U.S. Space Force Lt. Gen. Michael A. Guetlein, Space Systems Command commander. (U.S. Space Force/Luke Kitterman)

WASHINGTON: Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall is pushing a “large pivot” in the fiscal 2024 budget to prepare for the “China fight,” including for Space Force, Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein, head of Space Force’s acquisition command, said Wednesday.

“We’ve heard the Secretary say ‘China, China, China, China’. He’s going to continue to say ‘China, China, China, China’,” Guetlein, who heads Space Systems Command (SSC), told a conference sponsored by the National Security Space Association.

And China is the focus behind Kendall’s seven “operational imperatives” outlined in January, the first of which is a “resilient space order of battle,” Guetlein said.

Guetlein explained that Kendall “made a pivot” towards that end in the five-year program objective memorandum (POM) beginning in FY23 when he came on board at the Pentagon, but explained that due to the short timeframe available to make changes in the budget, it comprised “small muscle movements” that could easily be made.

“He is intent on making a large pivot in the FY24 POM to get after the China fight. And the analysis behind what we need to invest in is happening in those seven operational imperatives,” Guetlein said.

Development of a national security space architecture that is less vulnerable to adversary threats — one that includes redundant systems in multiple orbits, incorporates beefed-up protections against cyber attacks and jamming, and is less reliant on single point ground centers, for example — is also a top priority for Congress. Lawmakers have been increasingly impatient with the failure of the Space Force to change direction away from building satellite constellations composed of small numbers of very expensive, exquisite satellites that create, in the words of former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten, “fat juicy targets.”

For Space Force, Guetlein said, the crucial end date of that China pivot is 2026 — that is when the service needs to have capabilities on line to support the new space order of battle, including both systems in space to support other domains and those required to “protect and defend” US satellites.

Noting that the US is “falling behind the power curve” in the race against space threats from China, as well as Russia, he stressed that “2026 is the fight we’ve got to get ready for.”

Part of getting from here to there is speeding the long-lamented space acquisition process, Guetlein said. That is an issue that he is working on as the “facilitator” of SSC’s Program Integration Council (PIC), which is designed to coordinate the “extremely complicated community” of multiple space acquisition agencies in “getting after our capabilities and delivering our next generation systems that we’re looking at across the whole of government,” he said.

PIC has seven different “core members,” Guetlein explained: SSC, the Space Development Agency, the Missile Defense Agency, the Space Rapid Capabilities Office, the Space Development Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office and the Space Warfighting Analyses Center (SWAC). It also brings in representatives of the Department of the Air Force’s international affairs office, “warfighters,” commercial industry and the various national security and military labs, he said. The PIC chair rotates among the core agencies, he added, and the meets once a month at the “two- and three-star level.”

“We have already been talking about data standards and the network; we’ve already been talking about missile warning, missile track missile defense in that in that group, and making recommendations” to senior acquisition authorities, Geutlein said.