Top Down Architecture for Commercial SATCOM Survivability

The Government's increasing reliance on domestic commercial communications satellite systems to support National Security and Emergency Preparedness requirements mandates that steps be taken to enhance their survivability. The key thrust of such activities should be to exploit the proliferation inherent in the system's ground and space segments to overcome fundamental system weaknesses. Early efforts should concentrate on those enhancements which can be accomplished quickly and with minimal investment In hardware. Longer term actions should be supported by near-term studies to select among available enhancement alternatives.