By Paul D. Shinkman
VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, California – Gen. David Goldfein, the fighter pilot who now serves as the Air Force's top officer, had an unorthodox priority on his mind when he and the rest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sat down for their first meeting with President Donald Trump on Jan. 27 to outline for the incoming commander in chief their top operational concerns.
"We talked about space more than any other topic," Goldfein recalls from that session in "the Tank," the Pentagon's secure facility for top-level meetings, "because there's this debate going on now, and will go on for the remainder of this year: Where are we headed in the business of space?"
The debate centers on the 73 trillion cubic miles spanning everything from a few hundred miles above the Earth's surface to the farthest reaching satellites 22,000 miles out. It's a domain over which the U.S. claims it must continue to be the principal governing power if space is to remain a peaceful commons. And it involves both protecting orbiting U.S. assets as well as ensuring the safety of the vital military and commercial information they convey to Earth.
Losing U.S. dominance in space could have wide-reaching effects, American officials fear, from limiting the ability to guide ships, foot patrols, manned jets, drones or missiles toward precision targets, to communicating with and saving wounded soldiers in the deep hinterlands of the Afghan Hindu Kush mountains, to more benign matters, like disrupting GPS systems that direct millions of American commuters and support domestic farmers who rely on them to steer combines in perfectly straight lines and maximize their crop yields.
The question facing the new administration is how far the U.S. should proceed in preparing for military action against either U.S. interests in space or the purpose of those missions, while stopping short of provoking an arms race from countries like Russia and China. They're among other world powers contemplating an alternative future for space, one in which they would have the ability to deny America's free movement and solidify their own positions as global military and economic contenders.
Discussions of war above the atmosphere often lead to breathless predictions about space-age battles. The military is not anticipating – at least in the near future – astronauts fighting cosmonauts with laser guns. But that doesn't mean officials aren't concerned about aggression there.
In 2007, China tested an anti-satellite missile and successfully destroyed one of its orbiting weather satellites. It was a message to the world of its new capabilities and a grave concern to the U.S. military. Incidents like these are in part allowed due to relatively few international laws or rules governing space operations. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty sets a broad standard for peaceful activities in space but limits its strict prohibitions only to forbidding the deployment of nuclear weapons there. It is unspecific about other kinds of weapons, or rules for non-state actors like private companies.
In the unlikely event that, say, a Russian or Chinese satellite attacked a U.S. satellite, the American response would not center on firing back at it, says Navy Rear Adm. Brian Brown, deputy commander of the military's Joint Functional Component Command for Space, a key headquarters for monitoring and tracking space operations based here. Retribution in this hypothetical scenario would more likely take the form of a U.S. bomber attacking the foreign base that commanded those satellites.
"There's no such thing as a space war," Brown says. "There would not be a war that just stays in space. The minute a conflict extends to space … it starts to affect all domains."
When asked about U.S. capabilities to deploy weapons in space, Brown, Goldfein and other U.S. officials are tight-lipped.
"The U.S. is not seeking to weaponize space," a defense official said. "The U.S. does not have any kinetic anti-satellite capabilities."
"We do not want, and it would be bad for all the world's citizens, to have a conflict that extends to space," Brown says. "We're trying to put forth a posture and operate in a way where potential adversaries don't see the benefit of taking a war fight to space."
The Air Force's actual concerns center on China and Russia's ambitions, including current attempts at interfering with communications between satellites and other military machinery, like ships in the Pacific or planes flying over Syria. Brown's headquarters investigates incidents of "electromagnetic interference" every day, the large preponderance of which are accidental or benign but could also be considered as much of a space-based attack as an outright missile launch against a satellite.
Aside from ground-based jammers or other forms of purposeful interference, the Air Force also worries about how competing powers might catch up to U.S. capabilities in space, specifically the tools developed in recent decades that integrate space-based satellite imaging and communications into battles and intelligence operations occurring in real time on continents far away.
"Our competitors out there have been watching the way we fight over the last 26 years. And they see our asymmetric advantage that very often comes from capabilities in space," Goldfein says. "They're looking for ways to deny that to us."
The U.S. demonstrated how it's able to wield its space dominance on the battlefield during the Gulf War, the first time it used satellites to help guide its planes and the bombs they dropped onto precisely surveyed targets.
Now the military is faced with a tricky challenge: How does it ensure control of space according to its vision – one that centers on cooperation with allied partners and which must be protected from a potential military threat – without goading China and Russia, or even Iran and North Korea into preparing for a space war under the claim it's in their self-interest to protect their people?
Last week, Goldfein toured some of the military's central hubs for space operations, including the space command and launch facilities here, as well as an inconspicuous base in downtown Los Angeles. It occupies a mere city block but houses the Air Force Space Command's Space and Missile Systems Center, managing the procurement and development of some of the most advanced space equipment the U.S. military fields.
The military, and particularly the Air Force, faces challenges in the coming years if it will maintain relevance in space. First among these is weaning itself off the RD-180 engine, a critical Russian-built component of the rockets the military has used since the retirement of the U.S. space shuttle fleet. Deteriorating relations with Russia have complicated the arrangement. When the engine breaks, for example, the rocket's American manufacturer contacts the Russian builders, who send a Russian engineer to the launch pad under ever-heightening security to make repairs or replacements. Congress has mandated the military find a replacement for the rocket by 2022, a prospect that currently centers on competition from a series of private contractors, including United Launch Alliance and Elon Musk's space venture SpaceX.
Another concern for Goldfein has been how to refer to his service's role in space. In remarks in Washington, D.C., at the Air Force Association this week, the general referred to space as a "warfighting domain" – a term of art the military uses to describe areas where conflict takes place but also a standard term for young troops to understand the gravity of where they're operating. It's an issue at the Air Force's schoolhouses for trainees in space operations here, where instructors say they stress to trainees that they're as much a part of fighting wars as pilots. It's a transition that cyber operators most recently have had to bridge.
"Hopefully in that process we'll keep busting down the barriers and the moats that have allowed space and air to actually become separate domains. The reality is, in the business of warfighting, they're completely connected," Goldfein says.
It's a gamble, however, that Russia and China won't hear "warfighting" and interpret it as a U.S. desire to initiate a conflict among the stars.
Among the military's attempts to help potential adversaries understand are tactics that focus on openness, like the military-sponsored space-track.org satellite monitoring website, or a strategy to build so many groupings of satellites – known as "constellations" – that it would prove too expensive for an adversary to try to knock them out.
America's ambitions now center on standardizing how responsible countries should behave in space – with rules like the appropriate distance between satellites, for example – and deploying far-reaching surveillance satellites to the deepest reaches of Earth's orbit to act as a "neighborhood watch." The U.S. incorporates allied partners, like Canada, the U.K. and Australia, who send officers to work in space headquarters like the one based here, and has 67 sharing agreements for space operations, 11 of which are with foreign countries, two with non-governmental organizations and the rest with commercial partners.
The symbolic alliances also have practical benefits: Australia recently set up a radar station at Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt, at the north-westernmost corner of the country, allowing it to monitor Chinese rocket and missile launches.
They're up against renewed vigor from familiar adversaries. Russia announced last year it would spend more than $20 billion in its space program, which continues to ferry Americans and supplies to the International Space Station, and it's currently investing in developing new rockets after a series of launch failures.
Trump and his staff were receptive to Goldfein's ambitions for space, the general says. The president announced in January he would place particular focus on missile defense.
"I'm going to be in this dialogue as chief of staff, I imagine, more than any other time in the U.S. Air Force mission. I think that's going to dominate my time as chief," Goldfein says. "And I love that."
Paul D. Shinkman is a national security reporter for U.S. News & World Report. You can follow him on Twitter or reach him at pshinkman@usnews.com
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