Exclusive: US General Lays Battle Plan to Avoid A War in Space That No One May Win

As geopolitical tensions on Earth threaten to spread beyond the atmosphere, the head of the U.S. military's newest branch tells Newsweek in an exclusive interview how he plans to deter a conflict from erupting in space, including through the use of force on the planet and beyond.

Should such an extraterrestrial war erupt, he warns, it has the potential to be even more destructive than traditional air, land and sea theaters, and could affect civilian life for ages to come.

"If, in time of war, you were to shoot down an aircraft, it falls out of the domain. If you sink a ship, it falls out of the sea lane," General Chance Saltzman, chief of the U.S. Space Force, told Newsweek. "If you shoot down a satellite, it stays on orbit for hundreds of years, and that debris could cause problems and is likely to cause problems, especially as it grows over the course of a war, for all of the orbits."

"So, warfare in space could literally foul that global commons for generations," he added.

Unlike the volatile waters of the Persian Gulf or the war-ravaged skies above Ukraine, there is no substitute for public or private operators in orbit, so "if space becomes a combat area of responsibility, commercial vendors will be in it," Saltzman said. "There's no avoiding it."

Such high stakes entail Space Force to adopt a posture in which it is prepared to take preemptive measures to prevent such a disastrous scenario from becoming reality.

"We have to be able to attribute irresponsible behavior that could lead to damage, that's our responsibility," Saltzman said. "And then we have to have credible responses so that adversaries don't even make the first move, because they know there will be consequences to those actions."

"All of that is your Space Force trying to deter the conflict," he added. "So, it's protection before there's a need to protect, saying, 'We can't afford it.' No one can afford a conflict that extends into space."

And yet the establishment of Space Force in December 2019 has cemented the status of the so-called "final frontier" as a veritable warfighting domain, one whose latent risks remain untested in actual combat. While the Air Force has wielded space-based capabilities to support terrestrial operations for decades and four nations, including the United States, Russia, China and India, have tested anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons, a clash has yet to erupt beyond the planet's atmosphere.

At just roughly 8,700 personnel, however, the U.S. Space Force is by far the smallest branch of the U.S. Armed Forces, despite being tasked with an infinitely expanding domain.

To approach this unique challenge, Saltzman, only the second individual to ever hold his position, has developed a novel "theory of success" toward establishing "space superiority." He calls it "competitive endurance," and identifies three tenets to achieve it.

The first tenet requires a comprehensive surveillance regime of sensors, including both optical telescopes and radars, and data collection to monitor space-based activities in real time and thus "avoid operational surprise." Through this approach, any potential risks would be identified and attributed in order to "apply some level of pressure that might deter irresponsible behavior."

Secondly, Space Force is channeling the age-old deterrence strategy of seeking new technologies and methods that would neutralize offensive actions. Just as past innovations from castle walls and siege towers to machine guns and armored vehicles brought paradigm shifts to battlefield planning, Saltzman said efforts were being made to "deny first-mover advantage" in space.

As he pointed out, however, "the offense has the advantage" right now in space due to the vulnerable and predictable nature of satellite movement. His answer is to create a more resilient network consisting of not only several key installations, but hundreds, thus having "changed the targeting calculus for the adversary" and rebalancing the cost-benefit equation of ASAT operations in the midst of a conflict.

The third and final tenet of Saltzman's "competitive endurance" theory consists of taking out enemy capabilities, and doing so in a way that mitigates the damage wrought by a kinetic confrontation more than 100 miles above the Earth's surface. Already, President Joe Biden's administration announced in April of last year a voluntary restriction of ASAT tests, and Saltzman said Space Force was exploring less explosive options.

"We want to pursue reversible techniques for denying, we want to use electronic warfare instead of kinetic capabilities," Saltzman said. "We recognize we're going to have to disrupt what they can do, but we want to do it in a responsible manner so that we don't have a Pyrrhic victory."

But kinetic options are available to target enemy capabilities originating on Earth.

"We put the military operations where we have the advantage and its land, sea and air," Saltzman said. "Once things get to a no-kidding military engagement, the Space Force's job is to basically set the conditions so that our joint force can do closer the planet what it needs to do."

U.S. Space Force constitutes the world's only independent service of its kind. Despite the autonomy it has gained from the U.S. Air Force, it continues to pursue strategies toward working in concert with fellow branches of the U.S. military.

Saltzman said that "at the minimum level of engagement" in line with this endeavor is "engagement," followed by "collaboration," which he said constitutes day-to-day activities such as training and funding. But "integration," he said, is the true goal.

"We are working hard to fully integrate across the whole joint force and the demand signal from the joint force," Saltzman said, "because of how much they recognize that they need our capabilities, and they need us to deny the adversary their capabilities."

While the U.S. Space Force may be unique, its domain has long attracted the attention of international militaries.

The history of weapons flying through space dates back to Nazi Germany's World War II-era missile program. Russia was the first nation to establish an independent space force in 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, though the service was later merged with its air force in 2015. That same year, the Chinese People's Liberation Army established the Strategic Support Force with a space component, and a growing number of nations including France, India and Spain have also developed space-focused military entities.

With space becoming a more popular and accessible domain, Saltzman identified another key component of the U.S. military's strategy in this emerging theater.

"One of the real asymmetric advantages the United States has is our tremendous network of partners and allies," Saltzman said. "We build a coalition like nobody's business, and I think that's because largely our motives are consistent with what the international community wants to see—peace, stability and prosperity for everybody.

"And so, therefore, when somebody works against that, and we say, 'Hey, we need to stop them,' there are others that join in behind us," he added.

In 2020, NATO Allied Air Command established the NATO Space Center to coordinate the activities of the now-31-nation bloc in space. The following year, the transatlantic coalition asserted that attacks in space could serve as grounds to trigger NATO's Article 5 collective defense clause.

"You're in against all of us, not just one of us," Saltzman said. "And I think that changes the decision calculus about what you're willing to do in terms of violence against a particular country."

But the threat of conflict along with all the associated risks remains very real.

Despite the strides made by the U.S. military in utilizing space for combat, Saltzman said that "the most significant change that has occurred is our strategic competitors saw the tremendous advantage that we were getting out of space and they saw it as an asymmetric way to affect our military operations."

Saltzman said the logic behind the thinking of U.S. adversaries is, "if we can deny these Americans the use of space, they are going to struggle to meet other objectives."

"And to some degree, they're right," Saltzman explained. "It will be different, because we've come to count on these space capabilities, particularly satellite communications and precision navigation and timing, for example."

"And so, they built weapons to disrupt, degrade, deny and now destroy those satellite capabilities," he said. "So now not only do we have to provide those services to the joint force, but now we have to figure out how to protect them, so that they're always available, even if the adversary tries to do something."

Saltzman cites the example of the Asia-Pacific region, an area in which the U.S. has increasingly focused its military posture, especially in relation to the growing power of China. Located thousands of miles away from the U.S. mainland, he said operations here create "a distance problem" to which "space-enabled tracking and targeting" is the only solution.

"And so now if we're going to actually achieve those military objectives, we have to take out, deny, disrupt, degrade their ability to perform space-based targeting of our capabilities," Saltzman said. "This is traditional warfare."