US Space Force publishes ‘Space Warfighting’ blueprint for future of warfare beyond Earth: ‘Global power projection’

The United States Space Force published “Space Warfighting: A Framework for Planners” — a detailed blueprint that lays out basic principles, tactics and strategies for battling adversaries in the future’s most critical war domain — space.

The USSF described its plans to defend US space capabilities and maintain the Joint Force’s “long-range kill chains and global power projection” to achieve short, mid, and long-term “space-superiority,” in a manual published for experts in the military community Thursday.

“Space superiority” is defined by the space-faring military branch as having a “degree of control that allows forces to operate at a time and place of their choosing without prohibitive interference from space or counterspace threats, while also denying the same to an adversary.”

“Space superiority may involve seeking out and destroying an enemy’s spacecraft, systems, and networks through measures designed to minimize the effectiveness of those systems, or countering enemy efforts in the other warfighting domains (land, maritime, air, and cyberspace),” the battle manual read.

“The ability to establish space superiority at the time and place of our choosing enables joint lethality in all domains,” the document stated.

“This document is really intended … to introduce sort of a common framework, common lexicon that we can use in our training and in our education programs,”  Lt. Gen. Shawn Bratton, Space Force deputy chief of space operations told reporters according to Defense One news. 

To achieve this goal of outright domain domination, the military branch laid out their plans of offensive and defensive tactics and strategies in three mission areas — Orbital Warfare, Electromagnetic Warfare, and Cyberspace Warfare.

Offensive counterspace operations include orbital strikes, terrestrial strikes, and space link interdictions — which include electromagnetic and cybernetwork attacks carried out to “disrupt, deny, or degrade an enemy’s critical space links.”

Defensive counterspace operations include passive tactics such as threat warning, military deception, “hardening,” dispersal, disaggregation, mobility, and redundancy. Active defenses include counterattacks and suppression of adversary counterspace targeting. 

Space superiority over “peer and near-peer adversaries” is characterized as when both sides can operate their space capabilities or when neither side can operate space capabilities, according to the document.

Peers and near-peers operating freely in space are categorized as “Very High Risk” to Joint Force operations.

“General superiority of space is achieved when the enemy is no longer able to act in a meaningful or dangerous way against friendly celestial lines of communication, and it also means that the enemy is unable to adequately defend or control its own assets or deliver space effects in support of its own operations,” the documented stated of achieving its self-described core function.

The framework laid out by the Space Force accounts for a decreased reliance on human decision making, relying mostly on “highly automated systems” due to the space domain’s “high speeds, long distances, and congested orbital regimes.”

In the same vein, the document harped on the “interdependence” of the space domain on the cyberspace domain in the critical realms of strategic communication — calling Space “almost entirely reliant on the network dimension.”

“Space superiority is not only a necessary precondition for Joint Force success but also something for which we must be prepared to fight,” USSF Chief of Space Operations General B. Chance Saltzman wrote in the document.