When President Donald Trump signed the Space Force into existence, he hailed space as the “world’s newest warfighting domain.” Five years later, the Space Force is fully embracing its role as “warfighters”—arguing for new gear to defeat enemy satellites and control the heavens.
From Chinese satellites that can “dogfight” other satellites to Russia’s development of a nuclear weapon designed for space, the Space Force says its adversaries are becoming more aggressive in space, and it needs additional funds to deter and fight back.
This call will likely be answered by the Pentagon, with longtime space official Troy Meink slated to lead the Department of the Air Force, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk serving as a close adviser to Trump.
But the Space Force’s future is far from certain. The service is poised to lose part of its already small workforce—a third of which is civilian—to the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize the federal government, and new Pentagon priorities are forcing the smallest service to find ways to cut 8 percent from its budget and redirect those funds to other efforts.
Still, the Space Force is in a “good spot” to weather Hegseth’s budget realignment, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman told Defense One in March during its annual State of Defense event series.
“I think in the end, what you’ll see is that because our priorities were so focused on warfighting, so focused on the new emerging threats, that everybody is kind of coming to the realization that we have to address, that we were pretty well aligned with the new administration’s priorities, and so I think the Space Force is going to be in a good spot,” Saltzman said.
The Space Force offered up its “lowest priorities” for the 8 percent budget reorganization, Saltzman said, but didn’t specify which missions or programs were listed, stressing that those moves are predecisional. And, ideally, the service won’t have to make any cuts at all.
Saltzman’s budget optimism could be warranted, since the service will play a crucial role in the development of Trump’s next-gen missile shield effort, called Golden Dome, which will rely on the service’s sensors in space to detect and track hypersonic and ballistic missiles.
Several agencies already have threat-tracking systems in the works, including the Missile Defense Agency’s Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor satellite and the Space Development Agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, but Golden Dome is going to require a lot more sensors, networks, command and control tools, and weapons, Saltzman said.
“That’s a lot of things coming together, so the biggest hurdle is integration. How does it all fit together? Can we make such a large effort to come together seamlessly so that we can do things? Because things are going to be happening at supersonic speeds [and] we’ve got to be able to make the right decisions and put the right data in the right hands of the right shooters,” he said.
Trump’s executive order called for the missile defense shield to include space-based interceptors—harkening back to President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Saltzman acknowledged that building such an interceptor will be challenging, but expressed confidence that industry can overcome them.
“There’s a lot of technical challenges, because it’s not just that we want space-based interceptors—we want them in boost-phase. We want them to achieve their effects as far from the homeland as possible. So they’ve got to be fast, they’ve got to be accurate. There are some technical challenges there, but we’ve got a pretty amazing space industrial base, and I’m pretty sure they’re going to solve most of those technical problems,” he said.
Saltzman also downplayed concerns that fielding space-based interceptors would be a major shift in U.S. policy and potentially destabilizing move—instead arguing that it’s time for the U.S. government to “step up to the responsibility” and protect citizens from emerging threats.
As the Pentagon figures out how it will execute and pay for Golden Dome, the Space Force is also pushing for more money writ large to achieve control of the domain and field offensive and defensive systems, a mission Saltzman has dubbed “space superiority.”
At the AFA Warfare Symposium in early March, Saltzman made a forceful call for offensive space weapons, saying his service “will do whatever it takes” to control the space domain. And during the Space Symposium in April, Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of U.S. Space Command said “it’s time” for the service to clearly say that it needs weapons in space.
Specifically, service leaders have outlined six categories of counter-space weapons that need to be developed—including ground-based and space-based jammers, directed energy, and kinetic capabilities.
“Those six categories all have to be invested in, because each one is optimized for different types of targets, whether it’s low Earth orbit, whether it’s in geosynchronous orbit, whether it goes out further than that. How much you need in each weapon is kind of what we’re working through in terms of a strategy, but you really have to invest across all those. [People’s Republic of China] is showing us that, because they’re investing in all those,” Saltzman said.
To define new terms that fall under the space superiority mission, the service released a “space warfighting framework” to describe possible counterspace operations. The document will give guardians and joint planners a common lexicon to help them prepare for a future conflict, officials say.
Saltzman emphasized in the document that space superiority is not only a “necessary precondition” for the joint force to be successful, but the very “basis” for military power—reinforcing the service’s role.
New launch providers and blossoming commercial market
It’s been a year since the Space Force released its commercial space strategy—a blueprint for how the service wants to use commercial space capabilities. The service is still working to implement it, but Saltzman said the strategy has been “very valuable” in helping companies figure out where they can work with DOD.
Saltzman pointed to successes with the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve program, or CASR, the service’s version of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet—a commercial fleet that the service can surge during wartime. The service recently signed the first “pilot” contracts for CASR for space domain awareness, according to Breaking Defense.
“I just see a tremendous interest in the commercial industry, and we’ve been able to focus them around the key technologies that we think we need, or data or services that we need because of that commercial space strategy,” Saltzman said.
The Space Force has also started looking at which of its expensive legacy programs could be delivered commercially, warning industry that the service might change current contracts to fixed-price agreements or break them into more manageable pieces.
Through trial and error, service leaders have realized that smaller programs move much faster than large ones, so they’re looking for programs across all mission areas that could be completed with commercial options, Saltzman said.
“Every chance we get to disaggregate the requirements is an opportunity for us to go a little faster, be a little better stewards of taxpayer dollars,” he said.
The chief also pointed out that the U.S. launch market is growing. United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket was recently certified by the Space Force, and two new players—Rocket Lab and Stoke Space—were added to the service’s launch competition, National Space Security Launch Phase 3.
“It was only about 10 years ago when we had one provider and just a few rocket systems. So if you take a long look at this, over the last 10 or 15 years, we’ve really expanded the industrial base in support of launch services, and I think we’re on the right trajectory,” he said.
Still, Musk’s SpaceX will remain the dominant force in the launch market for the foreseeable future. And Musk’s outsized role in Trump’s administration has raised questions about conflicts of interest, particularly as his company continues to secure lucrative contracts from the Pentagon.
When asked about Musk’s involvement in the new administration, Saltzman said he has not seen any evidence of an improper advantage with Space Force contracts.
“We just have seen no evidence that would indicate there’s any kind of undue influence, and so I think the real key there is just to pay attention and make sure that we’re as fair and equitable across the process as we can, and follow all the laws, and that’s what we’re focused on doing,” he said.
Amid new priorities in the Pentagon, an unpredictable administration, and an uncertain budget landscape, the Space Force faces a pivotal year ahead as it pushes to carve out its warfighting role and assert its place in the growing race for space dominance.
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