COLORADO SPRINGS — The Space Force today released an unclassified version of long-awaited Objective Force plan for the next 15 years, along with a companion Future Operating Environment — two documents numbering 160 pages that, taken together, call for a greatly expanded service force structure by 2040.
“The Objective Force we’re projecting calls for more Guardians — officers, enlisted and civilians — necessary to perform the new missions and the operations tempo being asked of the Space Force,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman told the annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.
“To meet mission requirements in the future threat environment, the Space Force must grow significantly over the next five to 10 years: thousands more Guardians in our end strength, and with equal importance, the infrastructure, the bases, the training structure to support that growth,” he said.
The Objective Force plan further calls for new satellites and space systems for missions ranging from positioning, navigation and timing (PNT), to low latency data transfer, to missile defense and orbital warfare.
The Objective Force projections are built in five-year increments for eight major mission areas, Saltzman told reporters, with the first five years reflective of the Space Force’s five-year budget projection built into its recently-released fiscal 2027 funding request.
The purpose of the document “is to say, this is what we expect in terms of delivery of capabilities,” he said. “So, I think you would see [we] kind of chunked it into three different epochs. There’s the next five years, for which you see good budgeting and programming information. There’s the five years that follow that, and there’s the five years that get us to 2040.”
Saltzman would not provide a specific number of Guardians foreseen as necessary by 2040, explaining that it will depend on a number of factors, including how new missions evolve. However, the Objective Force plan calls for doubling end strength over the next 10 years. A Space Force spokesperson said that as of a few days ago, the total number of Guardians is 15,094, 10,198 of them military.
Saltzman said that the Objective Force plan will be overhauled every five years, but that it also will be refined every year in alignment with the annual budget.
Future Threat Assesment
The Space Force has been working on the duo of documents for about a year, and originally had intended to release them by the end of 2025.
“All of the delay is my fault, mostly because it’s a baseline document, and I was a pretty demanding customer,” Saltzman said.
The report represents a best guess by the Space Force of what it will face in orbit over the next 15 years as the capabilities of other nations, especially potential adversaries, evolve.
“The Future Operating Environment is not an intelligence assessment, and it doesn’t describe specific threat systems or define military solutions. Instead, it’s a conceptual view of a future where our space superiority efforts must contend with new technologies, new threats, new missions and new ways of war,” Saltzman said.
For example, the Future Operating Environment projects a US government satellite fleet numbering 30,246 in 2040, up from 7,291 in 2025. It assesses that China will have 20,913 birds on orbit by 2040, up from 1,871. Russia is seen as a distant third space player by 2040, with only 1,488 satellites up from 407 in 2025.
The Objective Force plan, in turn, builds upon those projections to lay out a detailed, mission-by-mission plan for how the Space Force can keep its edge in that evolving environment. Those mission areas include Space Control, Missile Warning and Tracking, Navigation Warfare, Satellite Communication (SATCOM), Space-Based Sensing and Targeting, and Space Access. Another set of missions fall under what the service calls “Enabling Functions:” Command and Control (C2), Cyber Operations and Space Domain Awareness.
Among the highlights of the mission-specific plans:
Orbital/Electronic Warfare. Orbital and electronic warfare are characterized by the service as a key part of the Space Control mission. The Space Force’s projections of its needs for orbital warfare and electronic warfare are only included in the classified version of the Objective Force document, but Saltzman confirmed that the service wants new kit for orbital warfare.
“We will need new assets working very closely with US Space Command, because they generally own the overall warfare mission,” he said.
The Objective Force plan explains that when defensive measures for the satellite fleet are “insufficient” the service “must integrate offensive and defensive counterspace capabilities” across the Orbital, Electronic and Cyber missions, “in direct support of Joint Force maneuver and fires.
“By 2040, the Space Force will move beyond near-term attrition-based methods to a mature warfighting approach centered on campaigning, maneuver, and reconstitution that preserves strategic advantage without driving unnecessary escalation,” it adds.
Space-Based Sensing and Targeting (SBST). The emerging missions of tracking ground and airborne targets fall in this mission set, with a goal of building “a resilient, hybrid family of systems capable of closing long-range kill chains in a contested environment,” the Objective Force plan says.
“For the first time, Guardians will operate MTI [Moving Target Indication] systems that directly enable lethal fires in all domains, and the Space Force must accomplish sufficient work to ensure their readiness and integration into the Joint Force,” the document states. It adds that between now and 2035, the service “will field the second and third generation of systems.”
Satellite Navigation. The Objective Force plan explains that in the future, the service will need to ensure that “at least 88%” of its PNT constellation must be “operationally available more than 98% of the time” in the face of advanced adversary jamming and spoofing capabilities. To achieve this, the Space Force wants to build a new satellite constellation called NM-4 to augment updated Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, as well as utilizing allied and commercial PNT satellites.
Modernizing the current GPS program “requires increasing aggregate constellation size by pursuing a lower cost, simplified satellite vehicle in the near-term. Designated NM-4, this system will accompany the legacy longer-life GPS-IIIF … Beyond that, the service will develop the architecture and system design for a resilient fourth generation (i.e., Gen 4) system for delivery in the 2040 timeframe,” the plan states. The document shows that the Space Force intends to “build and launch” the new NM-4 birds in 2035.
SATCOM. The Space Force’s SATCOM plans center on bringing to fruition the emerging Space Data Network (SDN) that will serve as a sprawling internet in space, linking military and commercial communications birds across all orbits. The “cornerstone” of the network is a “backbone” for data transport in low Earth orbit. It also will include a “family of systems” that “provides the ability to support legacy narrowband users who rely on integrated broadcast or low-bandwidth data, voice, or messaging services,” the document explains, as well as broadband users requiring higher bandwidth.
Missile Warning, Tracking and Defense. “[T]he Space Force must modernize its approach to MWT, layering distinct missile warning and missile tracking systems into a resilient capability to warn for and defend against missile attacks. Today, the MWT mission area largely revolves around providing crucial tipping and cueing to missile defense forces. In the future, that data will also enable fire control for interceptors,” the Objective Force plan states.
“Building on MWT, missile defense is an emerging mission set to directly engage and destroy a missile threat before it can reach its intended target. Space Force capabilities must evolve to enable and potentially execute future missile defense missions,” it adds. However, the document notes that “the specific requirements necessary to accomplish fire control remain uncertain. If the Space Force builds space-based interceptors or supports their employment, it should undertake a focused study into the specification required to do so.”