WASHINGTON — The Defense Department should commission an independent “roles and missions” review “across the national security enterprise,” and invest in “cross-domain” capabilities to ensure that the US military can achieve “space superiority,” argues a new report from the Mitchell Institute.
“We’ve had two major space warfighting organization stood up in the last six years, US Space Command and US Space Force, and there have been no check ins, no checks and balances, no check ups, no checkouts to see if we are getting it right,” said author Jennifer Reeves, a retired Air Force colonel now a senior resident fellow for space studies at Mitchell.
“I am not sure what the appetite [for a review at DoD] is,” she said at a webinar today to release the report, Charting a Path to Space Superiority: The Cross-Domain Imperative. “But what I am absolutely saying is that it needs to be done.”
Reeves elaborated that the roles and missions review is critical in order to find, and fill, “gaps and seams,” in how DoD is preparing to uphold space superiority, as well as to avoid duplication of effort.
As she and other Mitchell Institute authors have done in the past, Reeves’ paper takes aim in particular at the Army’s plans to beef up its own counterspace operations.
It stresses that while other services beside the Space Force “should absolutely own and [operate] counterspace capabilities,” those capabilities must be subject to the command and control of Space Command (SPACECOM). “Without this, space control operations to supposedly support specific tactical ground operations could potentially undercut larger or other operations in the space domain,” the report adds.
The roles and missions review should further take a hard look at the break out of responsibility between SPACECOM, the Space Force and the Intelligence Community (IC), Reeves told the webinar.
The lines of demarcation between the Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency have been the subject of debate going back to the creation of the service in 2019.
Reeves said that while the IC agencies provide much needed data and products, the question is their ability to meet tactical needs.
“There is an issue, though, that these capabilities increasingly carry tactical and operational consequences for the joint warfighters. And there seems to be, at least now, a little bit of a mismatch, and certainly has the potential to grow in the future, that those products are not necessarily optimized for the speed that is needed, for the classification, sort of the releasability of it,” she said.
With regard to investment in new capabilities, the report argues that first and foremost all the military services should be contributing to space domain awareness by integrating their assets into SPACECOM systems for monitoring the heavens and warning of potential attacks.
In addition, the paper recommends new funds for laser technologies to provide “secure and survivable high-bandwidth communications links,” as well as anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons including “direct-ascent, laser and electronic warfare capabilities” fielded not just by the Space Force, but also by the Air Force, Army and Navy for use by SPACECOM in a conflict.
Finally, the paper calls upon the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to increase the number and types of joint exercises, education and training programs focused on space superiority.