Satellite shortages may choke off military drone expansion.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.

* It is a perennial problem in military operations that there is never enough satellite capacity to satisfy commanders' gargantuan appetite for voice and data communications.

The bandwidth crunch is expected to worsen in coming years as the Pentagon increases deployments of remotely piloted aircraft for around-the-clock surveillance in many parts of the world. Anticipated requirements for satellite communications will far outstrip capacity, officials have predicted.

The Pentagon has its own fleet of satellites, which supply about 60 percent of the military demand. It augments capacity by leasing commercial bandwidth, but that supply will become tighter in the future as vendors pursue more lucrative business in the private sector.

Analysts had predicted several years ago that military satcom needs would diminish after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ended. But those projections were wrong, said William N. Ostrove, aerospace systems analyst at Forecast International Inc. Bandwidth demand will soar as the military deploys more drones in 24/7 surveillance operations, he said. Satellites offer an ideal form of communications links for unmanned aircraft because they provide global coverage. "It has been clear for a long time that the Defense Department is going to have to be creative to fill its bandwidth needs."

The Navy, more so than the other branches, is likely to feel the satcom pinch as it carries out ambitious plans to create mobile networks at sea, and deploys large numbers of unmanned aircraft on ships and on land bases, as well as underwater robots for deep-sea surveillance.

Many people talk about the need to collect, process and distribute information, "But they do not talk about the bandwidth," said Vice Adm. Kendall L. Card, deputy chief of naval operations for information dominance and director of naval intelligence.

Across the military and intelligence agencies, more surveillance drones are being deployed, and contractors are offering faster data-processing boxes to help manage the flow of streaming video. But the technology has limited use once it hits the bandwidth bottleneck, Card said at a conference of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.

"I hear from companies that they can provide something at 2 gigabits per second. ... I tell them, 'That's wonderful, but can you reduce it to 24 kilobits because that is all I can push through the systems," Card said. "Full motion video takes a tremendous amount of...