The Pentagon released a new Defense Space Strategy June 17, laying out four lines of effort meant to maintain U.S. superiority in the space domain and counteract ever-growing threats by Russia and China.<\/p>\n
An unclassified summary and fact sheet of the strategy was released Wednesday as the U.S. government continues to increase its emphasis on the need to treat space as a warfighting domain, following the establishment of the U.S. Space Force<\/strong> as the sixth U.S. armed service and the reestablishment of U.S. Space Command, both in 2019. It provides guidance for the U.S. Department of Defense<\/strong> (DOD) to achieve \u201cdesired conditions in space\u201d over the next 10 years, informed by other Pentagon documents such as the 2018 National Defense Strategy and the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, per the document.<\/p>\n \u201cThe U.S. space enterprise was not built for the current strategic environment,\u201d said Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy Stephen Kitay during a Wednesday press briefing. In order to remedy that, the report lays out four lines of effort: build a comprehensive military advantage in space; integrate military space power into national, joint and combined operations; shape the strategic environment; and cooperate with allies, partners, industry, and the U.S. government and agencies.<\/p>\n To build a \u201ccomprehensive military advantage in space,\u201d the Defense Department must continue to increase its agility and flexibility to take advantage of commercial innovation, the report said. Specific goals include reforming organizations and building new resilient architectures, improving intelligence and command-and-control (C2) assets, continue to build out the new Space Force and develop \u201cspacepower culture\u201d through expertise, doctrine and operational concepts.<\/p>\n The strategy looks to integrate space power into national, joint and combined operations by updating the security classification for DoD space programs and integrating allies and partners into space activities. It calls on U.S. Space Command to bring \u201cfull time operational focus to deterrence and employment of military space power.\u201d<\/p>\n The U.S. military would shape the strategic environment by deterring adversary aggression and attacks in space, and developing and promoting new standards and norms of behavior in space with allies and partners. The strategy also recommends informing international and public audiences of \u201cgrowing adversarial threats in space.\u201d<\/p>\n The department should enhance space cooperation within the U.S. government, with international partners, and with the commercial sector to better influence policy and strategy, while taking advantage of information-sharing and operations opportunities, the report said.<\/p>\n The strategy is necessary as the U.S. military must posture itself to face increasing threats in the space domain from various state actors, but especially Russia and China, Kitay noted. Those two countries\u2019 actions \u201cpose the greatest strategic threat with ongoing development, testing and deployment of counterspace systems and the associated military doctrine designed to hold allied and U.S. space systems at risk,\u201d he said, adding that Moscow and Beijing are developing ground-based anti-satellite missiles, on-orbit assets, directed energy weapons and jamming and cyberspace capabilities to use against the United States and its allies.<\/p>\n At the same time, the U.S. government is at \u201ca moment of historic reform\u201d as there is synergy from the White House, to Congress, to the Pentagon to prioritize space and streamline national policies and procedures surrounding the domain, Kitay said. \u201cI see this progress as a gears of a powerful machine clicking into place,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Kitay added that allies and partners abroad are also at a similar moment in their focus on space, \u201cwhere there is a recognition of the criticality of the domain, as well as the threats that we\u2019re facing.\u201d He cited NATO and the \u201cFive Eyes\u201d partners of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as key partners in space, along with France, Germany, and Japan. \u201cI would say that that the opportunities for partnership are high. We\u2019re getting a strong demand signal from them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n This article was originally published by our sister publication Defense Daily. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Pentagon released a new Defense Space Strategy June 17, laying out four lines of effort meant to maintain U.S. superiority in the space domain and counteract ever-growing threats by Russia and China. An unclassified summary and fact sheet of the strategy was released Wednesday as the U.S. government continues to increase its emphasis on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49698,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59498"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}