“This is not going to be helpful over on the Hill,” one former congressional staffer said of SDA’s $11 billion, five-year draft budget. “In fact, it could put the final nails in SDA’s coffin.”

The vision itself isn’t the only thing that is needed, industry sources say. A concept of operations is required for how the Air Force will manage different user needs and interact with different industry providers. “The vision is out, but there is no concept of operations,” said one source.

“We are the ones that say this is what needs to be done” to build a next-gen space architecture, says SDA Acting Director Derek Tournear. Except when they don’t.

When new entities fail, it’s most often due to the fact they don’t do what they do better than their competition (differentiated value proposition is the business term) and they lack investment in talent and technology. But there are other challenges.

The Pentagon says it can’t keep up with private tech firms using 5G. Mike Griffin says the best it can do is try and be “good customers.”

Such smallsat payloads, hosted on commercial satellites, are an important piece of the Army’s evolving concept of Multi-Domain Operations, which seeks to combine efforts on land, the sea, air, space, and cyberspace to defeat sophisticated adversaries such as Russia and China.

Wallis Laughrey, Raytheon Vice President for Space and Airborne Systems, says it is possible that the Air Force will keep both Raytheon and Northrop Grumman as Next-Gen OPIR GEO payload providers “if funding is available.”

“Everybody is watching SMC right now,” says Chris Beres of LinQuest, which has secured a new contract to help the Air Force with its SMC 2.0 revamp.

Presumptive Deputy Defense Secretary Norquist pledged to “revise budget review timelines and data collection standards to maximize senior leader decision-making quality and timing.”

“We anticipate that adversary nations are unlikely to discriminate between U.S. military satellites and commercial satellites providing services to the U.S. Government, in the event of a conflict,” Defense Secretary nominee Mark Esper told the Senate during his confirmation hearing.