilities have been excellent, we
need to add persistence to the equation. That is to say, you
know, satellites orbit the Earth every -- if they're in
low-Earth orbit, every 97 minutes, or thereabouts. And you'd
like to have more long-dwell. You'd like to be able to have a
focused view of hot spots on the face of the Earth that is not
intermittent, but more continuous. And that's what I mean when
I talk about universal situational awareness. Universal has this
temporal component.
You'd like to know all the time what's
going on around the face of the globe.
