Up to now, the bulk of military needs for imaging to track moving targets on the ground has come from radar sensors on aircraft. (Image: IMSAR)
By Michael Marrow,
Published by Breaking Defense, 4 August 2025
Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt, the Space Force’s deputy chief of space operations for operations, cyber and nuclear, also said the service expects to complete an analysis of alternatives by this fall for a separate but related effort to track airborne targets from the heavens.
WASHINGTON — The Space Force has already launched enabling satellites for a joint project between the service and National Reconnaissance Office to track targets on the ground or at sea from the heavens, paving the way for dedicated ground moving target indication (GMTI) satellites to start launching as soon as 2028.
Additionally, Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt, the Space Force’s deputy chief of space operations for operations, cyber and nuclear, said the service expects to complete an analysis of alternatives by this fall for a separate but related effort for the space-based tracking of airborne targets.
Speaking during a virtual discussion hosted by the Mitchell Institute Monday, Burt said that “initial satellites” that can enable GMTI — Pentagon parlance for the job of tracking ground-based objects — “have been launching,” pointing to electro-optical sensors and “a low-end radar capability.” The Space Force has additionally sent up “quite a few” mesh network communications satellites that will facilitate data transfer, she said.
Burt said military and intelligence officials have been working together to prepare how to effectively employ space-based GMTI in concert with what’s expected first to be a “full regional squadron” in Indo-Pacific Command and a global Space Force squadron assigned to US Space Command. Lessons learned, in turn, can support fielding those GMTI capabilities “to all the other combatant commanders.”
“So this is a crawl, walk, run as the constellation is launched to build the humans and the training and the data and machine-to-machine C2 [command and control] that has to happen to make this successful,” she said.
In her talk, Burt said the first “actual” GMTI satellites are expected to launch “in the next year.” But on Tuesday, following the original publication of this report, a Space Force spokesperson walked those comments back, saying in a statement that the first dedicated GMTI birds are not expected to lift off until 2028. The satellites Burt said would launch in the next year “can enable the GMTI mission but were built primarily for other missions,” the spokesperson said.
The Pentagon has been collaborating with the NRO for years to field space-based GMTI, which can offer greater resilience against adversary threats compared to airborne platforms. The new GMTI sats are also needed to fill gaps left by the Air Force’s divestment of the E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS), which previously tracked terrestrial targets.
The Space Force has additionally worked in parallel to develop a satellite constellation that can similarly track targets in the air, a mission known as AMTI. However, AMTI can be more difficult to perform from space due to basic physics, such as that airborne targets move much faster than tanks or ships.
The Pentagon already has AMTI prototype satellites on orbit, US Northern Command chief Gen. Gregory Guillot revealed during congressional testimony in May. Although Burt said officials are primarily focused “from an operator perspective” on fielding the GMTI satellites, she stressed lessons learned from fielding a GMTI constellation can translate to AMTI for topics like tracking, data sharing and command and control.
Fielding a working AMTI constellation gained importance this year after the Trump administration revealed it intended to cancel the E-7 Wedgetail, the radar plane successor of the E-3 Sentry. Officials have previously said they expect an AMTI constellation to be online in the early 2030s, but that a multilayered architecture, presumably consisting of aircraft and ground-based radars that can get closer to a target, would be needed to accomplish the mission.
The One Big Beautiful Bill accelerated AMTI work as well by adding $2 billion for AMTI satellites, according to a spending plan recently submitted to the Pentagon by lawmakers. Worried about potential gaps in tracking airborne targets, congressional committees have pushed back against the E-7’s truncation and could ultimately come to the plane’s rescue once a budget for fiscal 2026 is finalized.
See: Original Article
