AUGUST 30, 2024 – U.S. Space Command celebrated its fifth anniversary Aug. 29 and commemorated the milestone with discussions of the 11th combatant command’s achievements and goals for the future.
In a special edition of the Mitchell Institute’s Schriever Spacepower Series held in Colorado Springs, Aug. 28, USSPACECOM senior leaders participated in a panel on the organization’s growth since its establishment in 2019.
To kick off the live webinar, Gen. Stephen Whiting, USSPACECOM commander, remarked on the organization’s transformation into a fully operationally capable headquarters.
“While there’s a lot left to do – and part of the last five years was really figuring out what we all have to do collectively to defend our interests in space – we are so much better postured today than we were five years ago,” Whiting said.
In addition to meeting the requirements necessary to achieve full operational capability, part of the command’s maturation was articulating and gaining understanding for both its supporting and supported roles. Not only the need to provide combatant commanders with military spacepower and protect the joint force from space-enabled attack, but to be ready to receive support in its growingly congested and contested area of responsibility.
“In space, we are the supported command, and we have to have the right relationships with other combatant commands so that we can leverage them,” Whiting explained. “We can’t achieve all that we need to do without their capabilities, as well as our international partners, interagency partners, and others.”
USSPACECOM’s chief of staff, Rear Adm. William Pennington, and Royal Air Force Air Commodore Darren Whitely, the command’s deputy director of strategy, plans and policy, joined Whiting on the panel and echoed the importance of leveraging unique perspectives and diverse expertise.
When the command first stood up in 2019, Pennington noted that there were no components assigned to it. Five years later, each military branch presents warfighting forces to USSPACECOM for operational employment.
“What the services have invested in is the development of their force to have a greater understanding of space … to enable true multi-domain joint force and coalition-force warfare,” Pennington said.
He added that the fusion of those with space backgrounds and those maneuver backgrounds delivers a “total joint force solution.”
Whitley integrates a similar multi-domain, combined focus into his role as deputy director of the Policy and Plans Directorate. Recently, he said, greater emphasis has been placed on incorporating language that any joint warfighter could understand.
“Before, the [planning] annexes … didn’t really talk about effects, but to do globally integrated operations, you need globally integrated planning,” he said. “We worked hard to have the conversations with the other combatant commanders (Plans and Policy Directorates) of here’s our plan, here’s how it impacts you, here are the risks and the opportunities.”
In addition to synchronizing operational plans with the other combatant commands, Whitley cited Operation Olympic Defender, a U.S.-led initiative to optimize combined space operations, as a success story for international collaboration.
“When you join into a named operation, that makes a huge difference, and it acts as a forcing function then to try and align or ask for policy changes,” he said. “These policy changes have to be driven by a why … it’s not just a case of ‘we need to share more,’ but rather ‘we need to share more, because …”
Opened to allies and partners in 2019, OOD now includes the U.S., Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and earlier this year extended membership offers to France, Germany and New Zealand. The forum seeks to strengthen the collective abilities of like-minded nations to deter conflict in space.
Today, the command seeks to expand its warfighting advantage even further, which Whiting says is dependent upon intelligence-driven operations to understand the threats in the domain. To accomplish this, the command looks for opportunities to refine its unified operational picture through information-sharing with like-minded nations, commercial organizations, and intergovernmental agencies.
While these threats certainly include competitor counterspace capabilities, they also include space debris. As part of USSPACECOM’s commitment to responsible behaviors in space, the command continuously monitors the domain for possible conjunctions and communicates to owners and operators of potential risks to their satellites.
As the command celebrates five years, it also recognizes the incredible consequence of ensuring a conflict does not extend into space. Whiting remains confident though that, as long as spacefaring nations engage in safe and sustainable activities, humanity will remain free to continue the same exploration and discovery of space that has inspired him throughout his life.
“I was only just under two years old when Neil Armstrong walked out on the lunar surface … and I think in my lifetime, I’m going to see somebody walk out onto the Mars surface,” he said. “We want to make sure that no bad actors prevent that from happening, we want this exciting space future to be there for all mankind.”