Congress will soon decide whether to support a proposed new armed service for military operations in space. But a new combatant command only addresses half the problem
. The case for forming this new command is widely accepted throughout the national defense community, the White House and both Houses of the Congress; it is on track for implementation.
To be clear, U.S. government policy toward military operations in space has focused for over six decades on developing force enhancement tools to facilitate military operations inside the atmosphere—not on warfighting in or from space. Today, our space assets deliver precision, navigation, and timing ; missile launch warning; communications; and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance . The U.S. has no weapons in space.
Though the United States now has over 60 years of experience in space, we have yet to make a commensurate effort to develop the offensive and defensive military space capabilities inherent for a space armed service. Indeed, until recently, the idea of conflict in space could not even be mentioned in open forums. Space as a warfighting domain remains immature, more like airpower in the first quarter of the 20th century than at the end of World War II.
Real threats to our space-based enablers continue to grow. While the U.S. did not seek to weaponize space, the decisions and actions of U.S. adversaries have made great strides in this regard. They saw the need to fight in space because space-based enablers are now fundamental to the U.S. way of war—the U.S. military cannot fight effectively without them.
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