EXCLUSIVE: New Joint Force space doctrine clarifies Space Command’s ‘offensive’, ‘defensive’ ops

WASHINGTON — The latest revision to the doctrine guiding Joint Force operations in space, obtained by Breaking Defense, is a major overhaul — codifying US Space Command’s (SPACECOM) scope of action as well as clarifying US military space missions and how they are to be undertaken.

This includes more clearly establishing the fact that SPACECOM and the other combatant commands will conduct “offensive and defensive space operations” during conflict, using “direct or enabling” capabilities against adversary space assets — that is, spacecraft on orbit, terrestrial control stations and/or the data links between them. It also details SPACECOM’s area of responsibility (AOR) in joint operations.

The Aug. 23 update to Joint Publication 3-14 (JP 3-14): Joint Space Operations is one of the most far-reaching in its history, according to Lt. Gen. John Shaw, at the time deputy SPACECOM commander.

“I’m pretty proud of the latest 3-dash-14. I’ve seen a lot of versions of it over the years, right? This is the most different I think from all those,” he told the Space Force Association earlier this month.

The first version was published in 2002, and until now each update has been unclassified and available to the public via the Joint Staff’s online doctrine hub. This year, however, the Joint Staff decided that the document should be a “limited distribution publication” available only “within” the Defense Department, a Joint Staff spokesperson said — even though it is not classified, or marked as controlled unclassified information (CUI) or with any other stamp that would prevent dissemination.

The role of Joint Staff doctrine is to set the foundational principles to guide military forces working together in each domain as they pursue national security objectives, as well as to establish agreed concepts and terms to prescribe the manner in which they will fight. There are various levels of doctrine, with that crafted by the Joint Staff to guide joint force operations at the top of the food chain. Each military service then writes its own hierarchy of doctrinal papers covering specific roles and missions. (Space Force, for example, is currently crafting its own doctrine, with its first “operational” volume published in August.)

This new rewrite of JP 3-14, first published in 2002, was led by Space Command, working in tandem with the Space Force and the Joint Staff. A key attribute of the new document is that it focuses on aligning space operations doctrine with the Unified Command Plan, which sets out combatant command roles and responsibilities, as well as the doctrinal terms and concepts used by joint forces in domains. The primary goal was to “normalize” space as just another domain of warfare, something that the Defense Department has been working on as a matter of policy.

From Geographic to ‘Astrographic’: Defining SPACECOM’s AOR

The new JP 3-14 introduces the term “astrographic” to describe SPACECOM’s area of responsibility, which starts at 100 kilometers (54 nautical miles) above mean sea level.

The publication explains that the boundary between SPACECOM’s AOR and that of other combatant commands surrounds the Earth and is “defined by altitudes rather than a nations’ borders or latitude/longitudinal coordinates.” Further, JP 3-14 for the first time explicitly states that SPACECOM’s patch stretches into “exgeosynchronous” orbit — that is, beyond about 36,000 kilometers (about 19,000 nautical miles) — to include cislunar space, lunar orbit and the Earth-Moon Lagrange points.

Shaw said redefining SPACECOM’s remit is important conceptually for understanding its future space operations.

“Now that we are assigning a responsibility, and we have missions within that area of responsibility, we now are responsible for protecting, defending activities and/or capabilities and things that are happening in that AOR,” he said in his SFA talk. “And that has implications for supporting and supportive relationships [among combatant commands], for prioritization of resources, for synchronizing operations in our AOR with the terrestrial AOR in a broader global engagement. And so, we I think we’re still unpacking all that, what that’s going to mean for us in the future.”

‘Direct And Enabling Capabilities’

The new JP 3-14 also provides much more clarity than previous versions of how the Pentagon sees combat operations in space, a subject about which the Pentagon is very deliberate. For one, it for the first time embeds the military concepts of “direct and enabling capabilities” into space operations in a new way, according to a explanatory slide deck put together by SPACECOM and the Space Force to accompany the main document. The slides explain:

“Direct capabilities are fires which impact an adversary. Enabling capabilities do not inflict harm but serve as a force multiplier for friendly forces and support the potential of other instruments of national power. … The key discriminator between direct and enabling capabilities is whether it can impose a cost or not. If it does, it is a direct capability.”

The new JP 3-14 further lays out US military “space mission areas” for joint actions: “space domain awareness; offensive and defensive space operations; positioning, navigation, and timing; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; satellite communications; environmental monitoring; missile warning; nuclear detonation detection; spacecraft operations; and spacelift.” (Interestingly, it doesn’t break out electronic warfare as a separate mission area, as Space Force chief Gen. Chance Saltzman did in his recent announcement of new “Integrated Mission Deltas.”)

The document then maps of each to the type of capability — direct or enabling — that support it, providing a degrees of transparency into planned space combat that earlier versions did not. For example, the “satellite communications” mission area is “primarily supported by enabling capabilities”; whereas “offensive and defensive space operations” are supported primarily by “direct capabilities.”

Limiting Expectations of Space Dominance

In particular, Shaw pointed to the document’s new formulation of offensive space operations as aimed at the “suppression of enemy space capabilities” — a parallel to the Air Force’s “suppression of enemy air defenses” concept.

He explained that as the team worked on defining the term “space superiority,” they realized that determining when that goal is achieved is a complex task and one without a static answer.

“We really, really struggled to to be able to measure when you think you have space superiority,” Shaw said. “And we realized that … if the president ever said, ‘So, do you have space superiority?’ we’d have a hard time answering that question.”

Instead, the “new term” of “suppression of enemy space capabilities” was coined to allow commanders to measure “incremental progress against an adversary in the domain,” he said.

Indeed, what the new JP 3-14 acknowledges is that it is going to be impossible for the US military to overcome everything the enemy throws at US space assets, everywhere in the vast realm of the heavens at the same time. Instead, the goal should be achieving “a relative degree of control” of the operational environment when needed.

Shaw explained: “I think what it does is it realizes you’re not probably ever going to have dominance in all parts of the Earth-Moon system, in the electromagnetic arena as well as the physical arena, at all times. But we might be able to deprive an adversary of just enough of this, and just enough of that, and just enough of this — and we can measure that. And then we can say we’ve suppressed their space capabilities to a proper threshold that allows us to now have freedom of maneuver in the domain and in the terrestrial domains.”

Goodbye To Euphemisms

To underscore this more nuanced view of space combat and provide more transparency, the new JP 3-14 actually abandons the long-controversial terms “space control” and “counterspace” — both of which over many years have been used as code for offensive space operations and the weaponry to support them. The explanatory slide deck also acknowledged that space control “implies ownership,” which could be read as counter to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.

The term “negation,” which formerly was defined as measures to deceive, disrupt, degrade, deny or destroy enemy space assets, also went into the metaphorical garbage can.