Space Force to launch ‘actual’ GMTI sats ‘in the next year’: General

WASHINGTON — A joint project between the Space Force and National Reconnaissance Office expects to launch satellites that can track targets on the ground or at sea as soon as next year, according to a top Space Force official.

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 to track airborne targets from the heavens.

Speaking during a virtual discussion hosted by the Mitchell Institute today, Burt said that “initial satellites” that can enable ground moving target indication (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, explaining that “in the next year, when the actual GMTI satellites launch,” that the constellation can be met with 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.” Burt did not elaborate on the specific traits of the “actual” GMTI birds. 

“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. 

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.

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The Space Force has also 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, which will likely help inform an analysis of alternatives that Burt today said is “supposed to deliver this fall.” Although Burt noted 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.