The so-called “space warfighting” framework is expected to outline the common vocabulary and concepts used by the service in order to achieve what it calls “space superiority” — that is, the ability for the United States to operate freely in the space domain while also denying an enemy’s ability to do the same. The document will also categorize adversary on-orbit capabilities, link structures, ground facilities and network targets, Saltzman said during a webinar hosted by the Mitchell Institute.

“What the framework does is, it defines our terms so that planners — and this is space planners, but this is [also] joint planners — to make sure that our capabilities are accounted for and integrated fully into all the operational design,” Saltzman said. “We felt like we owed the Joint Force that set of framework, that set of definitions, so that we could have the right kinds of discussions.”

The drafting of the new framework comes as the Space Force continues efforts to more accurately convey its mission and warfighting functions both within the Defense Department and to the general public. In recent weeks, Saltzman and other senior service leadership have begun openly discussing the Space Force’s ability to conduct warfare in the space domain — marking a shift in messaging following years of keeping such rhetoric behind closed doors.

“We must think of space as a warfighting domain, rather than just a collection of support activities that the Space Force must organize, train, equip and conduct warfighting operations as an integral part of the joint and combined force,” Saltzman said March 3 during his keynote speech at the annual AFA Warfare Symposium in Denver, Colorado.

Saltzman said during Wednesday’s webinar that senior leadership across the Pentagon fully support the Space Force’s mission to enable all the military services to conduct joint operations. Likewise, younger warfighters who understand today’s “digital environment” understand the importance of space-based capabilities, he added.

However, there is a group in between those two levels that aren’t as informed as others, he said. The new space warfighting framework will provide a doctrine-level lexicon for that middle group and others as a way to help inform them of the Space Force’s missions.

“Here’s the terms we can talk about. Here’s what orbital warfare means. Here’s how we use electronic warfare. Here’s how we would use cyber warfare, and in pursuit of space superiority, protect what we have and deny an adversary,” Saltzman said regarding what the document will lay out.

Additionally, the service’s Space Training and Readiness Command (STARCOM) will also soon publish the Space Force Doctrine Document–1 (SFDD-1). Saltzman previously said that the document will articulate the doctrinal concepts shaping the service moving forward — including the service’s newest core function known as “space control,” among others.

The concept encapsulates the Space Force’s ability to deny, degrade, disrupt or even destroy adversary space systems using both kinetic and non-kinetic weapons. Space control can refer to both offensive and defensive orbital warfare, electromagnetic warfare and other counterspace operations.

“We have to deny the adversary the ability to use the space-enabled targeting that has now made them so lethal — particularly in the western Pacific — against our other terrestrial forces,” Saltzman said. “They have increased the range and the accuracy of their weapons because of that space-enabled targeting system, and it’s the Space Force’s job to deny them that.”

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Under the “Iron Dome for America” executive order published in January, Trump has tasked Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to create a plan to field a multi-layered missile defense architecture for the U.S. homeland. Given how heavily the directive leans on space-based systems, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said the Space Force will likely have a “central role” in the architecture’s development.

“We are leaning forward establishing this technical IPT to start thinking about it from an overarching perspective,” Saltzman told reporters Monday.

With only a few weeks to develop a strategy and deliver it to the president, the Space Force’s new technical integrated planning team (IPT) is currently analyzing technological maturity, cost estimates and capability gaps of space systems that could be part of the architecture.

“What they’re going to do is pull it together and make sure everybody has got eyes wide open before they start saying, ‘Initiate a program here,’” a senior Space Force official said Monday during a background briefing with reporters. “It’s more of a data collection [of] what do we know, and identify what we know we don’t know.”

The directive calls attention to several ongoing space-based missile defense programs — such as sensors onboard the Missile Defense Agency’s Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor Layer (HBTSS) satellites and the Space Development Agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) tracking layer. Both the MDA and SDA have released respective requests for information that ask for industry feedback on possible space-based capabilities for the Iron Dome for America architecture.

The Space Force official noted that the specificity of the Iron Dome for America directive has been helpful for the IPT as they conduct their analysis.

“What that allows us to do is say, ‘Hey, which of the programs that we already have either in place or in development directly support these requirements?’ And these become high priority, obviously, because they came out in an executive order,” the official said. “Then you do a quick gap analysis — what don’t we have [in] capability or what is so far left in terms of tech readiness?”

At the same time, Trump’s EO calls for deployment of “proliferated space-based interceptors,” a new capability that would be able to defeat enemy ballistic missiles during their boost stage of flight. The Space Force official admitted that they weren’t confident of how far along the Space Force or other organizations are in development of the technology, but added it would likely require more time to develop and field.

“One of the worst things to do is bite off a technical challenge that you can’t solve in a reasonable cost frame [and] a reasonable timeframe,” the official said. “And so we’ll be very forthright with … where we think the technology stands at this juncture. I think we’ve got some research that would give us some indications.”

The Space Force official noted that several organizations — such as the Air Force Research Lab, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Strategic Capabilities Office and others — are conducting research on future capabilities and their technical feasibility.

“That’s why we call it a technical IPT, because it is a search for what technologies are out there,” they said. “What’s required, and where are we in the levels of their readiness? Can we pull it together in a reasonable time frame? That is exactly what’s going on.”

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Established as a pathfinder program earlier this year, the TacSRT pilot allows the Space Force to purchase “operational planning products” from commercial industry that includes unclassified space-based imagery of specific regions and subsequent analysis of them. The pilot initially focused on U.S. Africa Command and has supported a number of operations since it began — including the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Air Base 201 in Niger, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said Tuesday during AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber conference.

“The goal was to complement the exquisite work done by the intelligence community with unclassified operational planning products delivered on tactically relevant timelines,” Saltzman said during his keynote speech. “It was a pathfinder, with the idea being that we could expand the program if it proved to be value added, and that’s exactly what it did.”

Saltzman said the average time it took for operators to receive operational planning products was about three-and-a-half hours after collection, noting that the timeline had decreased to 90 minutes towards the end of the withdrawal.

Now that it has proved TacSRT’s mechanisms work on relevant timelines, the Space Force is looking to expand the pilot to other combatant commands — and it needs more funding to do so, Saltzman noted.

“As we go to maybe more full expansion, it’s about how much money do we want to put into what we’re calling the ‘commercial marketplace,’ which allows our Commercial Services Office to purchase these products from commercial providers,” Saltzman told reporters during a media roundtable. “So, the next step is just getting more money so we can expand that to other commands.”

Through the TacSRT marketplace, the U.S. military can ask commercial providers to provide operational planning products of a specific region. The Space Force reprogrammed $25 million in its fiscal 2025 budget request to fund the pilot’s architecture and ability to purchase information packets, according to budget documents.

Saltzman didn’t provide any additional information as to how much funding would be needed to expand the TacSRT pilot, nor which areas of operation it would expand to.

He emphasized that the Space Force isn’t buying unclassified imagery alone, but also detailed analysis of the images.

“What TacSRT is doing with this pilot in particular, is we simply ask a question into the marketplace — ‘Hey, what generally does it look like around Air Base 201? Are there any items of interest, trucks that are missing? Is there a huge parking lot, do we see people milling around?’ We simply ask the question, and commercial industry provides us with products that try to help us answer the question,” Saltzman said.

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Seventeen NATO members signed a memorandum of understanding for the Alliance Persistence Surveillance from Space (APSS) program as part of the annual NATO summit being held in Washington this week, the alliance announced Tuesday. Members will now move into a five-year implementation phase of the project, during which allies will contribute more than $1 billion “to leverage commercial and national space assets, and to expand advanced exploitation capacities,” according to a press release.

The United States is one of the nations signed onto the initiative, as well as Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Sweden and Turkey, according to a NATO source.

The transatlantic organization created APSS last year with the intent to establish a “virtual constellation” — dubbed Aquila — comprising both national and commercial space systems, sensors and data that can be used by NATO’s command structure and other allies. The project is considered “the largest multinational investment in space-based capabilities” in the alliance’s history, and is set to increase NATO’s ability “to monitor activities on the ground and at sea with unprecedented accuracy and timeliness,” a press release stated.

Participating nations will be able to use their own space systems, provide tools for intelligence collection and analysis, or purchase space-based data gathered by commercial constellations.

“Integrating and exploiting data from space effectively has been a growing challenge over time,” a NATO press release stated. “By leveraging latest technologies from industry, APSS will help advance NATO’s innovation agenda and offer a new platform to engage with the growing space industry.”

The APSS project is part of the larger implementation of NATO’s overarching space policy adopted in 2019, which officially recognized space as a new operational domain. Since then, the alliance has worked to bolster its presence in space — including the establishment of a NATO Space Centre in 2020 and approval of an official Space Branch within the Allied Command Transformation in June.

In the United States, leaders across the Space Force have emphasized the importance of better collaboration with its international allies and partners in space as adversaries like China and Russia continue to grow their own presence in the domain. 

“We are strengthening our international efforts on space control, space cooperation and space classification to increase communication and collaboration [and to] prevent a disaster in space,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said in April during his keynote speech at the annual Space Symposium. “This includes full spectrum collaboration with our allies and industry — planning, operations, situational awareness, information sharing, capability development and everything in between.”

At the same time, other NATO members have been increasing their own investments in space capabilities. Luxembourg has notably led the APSS effort, having already contributed at least 16.5 million euros — or around $17.8 million — to lay the foundation for the program, according to NATO.

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The new document expounds on the Space Force’s previous assertions that it will integrate commercial space solutions into military architectures “wherever possible” as a way to augment or supplant current capabilities. The guidance indicates that the branch is looking for a range of “goods, services, and activities that support and integrate into a multifaceted hybrid space architecture.”

During his keynote speech at the annual Space Symposium on Wednesday, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman noted that the Space Force has become comfortable with using commercial capabilities in order to add capacity, but has not effectively integrated those technologies into its force design.

“The Commercial Space Strategy is not a panacea. It does not provide all the answers, but I do think it frames the discussion that must take place,” Saltzman said. “It sets the conditions for productive collaboration and it starts the critical processes needed to accelerate the purposeful pursuit of hybrid space architectures.”

The strategy comes months after Saltzman announced he had sent an early draft of the document back to the drawing board for revision. He emphasized that the strategy could not just be “aspirational” discussions, but required concrete definitions, examples and actionable guidance for the commercial industry.

Now, the 19-page strategy details four lines of effort — each with an immediate goal and offices assigned to oversee them — as well as the four criteria the Space Force will consider when deciding when and how to leverage commercial space technology.

While the strategy does not provide specific details about how much money is available to integrate commercial space technologies, Saltzman emphasized that “effective integration will only come about with a common understanding of our priorities, the missions where we need help, our proposal evaluation criteria and clear definitions of terms to enhance that collaboration.”

The directive comes on the heels of the Defense Department’s separate Commercial Space Integration Strategy, which was released last week. While the Pentagon’s strategy outlines the policy and structural guidelines for the entire department, the Space Force’s document focuses on service-specific use cases for commercial technology integration and provides criteria for mission areas and desired end states.

As detailed in the strategy’s second line of effort, “Operational and Technical Integration,” the Space Force wants to “operationally integrate commercial space solutions into a hybrid space architecture.” It also identifies and prioritizes seven mission areas where commercial integration is possible, including the potential capabilities that the Space Force is seeking commercial support for.

At the top of the Space Force’s list is satellite communications, and the service is looking for commercial tech that will increase and improve data transport “speed, capacity, agility, flexibility, reliability, and/or resiliency” for those missions.

Second is space domain awareness, where the Space Force wants capabilities from the commercial sector that “contribute to the holistic generation of SDA,” the strategy states.

New mission priority areas where commercial technology could be integrated, according to the service, include tactical, surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking (TacSRT); space-based environmental monitoring (SBEM); positioning, navigation and timing (PNT); and space access, mobility and logistics (SAML).

Cyberspace ops and command and control are included in the strategy’s list, as well.

In addition, the Space Force is seeking hybrid solutions for what it is calling “space mission enablers” — or capabilities that are essential to space operations and span across multiple mission areas. Those could include constellation management, artificial intelligence, ground support and more.

The strategy calls for both the Space Force’s force design and planning, programming, budgeting and execution (PPBE) processes to include more commercial space solutions, indicating that funding “will be allocated based on the strategic importance and urgency of missions within the USSF and priority will be given to mission areas critical for enhancing national security.”

In order to guide the Space Force’s decision-making when evaluating mission areas and commercial technologies that could be integrated into government architectures, the strategy includes four consideration criteria: operational utility, feasibility, resilience by design, and speed to fielding.

“As we work these lines of effort, we will have to make tough choices about where to place our precious resources,” Saltzman said. “There is never enough money to go around, so we will prioritize and scrutinize our investments. We are in an era of constrained resources and we are going to have to make trades between what we buy and what we build.”

Broadly speaking, the strategy’s remaining three lines of effort indicate that the Space Force plans to improve its engagement and collaboration with the commercial space sector.

For example, the document calls on the service to develop “a comprehensive understanding of the commercial sector’s innovative culture, shorter development timelines, and a burgeoning array of commercial space solutions to the greatest extent practicable.”

To do so, the Space Force will improve its overall awareness of commercial tech, identify requirements that can be met by commercial solutions during the force design process, and look for opportunities where guardians can integrate into the commercial realm to build mutual understanding.

The service is also tasked with establishing a process to improve how it shares threat information — including situational awareness and cybersecurity risks — with the commercial sector across multiple classification levels. The strategy notes the Space Force will actively work to reduce overclassification and other barriers that inhibit accurate and timely information-sharing.

Lastly, the Space Force is looking to establish a formal process to evaluate commercial technologies in order to identify potential capabilities and services that can meet requirements, according to the strategy. That includes tech from both traditional and non-traditional companies.

“We must continuously assess the future operating environment, what missions will be needed in what we need to perform, what threats we will face and what technologies we can bring to bear to meet our operational challenges,” Saltzman said. “We know we will need substantial support from the space industry to answer these vital questions.”

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The two initiatives fall under the service’s space access, mobility and logistics (SAML) portfolio, which in total is requesting $20 million in research, development, test and evaluation funds in FY ’25.

According to the Space Force’s budget justification documents, the focus of the program through 2026 will be to “establish the foundational capability areas through RDT&E, technology demonstrations, operational integration and fielding of Point to Point Delivery (P2PD) services and on-orbit mobility services, to include refueling.”

The service wants $16 million for work on in-orbit servicing and refueling technology, budget documents show.

Leaders at U.S. Space Command have stated they want to be able to refuel and repair the military’s satellites from space — something that is either incredibly difficult or impossible to accomplish today — in order to conduct “dynamic space operations.”

In response to Spacecom’s demand signal, the Space Force stood up a servicing, mobility and logistics (SML) program office at Space Systems Command in September. Since then, the office has been advocating for sustained funding and planning efforts for space logistics capabilities, particularly those related to satellite refueling.

During a Defense One webinar broadcasted Tuesday, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said the investments toward on-orbit refueling represented a key new mission set for the service.

“For the first time, we’re starting to invest small amounts … in demonstrations and capabilities to start to explore what you would need on orbit to be able to service and maintain satellites. This gives us some opportunities to explore dynamic maneuvering and maneuver without regret” of using up too much fuel, Saltzman said. “These are things that will make our satellites harder to target and more defensible, and so we’re starting that investment process to see how that mission set would play out.

Notably, the Space Force wants to exploit commercial capabilities that are already operational, budget documents show. Industry has repeatedly called on the service to provide a clear demand signal — as well as critical funding — for the new-ish commercial space logistics sector that can serve as the foundation for the market’s growth.

The effort “will maintain connectivity to the burgeoning commercial market to capitalize on industry advancement to qualify and onboard additional on-orbit capabilities as they mature,” justification books state. “As an ‘anchor tenant’ this may include providing last-mile development funding for government purpose modifications, demonstrations, landscape assessments and architecture development.”

Meanwhile, the Air Force Research Lab’s experimental Rocket Cargo Vanguard program is now moving to the Space Force under a new name: Point-to-Point Delivery (P2PD). The service is requesting $4 million in fiscal 2025 for the brand new program to leverage research conducted by AFRL and transition the capability to the Space Force.

The goal of the Rocket Cargo concept is to use commercially available rockets to quickly launch military supplies from one point on Earth to another. The program has been an AFRL Vanguard since 2021, and since then research has focused on how to safely land rockets on non-traditional surfaces both near structures and in remote locations; engineer a rocket cargo bay and logistics for rapid loading and unloading; and airdrop supplies from rockets after they’ve launched in order to deliver them to austere environments. 

Funding in fiscal 2025 will “support the detailed engineering design necessary for a P2PD service provider to perform airdrop payload delivery,” according to justification books. In the long term, the Space Force wants P2PD to support U.S. Transportation Command’s resupply missions, the documents state.

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During the annual AFA Warfare Symposium on Monday, he and other top officials outlined a total of 24 changes that will be part of the initiative. Those changes include near- and long-term action items that have been divided into four categories: develop capabilities, project power, generate readiness and develop people.

“We need organizations focused on the readiness of the current force and we need organizations that are focused on the future and ensuring that we have enduring competitive advantages. And we need an efficient and effective pipeline of technologies flowing continuously into more competitive capabilities for our highest priority missions,” Kendall said during his opening remarks at the conference. “In short, we need to transition to a great power competition-focused enterprise and we need to do it now.”

Kendall first announced that he had initiated a broad review of the Department of the Air Force — which includes both the Air Force and Space Force — and its organizational structure in September. During that time, he emphasized the goal of the review was to identify changes that the DAF needed to make to be prepared to fight China’s advancing military capabilities, as well as those from other U.S. adversaries.

While the 24 action items introduce a range of changes for the department — including how it trains airmen and guardians; the way the Air and Space Forces hold exercises; and the structure of Air Force operational wings and Space Force combat squadrons — a significant portion are directed towards developing and fielding new technologies.

To drive modernization efforts across the Air and Space Forces, the department will stand up a new Integrated Capabilities Office that will lead development and resource prioritization efforts of new tech.

The office will be “looking at capabilities across our services, not in stovepipes,” Kristyn Jones, acting undersecretary of the Air Force, said at the conference. “This organization will help us to prioritize our investments and will be responsible for working with us to determine the next iteration of operational imperatives.”

At the same time, the Air Force is establishing a separate Integrated Capabilities Command. The new institutional command will be led by a three-star officer and will primarily develop new competitive operational concepts, integrated requirements and modernization plans that align with future force designs.

This will allow other major commands — such as Pacific Air Forces or U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Air Forces Africa — to focus less on capability requirements and instead on overall readiness of their units, said Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. David Allvin.

“This is where the operators will test operational concepts against our force design,” Allvin said. “They will also ensure that when we have modernization initiatives, those are rationalized to ensure our current force gets to the future force in a way that makes sense so we do not unintentionally put modernization on platforms that really don’t have a long-term play in the future force design and waste money.”

The Air Force will also create a new Information Dominance Systems Center as part of a larger reorganization of Air Force Materiel Command that will boost the service’s focus on a number of high-tech capabilities, including command, control, communications and battle management (C3BM); cyber warfare; electronic warfare; information systems; and enterprise digital infrastructure.

The Space Force is also getting a new field command, dubbed Space Futures Command. Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman explained that the organization will consist of three centers: one that works to evaluate future threat environments, another that will develop and validate warfighting concepts, and a third that will conduct data-driven analytics on mission area designs.

“We’re going to take all those together and that’s going to inform our objective force — the force design,” Saltzman said. “What is it that the Space Force is going to need now in the near term, and in the long term to maintain that competitive endurance?”

Now that these and other action items that are part of the reoptimization have been identified, the Department of the Air Force will iron out how it plans to implement the changes, Kendall said. All 24 initiatives have a timeline for planning and execution that range from immediate to more than a year, and the department is looking to minimize disruption in both cost and readiness as it moves out on the plan, he said.

“There is no time to waste. We are going to turn this enterprise and point it directly at our most challenging threat,” Kendall said. “We are going to follow through on the decisions we are announcing today, and we are going to do so with a strong sense of urgency.”

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Known as the Black Skies exercise, the live simulation training initiative is aimed at developing Space Force guardians’ skills in tactical space electromagnetic warfare operations. Black Skies is one of three iterations in the Skies series hosted by Space Training and Readiness Command (STARCOM); its others are Red Skies, focusing on “orbital warfare,” and Blue Skies, which trains guardians in cyber warfare.

The latest training event, which was held in late September, focused largely on defending against simulated threats to drones, which were run by the Air Force 26th Weapons Squadron’s Remotely Piloted Aircraft Electronic Combat Officer Course (RECOC), according to a Space Force press release. 

At the same time, the Space Force looped in the Army for one of its Skies exercises for the first time. During the training, the Army’s 1st Space Brigade participated by “processing multi-intelligence data from a diverse array of sensors,” highlighting cross-service collaboration and operational planning, the release stated.  

Like in past Black Skies exercises, September’s event integrated “live-fire” training where guardians transmitted signals from Earth to real satellites in orbit. This time, the Combined Space Operations Center (CSpOC) was able to conduct command and control of different distributed units from multiple services, while also honing joint operational requirements, it added.

“Black Skies has been a massive success in training our forces and testing warfighting readiness,” Lt. Col. Scott Nakatani, 392nd Combat Training Squadron commander, said in a statement. “The planning and execution team is small, but extremely talented and we will continue to evolve the delivery of realistic combat training to space warfighters.” 

Using real-world systems are crucial for space exercises, “as they provide a realistic training environment, allowing participants to better prepare for actual combat by engaging with real-world, operational space systems,” the release noted. Guardians were also able to practice the same procedures in a closed-loop environment, which does not use physical space systems.

Overall, the third Black Skies event was STARCOM’s largest thus far and included over 170 personnel from various units in the Space Force, Air Force and Army. 

Hosting more frequent Skies exercises has been a key priority for Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman. He told DefenseScoop in April that the current training tempo is “insufficient,” and that the nascent service is moving as quickly as it can to increase the number of exercises each year.

“You’re not going to have the throughput that really gets the number of guardians through those training exercises that I think is required to really advance the training and the skills of the broader set of guardians that we need,” Saltzman said during a media roundtable at the annual Space Symposium.

A Space Force release noted that focus is now shifting towards the upcoming Concept Development Conference, hosted by the service’s 392nd Combat Training Squadron, that will outline exercises to be held in fiscal 2024. 

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Each military service besides Space Force currently has a service cyber component to Cybercom — just as they do for all combatant commands — and has requirements to provide Cybercom a set number of personnel and teams to the joint cyber mission force, which conducts offensive and defensive cyber operations.

Since the creation of Space Force in 2019, there was speculation as to if and when it would supply a service cyber component to Cybercom. However, to date, there were no formal or concrete plans to do so.

“We are in process of working with Cyber Command of what does their service component to Cyber Command, the Space Force service component to Cyber Command look like,” Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt, the Space Force’s deputy chief of space operations for operations, cyber and nuclear, said at the annual DAFITC conference Wednesday.

“Partnering with 16th Air Force [the Air Force’s service cyber component], with our own mission analysis team, [officials are discussing] what do we see that footprint for Cyber Command to make that connection as a Space Force service component in the future … [and] when do we get to our own cyber mission teams?” Burt added.

According to a Space Force spokesperson, coordination to establish a formal service component has been ongoing since early 2023, but there isn’t a confirmed date for activation and efforts are still in a preliminary phase.

There are currently two guardians from Space Operations Command that are members of the Air Force’s cyber mission force, a SpOC spokesperson told DefenseScoop in August. Burt on Wednesday raised the prospect that in the future, Space Force cyber mission force teams would directly support U.S. Space Command and its cyber needs.

“Who better to defend on behalf of U.S. Space Command their key cyber terrain, or to go after the enemy’s key cyber terrain in space than guardians,” she said. “Our goal is to grow to those cyber mission teams, so that first relationship with Cyber Command and the service component will help us grow to that structure in the future to then go at the enemy face-on.”

Currently, the Air Force’s cyber component through its Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber Air Force, is the coordinating authority for planning and synchronizing cyber support and operations for Spacecom.

During his confirmation to be chief of space operations, Gen. Chance Saltzman said it would take significantly more resources to create a Space Force service cyber component for Cybercom.

“Since all other Services provide teams to the Cyber Mission Force (CMF), it is reasonable for some to assume that the Space Force should also provide teams. However, the analysis of manpower required to standup the USSF did not include cyber manpower requirements to provide teams to the CMF,” he told lawmakers. “[A]ny requirement to support the CMF … would require a commensurate increase to USSF manpower to support this new mission area.”

Cybercom owns the authorities to conduct offensive cyber operations around the globe, which are conducted by the joint cyber mission force, mostly by combat mission teams. Thus, the services — and in this case, Space Force — would not have offensive teams to conduct offensive cyber operations outside of a Cybercom contribution.

The Space Force does have cyber personnel, mostly in its Delta 6, that perform cyber defense of Space Force assets such as ground terminals.

“We are more focused as a service. And what we brought to the Space Force were our cyber operators and our cyber squadrons to defend our mission systems and our key cyber terrain in both ground, space and the receivers in order to defend against China and Russia coming into those — because it is our soft underbelly,” Burt said.

“We also have our own [cybersecurity service providers] within the Space Force, again, looking at how do we defend across our installations, because we are employed in place, so we depend on our infrastructure on the installation because we do fight from our installations 24/7, 365. How do we have that right infrastructure support, the right guardians in the loop to get after defending those systems?” she said.

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Known as the Skies exercise series, the live simulation training events are aimed at developing guardians’ command-and-control skills. Space Training and Readiness Command (STARCOM) has already completed two exercises focused on live-fire electronic warfare operations — Black Skies — including one in September and another last month. 

The current tempo “I think is still insufficient,” Saltzman told DefenseScoop at a media roundtable during the Space Symposium.

“You’re not going to have the throughput that really gets the number of guardians through those training exercises that I think is required to really advance the training and the skills of the broader set of guardians that we need,” he said. “But baby steps — we’re working through this as quickly as we can.”

The next Black Skies exercise is now slated to be held sometime this fall.

STARCOM is also planning for two more live simulation exercises in the Skies series — Red Skies will focus on “orbital warfare,” while Blue Skies will train guardians in cyber warfare.

Since taking the helm as the Space Force’s top officer in November, Saltzman has made readiness one of his key priorities. That not only includes more frequent exercises, but the development of robust testing and training environments that leverage modern capabilities.

When asked by DefenseScoop if he thought the Space Force currently had the adequate training infrastructure to complete its upcoming Skies exercises, Saltzman said present resources are not enough.

“We are upping our resourcing to build the kind of testing and training infrastructure that we need, because right now it’s not sufficient,” he said. “In the areas where it is sufficient, it’s not at the kind of scale to get to all the guardians that we need.”

Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of Space Operations Command (SpOC), told reporters at a separate media roundtable that typical training for guardians involves training on the physical system itself and, in some cases, exercises conducted with simulations. However, those exercises are usually not able to accurately mimic the threats that the Space Force faces, he added.

“That’s typically white carded or a tabletop discussion — like, ‘What would you do if now there was a red threat that came up against you?’ There’s some value in all of that. We try to squeeze out as much learning as we can, but certainly that is not where we want to be,” Whiting said.

Instead, the Space Force wants to leverage offline, simulated systems that use physics-based models to emulate the tools, environments and adversaries a guardian might encounter in a real-life battle scenario, he said.

The Space Force is requesting $340 million in its fiscal 2024 budget proposal to bolster its training capabilities. Saltzman said the service is looking to improve technology like high-fidelity simulators that give guardians reps and sets for their tactics, and range environments that can simulate adversaries and threat environments.

“That’s where we’re doubling down on the investments to really robust that out and be able to produce that at scale so all guardians have access to advanced training, get the skills on the valid tactics to be successful in a threat environment,” Saltzman said.

Whiting also noted that because the space domain is thoroughly modeled in simulations by those that build the Space Force’s platforms, the service should be able to accurately mimic the threat environment.

However, “we’ve struggled to get that done, and a lot of folks are working hard on that — including STARCOM and Space Systems Command,” he added. “We’ve made some progress, but we just got to do better, and we owe our guardians and airmen a better training environment.”

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