Anyone who’s played the board game “Battleship” is familiar with the notion of operational resilience. Gameplay is simple: Each player has a fleet of five plastic ships that they place secretly on a grid representing the ocean. Players then take turns guessing the coordinates of their opponent’s ships. Correct guesses are “hits” marked with red pegs placed in holes on each vessel. When all its holes are filled with red pegs, a ship is sunk.
It’s not enough to sink a single ship. To win the game, you’ve got to decimate your adversary’s entire fleet. Therein lies the essence of operational resilience. Conventional wisdom is that a player with five ships left can withstand more hits than a player with two. The larger your fleet, the longer you can stay in the game. But that strategy doesn’t always win the game. The player with the smaller, less visible ships – like the smaller Patrol Boat or Submarine pieces – can hide and emerge to wreak havoc on the larger, more numerous Carriers and Battleships.
Because nations are likely to wage future wars with space assets, operational resilience is as relevant in space as it is at sea – or land, or air. The advent of proliferated low Earth orbit (pLEO) constellations is therefore an exciting proposition. With hundreds or even thousands of smallsats at its beck and call, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) can easily and affordably build a strategic advantage over its adversaries in space.
Or so suggests a new generation of space startups. Established companies like Boeing have a broader view. When it comes to building a resilient space order of battle, the numbers advantage that’s so vital in “Battleship” is only one piece of a large and complicated resiliency puzzle, according to Kay Sears, vice president and general manager of Boeing Space, Intelligence and Weapons Systems. Proliferated constellations make big targets like those large “Battleship” fleets, and…
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