I worked on military communications satellites (DSCS-III, Milstar, and UFO) for several years. Comm sats are kind of like transport planes or trucks - they aren't glamorous or sexy but when you need them, you need them bad. However, it can be hard in the Air Force or Navy to compete for money with the "trigger pullers" for infrastructure (like comm sats) when they're wanting to buy more fighters. Remember, as long as it's the "Air" Force, it'll be commanded by pilots and everyone else will take a back seat.

Some of the things that are driving up bandwidth demands include streaming video from Predators and other UAVs (everyone wants to see the video) and increased comm load to support the operational tempo.

A single high resolution image can be several megabytes, but much of the military comm sat capability is still running at 64K or less. To ease that somewhat, the military added Global Broadcast System (GBS) packages on some of the UFO satellites. GBS uses the same basic technology as DirectTV to provide high bandwidth downlinks to the field using small antennas. There are some operational limits to GBS, though, so that isn't the magic bullet. There are some programs underway to greatly increase bandwidth, but they're still at least a year from being ready to launch.

I was in Norfolk, VA last month working this issue with some Navy FORCENET people. The current situation would take a long time to describe, but there are some possible fixes to greatly expand bandwidth to the fleet that may begin later this year. It's a huge issue, and the Navy's particular needs are very difficult. After all, it isn't like they can go around trailing a fiber optic cable behind their ships.