Speaking during his keynote speech at Space Symposium on Tuesday, Spacecom Commander Gen. Stephen Whiting outlined ongoing initiatives to deter and defeat adversaries. The efforts are framed by the combatant command’s new “elements of victory,” and include moves to operationalize new capabilities, develop new technologies and draft two new strategies — one focused on experimentation and another on AI and machine learning.

“Over the past year at U.S. Space Command, we’ve developed elements of victory: our best military judgement for what we think we need to win in a conflict,” Whiting said. “These five elements of victory are informed by lessons learned in other domains — from the best thinking across our Joint Force, exercises and modeling and simulation — and they tell us what we need for war-winning advantage and how we will win.”

Part of the initiative focuses on getting new capabilities for warfighters across Spacecom’s different mission areas. For example, Whiting said the command is working to operationalize a data-fusion system that can create a single common operating picture for missile warning and missile defense missions.

Announced last year as a pilot program to improve data-fusion capabilities, the effort looked to address Spacecom’s ability to digest and view space domain data from multiple systems on a single screen. Since initiating the program, the command has focused on developing a data integration layer for missile warning and missile defense systems and is now demonstrating the capability, Whiting noted.

“Now we’re moving forward with operationalizing this system and placing it on our [Joint Operations Center] floor,” he said. “In the coming months, we’ll be adding additional missions to that program.”

At the same time, Spacecom continues to support research and development of technologies to enable what it calls “dynamic space operations” — or the ability to quickly and continuously maneuver systems on-orbit in order to address emerging threats in that domain.

While the command has repeatedly stressed the need for more maneuverable satellites, the Space Force has put only small amounts of money into research for the capability — and whether or not that funding will continue in future years remains up in the air. Whiting stressed, however, that development of space maneuver capabilities is imperative for Spacecom, especially given recent advancements in China’s ability to freely move their on-orbit satellites. 

To support development, the command will co-sponsor an effort with SpaceWERX — the Space Force’s technology innovation arm — that focuses on sustained space maneuver, according to Whiting.

“We will soon be identifying 10 proposals for $1.9 million each in funding over a 15-month period of performance,” he said. “This effort will continue to invest in the most promising technology from commercial industry to help us solve the sustained space maneuver challenge, so we can bring this joint function to the space domain.”

Other Spacecom initiatives include the deployment of an additional next-generation mobile radar for space domain awareness in the Indo-Pacific; working with organizations across the Pentagon to field more agile command-and-control capabilities; and meeting new demands for offensive and defensive space control.

Along with additional technologies, Whiting said Spacecom is drafting two new strategies that will help the command better prepare for conflict in space. 

“To ensure we maximize our readiness for day-to-day operations so that we are ready for conflict, we are operationalizing the command’s first-ever experimentation strategy and artificial intelligence and machine learning strategy,” Whiting said. He added that the priorities for these strategies focus on space fires, operational space command and control, missile defeat effects, enhanced battlespace awareness, cyber defenses and the command’s business processes.

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Across its mission set, Space Command currently operates several different systems that each produce high volumes of data necessary for conducting operations in the space domain — an amount that will likely grow as Spacecom continues to grow as an organization. The combatant command has repeatedly communicated its need for better command-and-control capabilities that can fuse all of its data for warfighters, Whiting said Monday during a webinar hosted by the Mitchell Institute.

“We have a fair amount of data that washes around in our system. Today, unfortunately, I don’t have a single common operational picture that I can point to to bring us all that in a coherent manner,” he said. “Can we operate without having that single common operational picture? Absolutely, but we want to do better.”

Now, Spacecom is in the early stages of developing a pilot program to test data-fusion capabilities for the space domain, Whiting said. He noted that he is working closely on the effort with the Joint Staff’s Office of Command, Control, Communications and Computers/Cyber, J6.

Planning for the effort’s timeline and cost is still underway, but Spacecom expects to announce the specific mission area it will use as a test case in the coming weeks or months, Whiting said. The mission area will be one that creates enough data over a specific period to adequately test data-fusion capabilities, he noted.

“We’re not an acquisition organization, but we think this is the kind of value a COCOM can add because we can deliver that within our event horizon of now to three years,” Whiting said. “It’s about merging data, it’s not about building a new satellite system. It’s taking the data we have and using it better.”

Because the effort is in its nascent stages, Spacecom hasn’t begun work on determining what technical solutions it will need to create a common operational picture, the commander noted. It will likely include capabilities leveraged from the commercial sector that will be configured by operators within the organization to fit their needs, he said.

“We’re early in the development of this pilot test case, but we don’t think this is an overly difficult technical problem,” Whiting said. “We think there’s lots of applications out there that can help us fuse the data and then present it in the way that we’re going to want to.”

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“CAVE is our modeling and simulation laboratory which enables us to perform analysis on warfighting, on plans [and] on campaigning,” Spacecom Commander Gen. Stephen Whiting said Tuesday during his keynote at the annual Space Symposium. “We’ll use that to derive better ways of deterring and planning to conduct operations for a war that’s never happened, and a war we don’t want to happen.”

The platform recently achieved minimum viable capability at the combatant command’s headquarters in Colorado Springs, Whiting told DefenseScoop during a media roundtable following his speech.

“CAVE is really an office, if you will,” he said. “It’s both a modeling and simulation platform, but it’s also the modeling and simulation experts and analytics experts who can help us model our warfighting plans, our operations and our campaigning.”

As space continues to gain significance as a warfighting domain, both Space Command and the Space Force have highlighted the need for accurate modeling and simulation capabilities that can accurately replicate the space environment — particularly for training guardians and conducting wargames.

Separately from Spacecom’s CAVE, the Space Force is developing its own digital engineering ecosystem platform known as SpaceDEN. The tool will allow the service “to identify capability gaps, performance requirements and acquisition strategies to meet emerging threats,” according to the military branch.

CAVE, on the other hand, appears to be tailored more towards the operational needs of Spacecom. Along with conducting wargames for operations in space, Whiting said the platform will be used to understand Spacecom’s requirements and how space will fit into future joint warfighting scenarios across all domains.

“At fully operational capability, we’ll be able to assess all of our operations at all classification levels,” Whiting said. “Today, we can do a subset of that, and it’s an important subset, but we still need to grow that. But I think we’re on a good path.”

The command doesn’t have a defined timeline for when it wants to see CAVE reach FOC, he said, but it plans to continue building out the platform beyond minimum viable capability throughout 2024.

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