Guarding the final frontier
Space Force has faced skepticism and mockery since its 2019 founding, said Jon Gertner in The New York Times Magazine. But the mission of this secretive military branch is more important than ever.
CHIEF MASTER SGT. Ron Lerch of the U.S. Space Force sat down in his office in Los Angeles one morning in September to deliver a briefing known as a threat assessment. The current “threats” in space are less scifi than you might expect, but there are a surprising number of them: At least 44,500 space objects now circle Earth, including 9,000 active satellites and 19,000 significant pieces of debris.
What’s most concerning isn’t the swarm of satellites but the types. “We know that there are kinetic kill vehicles,” Lerch said—for example, a Russian “nesting doll” satellite, in which a big satellite releases a tiny one and the tiny one releases a mechanism that can strike and damage another satellite. There are machines with the ability to cast nets and extend grappling hooks, too. China, whose presence in space now far outpaces Russia’s, is launching unmanned “space planes” into orbit, testing potentially unbreakable quantum communication links and adding AI capabilities to satellites. In Lerch’s assessment, space looked less like a grand “new ocean” for exploration—phrasing meant to induce wonder that has lingered from the Kennedy administration—and more like a robotic battlefield, where the conflicts raging on Earth would soon extend ever upward.
The Space Force, the sixth and newest branch of the U.S. military, was authorized by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump in December 2019. Its creation was not a partisan endeavor, though Trump has boasted that the idea for the organization was his alone. The initiative had in fact been shaped within the armed forces and Congress over the previous 25 years, based on the premise that as satellite and space technologies evolved, America’s military organizations had to change as well.
At its incarnation, the Space Force was an assemblage of programs and teams that already existed, mainly as entities within the Air Force. The new directive groups space endeavors under a central chain of command and authorizes its leaders to chart a unified future.
From the start, the Space Force had detractors. Air Force officials wondered if it was necessary, while some political observers believed that it signified the start of a dangerous (and expensive) militarization of another realm. What seemed harder to argue against was how nearly every aspect of modern warfare and defense— intelligence, surveillance, communications, operations, missile detection—has come to rely on links to orbiting satellites. The recent battles in Eastern Europe, in which Russia has tried to disrupt Ukraine’s space-borne communication systems, are a case in point. And yet the strategic exploitation of space now extends well beyond military concerns. Satellite phone systems have become widespread. Positioning and timing satellites, such as GPS (now overseen by the Space Force), allow for digital mapping, navigation, banking and agricultural management. Modern life is reliant on space technologies to an extent that an interruption would create profound economic and social distress.
The work of the Space Force is by its nature highly sensitive, often classified, and mostly out of sight. This leaves the organization in a battle for visibility and, at times, viability. Some members of the force— guardians, as they’re called—told me that even now they find themselves bumping into members of other branches of the military who see their arm patches and ask, in earnest, “Space Force, is that a real thing?” The Steve Carell Netflix comedy series, which members of the actual Space Force sometimes argue is neither good nor funny, doesn’t help their cause.
It likewise doesn’t capture their seriousness of purpose. For the moment, the force has taken up a problem not often contemplated outside science fiction: How do you fight a war in space, or a war on Earth that expands into space? And even if you’re ready to fight, how do you make sure you don’t have a space war in the first place?
THE SPACE FORCE’S operations division is headquartered on the southeastern side of Colorado Springs, in a massive three-story building within the guarded perimeter of Peterson Space Force Base. The office’s inner workings are highly secure and secretive; the force, as one security analyst told me, has a larger proportion of its budget—around $26 billion this year—dedicated to classified spending than any other branch of the military. Visitors to headquarters are not allowed to bring electronic devices or walk unescorted inside. All told, the Space Force has about 8,600 military guardians and about 5,000 civilian guardians.
Guardians tend to think of the realm they patrol as a kind of structured multilevel terrain—Earth as being surrounded by three highways, or three rings. The nearest level, low Earth orbit (LEO), is host to constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink network and the International Space Station, which moves about 250 miles above us at 17,500 miles per hour. A medium Earth orbit (MEO), between 1,200 and 22,000 miles above, is where GPS satellites circle. At the highest ring—at least for now—is a track known as “geosynchronous” orbit (GEO), because an object in such an orbit keeps pace with Earth’s rotation. This band is home to DirectTV satellites, weathertracking instruments from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and crucial Defense Department communication links.
It’s a technological zoo up there. The satellite mix is foreign and domestic, young and old, sinister and peaceful. The technologies are all different sizes, flying at different speeds and altitudes. The challenge for the force is to monitor all movement but also to track the threatening presence of debris,
some of which is naturally occurring (tiny rocks, for instance) and some of which has human origins (like shards of old rockets).
Keeping track of 44,500 items moving around the planet, along with new arrivals that slip into orbit nearly every week, poses a multidimensional task: Who launched these machines? Why? What could they do? “We need to know what’s up there, where is it going, and why we should be concerned,” Col. Bryon McClain of the Space Force told me. This goal, known as spacedomain awareness, has become one of the force’s overarching priorities. There are enormous challenges in creating a system of constant observation and making sense of so much data.
What constitutes threatening activities in orbit, moreover, and what might necessitate a strategic response is not always clear. In truth, space has few unquestioned laws apart from those relating to gravity. A treaty from the late 1960s, signed by most of the major nations on Earth, prohibits the use of nuclear weapons in space and designates the moon for peaceful purposes. But recently, I was told, satellites from foreign adversaries have been coming close to machines from the United States and its allies. The treaty says nothing about such provocations—or about grappling hooks, nesting dolls, and cyberwarfare.
Space Force leaders readily describe their guardians as working toward a state of combat readiness, even as they hope an era of actual conflict never arrives. In October, I went to the Pentagon to meet with Gen. Chance Saltzman, the chief of space operations and the Space Force’s highest-ranking officer. Saltzman remarked that several decades back, when he began working with satellites in the Air Force, the notion that there could be combat losses in space was not part of the conversation. But “those are discussions now,” he told me, “because both the Chinese and the Russians have demonstrated operational capabilities that truly placed those assets at risk.”
In 2007, China’s decision to test an ASAT anti-satellite missile to destroy one of its own satellites sent shock waves through the U.S. military and created a vast field of debris. A similar Russian tactic, in 2021, generated more than 1,500 fragments and led Secretary of State Antony Blinken to describe the act as “recklessly conducted.” The Space Force’s own squadrons, Saltzman told me, were still tracking pieces of junk that date to the 2007 explosion. “You know, the other domains kind of clean themselves up after war,” Saltzman said. “You shoot an airplane down, it falls out of the sky. Ships sink out of the sea lanes. Even on land, you bring the bulldozers in and you move things around. But space doesn’t heal itself.”
I asked Saltzman what he and his colleagues had learned from observing the war in Ukraine. With a caveat that the fighting is hardly over—“it could still be a catastrophe on a grand scale,” he said—he pointed to several crucial events. The first was how one of Russia’s earliest endeavors was to deny Ukrainian troops access to a satellite communications system they relied upon, known as Viasat, which is stationed in the distant geosynchronous orbital belt. “And they did it with a cyberattack against the ground infrastructure,” he said. “So you attack the ground network to achieve the space effect you want.”
Another crucial point came after that attack—Ukraine’s decision to go to a commercial vendor, SpaceX, and use its Starlink system for combat communications. Here the lesson was twofold. First, that what Saltzman called “commercial augmentation” could prove vital in a crisis. As important, he added, Starlink—a configuration of hundreds of “proliferated” small satellites flying in low Earth orbit—has proved hard to bring down. And the takeaway is that proliferated systems of many small machines in low orbit can be more technologically resilient to hacking and disruption than a few big machines in higher orbits.
“If I have two or three satellite communications doing nuclear command and control, maybe those are targets,” he explained. “But if I take nuclear command and control and spread it across 400 satellites that are zipping over the horizon [every] 15 minutes, there’s a targeting problem. How many satellites do I have to shoot down now to take out the U.S. nuclear command and control?”
If an adversary believes that it cannot achieve a military objective, Saltzman remarked, it will hesitate to cross “a threshold of violence.” No conflicts. No debris. No crisis.
THERE IS A darker side that accompanies a future of rampant growth. As space becomes commercialized, it increasingly becomes a geopolitical arena for competition too. Just as China launched a space plane that stayed aloft for months, so has the U.S. Space Force. Just as competitors develop satellites that make close and unnerving approaches to our satellites, so does the U.S. Space Force. With so many launches now planned, and so many designs for enigmatic satellites in the works, it becomes hard not to wonder if the United States will become engaged in a new arms race. Or to ask if it already has.
In 1950, a political scientist named
John Herz introduced the term “security dilemma,” noting that in international affairs, a state concerned with “being attacked, subjected, dominated, or annihilated” by others can be drawn into a “vicious circle” of building up its defenses. One implication of this, a political scientist named Robert Jervis later posited, is that “one state’s gain in security inadvertently threatens others.” When I asked Saltzman if this was a concern, he acknowledged that it was, but he also said that the security dilemma was a phenomenon that probably dated back thousands of years. Weapons are not inherently offensive or defensive, Saltzman maintained. “Weapons are just weapons. And the operations that you choose to undertake with those weapons makes them more offensive or defensive.”
The important question, as he saw it, was this: At what point does a buildup of defensive weapons in space constitute an ability to conduct offensive operations so that someone else feels threatened? “There is a balance here,” he said. “And this is about stability management. What actions can we take to protect ourselves before we start to cross the line and maybe create a security dilemma?” The line, he suggested—harder to find in space, no doubt, and at this point not clearly defined—had not yet been crossed.
Adapted from an article that originally appeared in The New York Times Magazine. Used with permission.