Measuring the operational impact of military SATCOM degradation

Military forces are becoming increasingly reliant on the use of satellite communications (SATCOM) to provide critical command-and-control services. These forces face a variety of threats that may degrade or deny use of these communications systems, including jammers, cyberspace attack, and kinetic attack. The vast majority of research to examine the effects of SATCOM degradation focuses on physical phenomena, signal modulation, and communications networks behavior, but not on higher-level operational impact. We describe a new simulation methodology for examining and measuring the operational impact of degraded SATCOM capabilities on military forces. This methodology comprises high-fidelity simulation, network optimization, and queuing techniques, and enables us to examine the ability to execute fire support missions and fulfill logistics requests in U.S. Marine Air-Ground Task Forces. To our knowledge, we are the first to build a method for explicitly simulating and quantifying the operational impact of SATCOM degradation upon tactical U.S. Marine Corps forces.