ARLINGTON, Va. — The U.S. military wants to turn its satellite communications into something that works like the internet — fluid, fast, and built on seamless interoperability between networks. But at an industry conference this week, Pentagon officials said the long envisioned military space internet is still a long way off.
In an era where commercial satellites outnumber military ones, the Defense Department is trying to tap into this diverse ecosystem, defense officials said June 17 at the SAE Media Group’s MilSatcom USA conference.
The goal is creating what DoD calls “enterprise satcom” — a virtualized, software-defined network that could automatically reroute communications between military, commercial and allied nations’ satellites if an adversary jams one satellite system.
But the reality today is an ecosystem full of manual processes, hardware silos and incompatible standards.
When you travel internationally, your iPhone doesn’t need different hardware to connect to local cell networks. That’s thanks to the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a global collaboration that created unified technical standards for mobile networks decades ago.
Satellite communications have no such standard. “The question always comes up: If DoD wants this ecosystem where users could roam across service provider networks, would we make that work?” said Mike Dean, director of command, control and communications infrastructure at the Defense Department. The answer is that a technical standard is needed comparable to the 3GPP.
Dean hopes the satellite industry will have its own “3GPP moment,” but so far, that moment hasn’t arrived. The commercial satellite industry remains fragmented, with each company developing proprietary technologies that don’t play well with others. As Rajeev Gopal, vice president of Hughes Network Systems, put it: “Can I take a OneWeb modem and replace it with an Amazon Kuiper modem? I do not think that can be done today.”
Bespoke ‘pizza boxes’ solutions
Each branch of the armed services uses different satellite terminals, requiring expensive hardware upgrades to work with different commercial services. The result is what Paul Van Slett, head of the satellite communications division at the Pentagon’s Chief Information Office, calls “bespoke pizza boxes” — the custom hardware units that military facilities use to integrate different satellite providers’ modems.
These pizza boxes, he said, are expensive and cumbersome to upgrade with new software. In fast-moving military situations where communication can mean the difference between life and death, this hardware-heavy approach is a liability.
“Software upgrades are a lot faster than doing all the wiring and cabling and interoperability testing of new hardware,” Van Slett noted. Under the Pentagon’s vision for the future, he added, “if a new wave form is developed, I don’t have to buy a brand new modem and field another rack of bespoke pizza boxes to get to that capability.”
The military has embraced commercial systems like SpaceX’s Starlink, which has gained market share precisely because it avoids the interoperability problem entirely. Starlink’s terminals are designed to work exclusively with SpaceX’s constellation.
This creates a paradox for Pentagon planners. Starlink works well, but officials insist they don’t want to become overly dependent on any single vendor.
The Defense Department has committed to a next-generation communications strategy, pushing for hybrid space networks that tap into its own classified satellites, those from commercial players and from U.S. allies. These satellites would span multiple orbits — low Earth orbit (LEO), medium Earth orbit (MEO) and geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) — to ensure redundancy and resilience.
But this hybrid network requires solving technical and business challenges that the Pentagon has struggled with for years.
Building the space internet
DoD’s plan for achieving satellite interoperability centers on something called the Enterprise Satellite Communications Management and Control (ESC-MC) system, a mission control center that would provide a “common operational picture” of all available satellite networks, automatically routing communications through the best available path.
But ESC-MC is only as good as the infrastructure supporting it. The military needs to modernize its ground stations (called teleports), many of which were built for older geostationary satellites. It also needs new “hybrid terminals” that can switch between different satellite networks using software rather than hardware swaps.
The good news is that all three military branches are now developing these hybrid terminals — something Dean called “unprecedented.” The Air Force could field its first hybrid terminal by 2026, though the other services are taking what Van Slett described as a “crawling, walking, running” approach.
Seamless satellite services
For now, the Pentagon’s vision of seamless satellite internet remains aspirational. The technical challenges are solvable as the commercial industry already does multi-network routing and virtualization, Van Slett noted. But applying these techniques to military networks, with their unique security and reliability requirements, requires coordination across dozens of companies and government agencies.
“We think about the space segment, we think about the terminals, but we always forget the ground,” Dean said, highlighting how complex the challenge really is. Building a true satellite internet requires not just satellites and terminals, but a complete reimagining of the ground infrastructure that connects space-based networks to terrestrial ones.
Van Slett put it more bluntly: The user terminal — the gear that connects soldiers to satellites — is still the “tail that wags the dog.”
Ideally, modems and converters that enable compatibility between vendors would be replaced with standardized, software-upgradable servers, he said. “If a new waveform is developed, I don’t have to buy a brand new modem and field another rack of bespoke pizza boxes to get to that capability.”
Gopal argues the satcom industry has made notable strides toward interoperability even if it hasn’t adopted standards comparable to cellular communications — a much larger industry that has been working on standards for decades.
Despite the challenges, officials insist the military is committed to building a hybrid satcom future. “The way we need to get to resiliency across a number of areas is through greater diversification,” Van Slett said.
