The Chief of Space Operations, General Chance Saltzman, has laid out his vision for ensuring U.S. space superiority as threats dramatically increase
According to the Department of Defense, The U.S. now contends with an incredibly sophisticated array of threats such as space-based GPS jammers, anti-satellite weapons and cyberattacks against U.S. ground stations and space assets,
Saltzman revealed that both Russia and China are increasingly using space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities to enhance targeting capabilities for their precision-guided munitions.
“Collectively, this rise in congestion and competition within the domain has led to a growing risk to our continued access to, and operation within, space,” Saltzman said. “We must protect our space capabilities, while also being able to deny an adversary the hostile use of its space capabilities…Only by pursuing space superiority in a disciplined way, can the Space Force ensure that the U.S. and our allies and partners have the peace we desire, and more specifically, that we can all access and exploit the space domain.”
The General emphasized that “…if we do not have space, we lose.”
The Pentagon is heavily dependent on space-based satellites for much of the work it does to defend the United States. That reliance is expected to grow in coming years.
While space assets such as satellites will always be at risk from U.S. adversaries, the best way to ensure continued access to space capabilities is proliferation, Derek Tournear, director of the Space Development Agency (SDA), said.
“Proliferation is our biggest defense,” Tournear said while speaking at a panel discussion sponsored by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, a nonpartisan policy research institute based in Arlington, Va. “That’s how we plan on really getting the resilience and the defense of our entire architecture.”
The SDA is responsible for orchestrating development and implementation of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA). The PWSA will include a mesh network of hundreds of satellites to provide space-based capabilities to the joint warfighter.
The strength of that network of satellites, he said, is expected to come not from defensive capabilities that focus on individual satellites, but rather from the sheer number of satellites launched. Protecting individual satellites becomes less important, he said, when there are so many of them.
“That’s the way you have to look at it when you’re talking about proliferated constellations,” he said. “Each individual one you can’t really care about. You have to care about the health of the whole herd, the health of the whole architecture. And so, we have everything in place to make sure that we can maintain that resiliency and maintain … operations even if you start to lose [individual satellites].”
Tournear also said that cybersecurity plays an important role in protecting the PWSA, however.
“Obviously we have cyber protections in place to protect the entire architecture and the network, and we have a lot of the environmental sensing pieces that are in place to give us an idea of what’s going on,” he said. “We put GPS situational awareness sensors on our satellites for those kinds of things, to make sure that we can kind of sense the environment.”
The PWSA system will eventually include hundreds of satellites, delivered in tranches every two years, with each tranche providing more capability than the last.
The network of hundreds of optically connected satellites will deliver two primary capabilities to warfighters on the ground. The first is beyond line-of-sight targeting for ground and maritime time-sensitive targets, which includes mobile missiles and ships, for instance. The system will provide the ability to detect those targets, track them, calculate a fire control solution and deliver that solution down to a weapons platform so the target can be destroyed. The second capability is similar to the first, but for enemy missiles already in flight.
The PWSA involves seven layers, including a mesh network of hundreds of optically interconnected satellites in orbit that make up its transport layer. There will also be tracking, custody, deterrence, navigation, battle management and support layers.
Even as almost every military leader and defense analysts emphasize the dramatically increased importance of space, the Biden budget cut the Space Force budget by 2%.The FY 2025 Space Force budget request for $29.4 billion is down from the FY 2024 request for $30 billion.
Photo: U.S. Space Command