Resilient Partnerships for U.S. Military Satellite Communication Missions Designing a Method to Assess the Impact of Partnerships on Resilience

The U.S. Space Force (USSF) is seeking to enhance the resilience and robustness of its space operations. Resilience assessments rely on a wide variety of inputs, from quantitative hard numbers, such as the number of satellites or the jam resistance of waveforms, to qualitative assessments regarding the impact of more-subjective factors, such as the incorporation of coalition and commercial partners into USSF missions and the subsequent impacts on organization, tactics, and training. Given the subjective nature of many of these inputs, there is an ongoing need to assess the continued relevance of these inputs over time. Therefore, the USSF tasked RAND Project AIR FORCE (PAF) with developing a methodology by which resilience criteria could be defined, assessed, applied to decisions, and evaluated over time, with a particular focus on the qualitative assessments of subject matter experts. To demonstrate the methodology, PAF focused on a specific mission and approach to building resilience: integrating coalition and commercial partners into the military satellite communications (MILSATCOM) mission. This report should be of interest to those seeking to understand how partnerships can be leveraged to improve the resilience of the MILSATCOM mission and those interested in methods to evaluate the validity and continued relevance of qualitative assessments about those partnerships.