Space has transformed from a supporting domain into a fully contested operational environment. Modern forces increasingly depend on space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) for early warning, targeting, navigation, and command-and-control. At the same time, adversaries actively exploit the same medium for persistent surveillance of ground forces and critical infrastructure.
This shift is explicitly recognized in the U.S. Defense Space Strategy, which states that adversaries have “made space a warfighting domain” and that the United States must ensure it can “provide space support to national, joint, and combined operations.” NATO articulates a similar view in its Joint ISR doctrine, calling ISR “vital for all military operations,” including those integrating space with land, air, sea, and cyber domains.
In practice, space-based ISR offers adversaries global, persistent, and increasingly affordable visibility of friendly forces. The Russia–Ukraine conflict has underscored this reality: public analyses by CSIS and others have demonstrated how commercial and national satellites have enabled precision targeting, operational planning, and rapid decision-making. At the same time, early-war incidents such as the attack on satellite communications infrastructure (e.g., the KA-SAT incident described in open assessments) have shown how quickly battlefield conditions degrade when space-enabled services are disrupted.
Against this backdrop, a new strategic requirement has emerged: friendly forces must be able to counter space-based surveillance without escalating conflict into orbit.
Directly attacking satellites is escalatory, technically challenging, and diplomatically costly—an issue repeatedly highlighted in public remarks by U.S. and European officials regarding the dangers of debris and space weaponization. Instead, militaries increasingly favor ground-based capabilities that make terrestrial units harder to detect, classify, or target from space—impairing adversary ISR without interfering kinetically in space.
These ground-based counter-surveillance and reconnaissance (CSR) capabilities include:
signature reduction and camouflage
decoys and deception measures to frustrate automated satellite analytics
emission control and concealment
electronic warfare aimed at ISR links rather than satellites
mobility, dispersion, and rapid reconfiguration to defeat revisit cycles
All of these fall squarely within the non-kinetic, terrestrial portfolio—yet have decisive strategic impact by disrupting the earliest steps of space-enabled kill chains: detect → characterize → decide → act.
This broader strategic context helps explain why the U.S. Army’s Program Executive Office Intelligence, Electronic Warfare & Sensors (PEO IEW&S) has, on November 21, 2025 initiated a new multi-phase down-select for:
“ground-based counter-surveillance and reconnaissance (CSR) capabilities against space-based threats.”
The SSN makes clear that the Army is not seeking future potential but immediate, mature capability. Only vendors that can currently deliver terrestrial CSR prototypes, currently employ TS/SCI-cleared engineering, security and program staff, currently operate SCI-accredited facilities (ICS-705-1/2), and can currently communicate via JWICS may advance to the classified solicitation stage.
Such stringent requirements indicate the Army’s intent to identify suppliers who are already operating inside the classified ISR and counter-ISR ecosystem and who can rapidly integrate into efforts addressing space-based threats.
Conclusion: Why This New Sources Sought Notice Matters
The publication of SSN W58SFN-25-R-0001-1 reflects a broader strategic shift: U.S. ground forces must now assume they are under near-continuous observation from orbit—by both state and commercial systems—and must field the means to deny, deceive, or degrade that surveillance from the ground.
Ground-based CSR is therefore not a niche capability. It is becoming a core requirement of modern survivability, force protection, and multi-domain operations.
With this SSN, the Army signals that terrestrial counter-ISR against space-based threats is no longer a conceptual discussion—it is a programmatic priority with immediate acquisition implications.
