Space Force Looks to Go Big on Commercial: ‘Everything’s on the Table’

April 10, 2025 | By Greg Hadley

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—Space Force acquisition leaders were already looking to see if they could shift some of their biggest programs to use commercial services or technology, but one of President Donald Trump’s executive orders, signed April 9, that could super-charge that effort.

Now, the service’s vision for going beyond conventional Pentagon-industry partnerships has an even greater sense of urgency, those leaders said at the Space Symposium.

“It’s a change in our culture, and it’s a change in our thinking,” Lt. Gen. Philip A. Garrant, head of Space Systems Command, said of the emphasis on commercial space capabilities. “It goes all the way back to the programming piece as we develop the budgets, because if we don’t pre-plan it, by the time it gets into their strategy, it’s too late. The PEOs need to make sure strategy is included as a forethought, not as an afterthought. That’s when the real power is going to happen. And [as] you’re seeing, we’re finally putting our money where the mouth is.”

The Space Force’s embrace of commercial has been a long time coming. A year ago, leaders unveiled their first Commercial Space Strategy after months of work, pledging to build “hybrid architectures” of government, allied, and commercial satellites and systems across a wide range of missions.

By the end of the 2024, Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael A. Guetlein and then-service acquisition executive Frank Calvelli issued guidance to program executive officers, said Col. Rich Kniseley, head of the Commercial Space Office: “Look over their mission area requirements and … see which ones of those can we now move over to commercial, international, and what has to be purpose-built,” Kniseley said.

Calvelli left his seat at the change in administrations, but his military deputy, Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, took things a step further in early 2025, when he assumed the role of acting SAE.

“Every major program at SSC, all the traditional programs, have taken an excursion. They’re not stopping the program of record, but they’ve taken a side excursion,” Garrant said. “And the ask was, ‘if I, Gen. Purdy, were to cancel your program, how would you meet your requirements purely commercial?’

“So in my mind, it’s a fantastic exercise. It nests right with the commercial strategy. It’s aligned with the pivot we’re trying to make. And everything’s on the table. … Nobody got a pass. Everybody has to do this excursion of, ‘Could I start over and meet my requirements commercially?’” The results of those drills aren’t in yet, but “this wasn’t just an academic exercise.”

Trump’s executive order, aimed at modernizing and reforming the notoriously slow Pentagon acquisition process, serves as an “exclamation point” to the message Space Force leaders had been sending, Kniseley said. It calls for the Pentagon to develop a plan for speeding up acquisition, to include a “first preference for commercial solutions.”

In some areas, the Space Force and its predecessor organizations have already shown they can do it. Todd Gossett, an executive with satellite communications provider SES Space & Defense, said during a panel discussion that SATCOM companies have “seen, over the past decade, a much more purposeful integration of these commercial capabilities into the military alongside military purpose-built capabilities and what we now call hybrid space architecture.”

A notional rendering of a mesh network in space. Photo Credit: Northrop Grumman

In a roundtable with reporters, Charlotte Gerhart, deputy director of military communications and position, navigation, and timing at SSC, confirmed that approach, saying she and her team are “continuously looking [at] ‘what can we pull in? How can we be faster and less expensive and more capable by pulling in the newest, latest technology commercial uses?’”

Still, the U.S. military space enterprise is known for taking decades and spending billions of dollars to procure its own exquisite, custom systems. Simply the possibility of canceling contracts that are years along, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, is a major shift.

A “frozen middle” of procurement officers who resist a more flexible, commercial-friendly approach doesn’t help, Gossett said.

Kniseley, himself a career acquisition officer, agreed, saying program managers are inclined to focus on cost, schedule, and performance without considering commercial alternatives.

Those alternatives may not fulfill every requirement in a program, Kniseley noted, but they can speed help to warfighters in the field. That alone makes them valuable as the U.S. races to keep pace with its adversaries, said Air Force Col. Eddie Ferguson, chief of advanced warfighter capabilities and resources analysis division at U.S. Space Command.

“We have a 2027 timeframe that [SPACECOM Commander Gen. Stephen N. Whiting] gave us,” he said. That demands using commercial partnerships, “preferably with dual-use technologies, because that’s what’s going to deliver in the timeframe that we’re looking at.”

There are other hurdles besides procurement officer inertia, though.

Commercial leaders frequently tout the innovation of American industry, but need to show they can meet the stressing demands of the military, which often go beyond what’s required for a commercial product.

“The challenge is, can you develop enough trust? Because most of us are coming from Silicon Valley,” or other non-traditional backgrounds,” said Joe Morrison, general manager of remote sensing at Umbra, a sensing and imaging firm. “There’s been a lot of big promises, [but] a lot of under-delivery. Can you trust us enough to share with us what your actual needs are?”

Once the government does that, industry still needs to fulfill its own, commercial purposes.

“It is a fundamental tension in the relationship where we are developing something that we think is the best way to solve a problem, and may be different than what a government customer has asked for or has envisioned for that need,” said Michael Madrid, chief growth officer at Starfish Space, a satellite servicing company.

The military, on the other hand, can’t afford to rely on a company that might go out of business or want to pull out of an agreement when the fighting starts and their satellites are being attacked.

“As we start to work with new … companies, we evaluate their financial viability, long term, Garrant said. But they are then “part of our Department of Defense architecture. You’re now at risk. You’re a legitimate target, right? What are the implications there?”

A clear and consistent message conveyed when dealing with companies is that those “providing services or capabilities to the United States military understand the risk,” added Ferguson.

Nevertheless, the industry and military space officials agreed that the ties between them are set to grow.

“It takes a lot of top-down pressure in order to change culture, while also building up from the bottom,” Kniseley said. “So having an executive order that says ‘go commercial first,’ having the Vice Chief of Space Operations and the SAE look to prioritize commercial, having Congress put it into the NDAA to prioritize commercial … you’ve got all the top-down pressure. But now it’s on the program executive officers to change how they procure things.”

INDOPACOM Boss Stresses Value of, Risk to Air Superiority in the Pacific

April 10, 2025 | By John A. Tirpak

Just a few weeks after the Air Force unveiled the F-47 and with the Navy on the verge of awarding a contract for its sixth-generation fighter, the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command warned that China is out-producing the U.S. in advanced fighters, and air supremacy, once the exclusive purview of the U.S., is now something that neither country can achieve in the region.

Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, in an April 10 hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, told lawmakers that the People’s Republic of China has “2,100 fighters [and] over 200 H-6 bombers, and they are producing fighters at a rate of 1.2 to 1 over the United States.” He also warned that “their advanced air-to-air missile/long range air-to-air missiles also present a tremendous threat” to the U.S.

Paparo was referring to the Chinese PL-15 and PL-17 air intercept missiles, the latter of which is reported to have a range of more than 200 miles, far outclassing the range of the U.S.’s main radar-guided dogfight missile, the AIM-120D Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM), which has a range of about 100 miles.

The disparity in the range of these weapons is the main reason the Air Force is developing the AIM-260 Joint Advanced Tactical Missile, which will extend the reach of U.S. fighters to roughly match that of the PL-17. The JATM is highly classified; it was to have been fielded in 2022, but the Air Force has only said the missile is in test.

China is reportedly also building its premiere stealth fighter, the J-20, at a rate of 40-50 airframes per year. The top U.S. air dominance fighter, the F-22, has been out of production since 2010. The Air Force awarded a contract for the F-22’s successor, the F-47 to Boeing on March 21, and a contract for the F/A-XX, the Navy’s counterpart, is in the final stages of approval. Boeing and Northrop Grumman are the finalists.

The importance of these new fighters was clear in Paparo’s comment.

“If you don’t hold the high ground along the first island chain, you are vastly limited in your ability to operate,” he said, adding that “ceding air superiority is not an option if we intend to maintain a capability against our adversaries and the ability to support our allies.”

Asked by committee chair Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) if China “is now capable of denying us air superiority in the first island chain,” Paparo replied that “air supremacy is the complete mastery of the air” and “neither side will enjoy that.”

The first island chain refers to an arc of nations and islands including Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan that has traditionally been the limit of China’s military sphere of influence in the Pacific. In recent years, however, China has been expanding the reach of its aircraft, ships, and missiles to reach as far as Guam.

In addition to the new air dominance fighters, Paparo also touted the value of the existing F-15E and its upcoming upgrade, the F-15EX. Specifically, he praised the EX’s “dominant electronic warfare capability, in addition to the already dominant elements of range, speed sensors and payload of the Mighty Eagle.” Paparo noted that he is a fan of the F-15, having flown it as an exchange pilot with the Air Force.

Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) noted that F-15Es from the 336th Fighter Squadron from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in his state recently arrived at Kadena Air Base in Japan, and asked Paparo what mission it will perform and the value the F-15E provides INDOPACOM

Paparo said the air units at Kadena are “our on-point, contact layer, immediately able to impose costs” on a regional aggressor and to provide “immediate ability to achieve ephemeral air superiority in the [area of responsibility.]”

“The air wing at Kadena is a critical, mobile, dynamic capability that is just not fixed in Kadena, but has the ability to move throughout the AOR…under the principles of Agile Combat Employment,” Paparo added.

ACE, as the Air Force calls it, is an operational concept where small teams of Airmen disperse to operate from remote or austere airfields. It is “the foundation on which the larger forces would flow in, in the event of a conflict … so it’s absolutely crucial,” Paparo said.

Paparo said the Air Force will be working on ACE during this summer’s Northern Edge exercise, saying it is “the means by which we achieve more dynamism among the force.” He told Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) that Adak, one of the westernmost islands in the Aleutian Islands chain, will figure prominently in that exercise.

Sullivan urged Paparo that INDOPACOM should “re-open” disused facilities on Adak, because Chinese officials have approached the Aleut Corporation, which administers the island for native Alaskans, about using it as shipping hub with a 100-year lease, something Sullivan said should not be permitted to happen.

Paparo agreed: “I think it would be bad, because this is [China’s] modus operandi in the Belt and Road Initiative. Imagine having the Belt and Road Initiative include Alaska.”

DOD Plans Quicker, More Comprehensive Cybersecurity Standards for Contractors

April 10, 2025 | By Shaun Waterman

Defense IT contractors who can demonstrate an assured supply chain and secure coding practices will soon be able to get fast track approval to have their products operate on DOD networks, radically shortening a process that often takes months or years at present, Pentagon Chief Software Officer Rob Vietmeyer said April 10.

The Defense Department will tell contractors, “if you want the fast path to get past these long [approval] cycles, if you want to demonstrate that your product is trustworthy and secure enough for these defense missions … demonstrate through independent testing that your products meet these types of controls, and we’ll get you on the fast test list,” he told an audience of industry executives at AFCEA Northern Virginia chapter’s Innovation IT day event in Herndon.

He said the so-called “Swift Process” will build on the work done over nearly 15 years to build required system security standards into DOD contracts under the 7012 provision of the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement, and then to require contractors to certify compliance with those standards under the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program, which will come into full force later this year.

But the Swift Process will be implemented much, much faster, he promised.

“7012 was a seven-year process,” he pointed out, “Another seven years to get CMMC through the regulatory approval process, we can’t operate at those speeds anymore, right?”

Despite being implemented more quickly, the Swift Process will also be more comprehensive than CMMC, he said, covering supply chain security and issues of foreign control or influence on the contractor and their suppliers, as well as incorporating the secure coding pipeline defined by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). And it would apply, not to whole organizations, as CMMC does, but to specific products.

“So what we’re looking at is defining a set of controls, and if industry [partners] can demonstrate that their products and their pipelines meet those controls, that removes from us the burden from going through months and months of Risk Management Framework assessments. It can get us to understanding, yes, this software meets our risk posture. … Because we built that trust with industry that if we install this software, it will not bring unacceptable risk into our environment,” he said.

Speaking to Air & Space Forces Magazine after his address, he said the new process is “a high priority for the current administration,” and the launch is “imminent.”

“We are working on some of the details right now internally,” he explained. “What we’re going to announce is the objectives for this effort, and a kind of high level framework, and then rapidly—so I think a few months, not years—engage with industry about it.”

He said the engagement will begin by collecting feedback via Requests for Information. They will ask industry “What are the sets of controls we should establish for software products? For foreign influence and control? For software pipelines? The aim is to work with industry so that they can demonstrate that their products are trustworthy, and then we can, based on that trust, give them the fast pass into the defense [IT] environment.”

He said the Swift Process is driven by two concerns. First is the need to get cutting edge capabilities into the hands of U.S. warfighters, and the second is the need to extend the Pentagon’s security perimeter into the contractors who make up the defense industrial base and beyond them, into their supply chains.

“We know adversaries are going after the software supply chain with increasing frequency, right? Sophisticated attacks. We’ve got to get much smarter as a community on what it means to secure software.” That includes tracking and vetting components in including open-source software packages that might be riddled with vulnerabilities, or susceptible to being back-doored by foreign cyber-spies posing as open-source coding volunteers.

Even contractors’ own code isn’t safe, he said. “Attackers are actually going after the [software development] pipeline,” as they did in the Solar Winds attack. “So we’re looking at everything from memory safe programming languages to how you’re securing your developer identities [and] your repositories,” he said.

Golden Dome Is New. But Plenty of Next-Gen Missile Warning Is in the Works Already

April 10, 2025 | By Greg Hadley

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—The Pentagon’s plan to implement President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense system is still in the works and nothing final has been decided, but at the Space Symposium here, military and industry officials alike touted partnerships and work already done that will feed into the initiative.

Indeed, while many of the headlines around Golden Dome have focused on the groundbreaking technologies and new efforts required, officials said many of the other capabilities mentioned in Trump’s executive order about detecting and tracking missiles from space are things they’ve been working on for a while now.

“President Trump’s executive order is a big policy shift, but I would say it is a recognition of what we’ve seen over the past years with the expanding missile threat,” Missile Defense Agency Deputy Director Maj. Gen. D. Jason Cothern said.

Those threats include growing capacity for the likes of Iran and North Korea, plus the advanced arsenals of China and Russia with new technology like hypersonic glide vehicles and fractional orbital bombardment systems.

In response, Cothern said MDA Director Lt. Gen. Heath A. Collins was working to up the agency’s game even before the Golden Dome order came out.

“For the last year, our director … has been leading us across multiple axes to be more agile as an institution, to retool us for great power competition, and to live his vision of ‘go fast and think big,’” Cothern said.

Among those changes, Cothern cited a new strategic road map, an advanced capabilities office, and a renewed focus on program execution.

Likewise, Col. Jon Strizzi of the Space Systems Integration Office and Col. Robert Davis of the Space Sensing directorate—both in the Space Force’s Space Systems Command—each noted that the Space Warfighting Analysis Center conducted a review of the missile warning mission several years ago and concluded that a change was necessary.

“That’s when we pivoted to the [low-Earth orbit and medium-Earth orbit] architecture,” said Davis. “And those are hyperfocused assets on the hypersonic threat, the exact type of threats that are potentially against the homeland that Golden Dome is assigned to detect, track, and then engage and defeat. So we were already heading in that direction.”

MDA has been pivoting too, Cothern said. It started with the agency’s Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor demonstration, which it has been working on since 2021. Two small satellites were launched into low-Earth orbit in February 2024 and have already proven itself valuable.

“It has collected over 650,000 images, including specifically tailored hypersonic test events, but also interesting real world events,” Cothern said of the HBTSS program.

Trump’s executive order called for the “acceleration of the deployment” of an HBTSS layer. Officials from L3Harris, which built one satellite, say they’re basically already expanding its deployment via contracts with the Space Development Agency for its proliferated low-Earth orbit constellation.

“SDA has taken the MDA technology and as part of the tranches, they are procuring copies of HBTSS,” said Ed Zoiss, the company’s president of space and airborne systems. “We’re not calling it HBTSS anymore, but SDA is procuring copies of HBTSS now.”

At a congressional hearing April 9, U.S. Northern Command boss Gen. Gregory M. Guillot said he needs those new satellites, particularly to track hypersonic missiles.

“The most crucial step, I think, is to get the HBTSS robustly fielded, that would allow us to detect and track in ways that we cannot right now,” he said.

Like their government counterparts, L3Harris executives also say they were already working on some of the things Golden Dome is looking for.

“I think it really started before the executive order came out for L3Harris,” said Zoiss. “L3Harris saw the move from exquisite single systems to proliferated, and we saw that that was going to be really a market shift.”

Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman told reporters that “mission analysis” on Golden Dome is ongoing, and the service is specifically looking at what it already has in development. Still, everything is “way predecisional,” he said.

Trump’s executive order, signed Jan. 27, gave the Pentagon 60 days to submit an architecture and plan for Golden Dome. Counting business days, that gives leaders until April 22. Yet even as planning is ongoing, potential elements of Golden Dome are churning forward.

On April 7, the Space Development Agency announced it was soliciting proposals for its latest tranche of missile warning satellites in low-Earth orbit, and Zoiss confirmed to Air & Space Forces Magazine that L3Harris will be pursuing that contract.

At the same time, Space Systems Command is working toward awarding a contract for its next round of missile warning satellites, called Epoch 2, in medium-Earth orbit. The biggest issue there is not a technical issue, but a budget one, Davis said—because of continuing resolutions, the command has had to delay a contract for several months. Epoch 1, meanwhile, is still on track to start launching in 2027.

Notional graphic of Resilient MW/MT MEO Epoch 1 Space Vehicles (Courtesy Graphic)

Meanwhile, the Missile Defense Agency is working on yet another prototype satellite called the Discriminating Space Sensor.

“This is a critical new development for us that will provide birth-to-death tracking and discrimination of in-flight ballistic missiles,” Cothern said. “Our plan is to launch this prototype and demonstration by the end of the decade, but who knows how the budgets play out—we may actually be able to accelerate that.”

Accelerating what’s already in development may prove to be the biggest effect of Golden Dome. James Mazol, performing the duties of chief technology officer for the Pentagon, told symposium attendees that the goal is to produce capabilities at a rapid rate.

“We’re going to move fast, we’re going to deliver quickly and repeatedly across the President’s term,” Mazol said—Trump’s term will end in January 2029. “We’re going to leverage the full range of industry, and we’re going to push the limits of technological development.”

Saltzman doubled down on that timeline when discussing what the Pentagon will be looking for at an upcoming Industry Days conference for Golden Dome.

“It’d be great to say, ‘I’ve got the perfect solution, and I only need 12 to 17 years to develop it,’” Saltzman said. “OK, that’s great. Put that over here. Now, what can we do in the next two to four years? Let’s talk about that.”

That timeline already matches some of what the Space Development Agency and Space Systems Command are doing. It remains to be seen if they will try to go even faster with an influx of resources.

As programs in the works move forward, another key part of Golden Dome may be ensuring they fit into a larger framework or “system of systems,” as Saltzman called it. Strizzi said the Space Systems Integration Office isn’t actively working on that while it waits for a plan to be approved by the White House, but it has performed analysis on missile warning before, and he sees his office as a natural fit to make sure everything works together.

“As things evolve and get more solidified with Golden Dome, I think we’ll see that there are specific programs and systems, both legacy and new, within the various PEOs of the space portfolio that are going to need to have some directive and prescriptive integrating functions that are not part of their current programs,” he said.

Coordination and integration will be key, officials agreed. And just as they noted ongoing programs can feed into Golden Dome, they touted preexisting cooperation and relationships that will help the initiative.

“Space and missile defense missions have always been coupled, overlapping Venn diagrams,” Cothern said, adding that MDA and the Space Force are “highly linked” and have a “growing collaboration.”

Hiring Freeze Has Had ‘Severe’ Impact on Child Care: Air Force Personnel Boss

April 10, 2025 | By David Roza

A defense civilian hiring freeze is undoing recent progress on child care wait lists, the Air Force’s top general for personnel issues told Congress on April 9.

Over the past two years, the service rolled out child care fee discounts to attract and retain staff for its child care centers, which pushed staffing levels from 72 percent in October 2022 to 86 percent in December 2024, Lt. Gen. Caroline M. Miller wrote in testimony for the Senate Armed Services personnel subcommittee.

That increase knocked the unmet child care needs waitlist down to below 3,000 children by the end of fiscal year 2024, the lowest level since the Air Force started tracking unmet needs in March 2018, she added.

“The first thing you do when you get a [permanent change of station] assignment is you look at, if you have children, where are my children going to go? What is the access to child care? How do I get on the list as soon as possible,” Miller told the subcommittee at a hearing last year. “I mean, it is mission readiness.”

But a recent civilian hiring freeze directed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on March 2 appears to be reversing that progress. A follow-up memo from the Pentagon on March 18 exempted schools and child development centers from the freeze. But the gap in hiring, while brief, made a dent at CDCs where staffing was already a challenge due to high turnover, a common issue across the military since most providers are military spouses who have to move every few years.

Hill Air Force Base, Utah, for example, had to disenroll 31 families last month due to low staffing.

“The Air Force now has an exemption to hire new CDC staff members,” Hill officials told Air & Space Forces Magazine at the time. “However, the hiring, on-boarding, and training process will take time, and there is no set date for when the CDC East will reopen.”

Likewise, Peterson Space Force Base, Colo., asked some families to enroll their infant children at a civilian partner daycare since the infant classroom at the Peterson Main CDC had to close due to a staff shortage.

Officials at both bases blamed the shortage in part on the freeze, and Miller said she is observing the effect service-wide.

“[T]he current hiring freeze has severely impacted our childcare centers by lowering our staffing levels and increasing waitlists, with the current DAF waitlist a little over 4,000 as of [March 19, 2025],” she wrote in her testimony. “With the projected reduction of the civilian workforce, we are still monitoring the enterprise impact this will have on DAF childcare.”

One military child care expert fears Hill and Peterson could be a sign of things to come for CDCs across the country, especially as PCS season approaches and fewer spouses are available to work.

“What we’re seeing is kind of a perfect storm right now of things not coming together,” Kayla Corbitt, a leading advocate for military child care programs, told Air & Space Forces Magazine last month.

Corbitt said the hiring freeze is just one piece of the puzzle, a piece which exacerbated a pre-existing staff shortage that CDCs have struggled with for years. The staff shortage may have been particularly acute at Peterson, where a large number of Space Force units drive high demand, and Hill, where an abuse scandal had a chilling effect on hiring, Corbitt said.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), ranking member of the personnel subcommittee, has flagged military child care staffing as a critical readiness issue at multiple hearings over the years. The senator was alarmed about the Hill closure, but she was also concerned that the services have not delivered on a provision in the Fiscal Year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act that required a model for redesigning military child care staff compensation.

That provision was inspired by the Defense Department’s own recommendation that higher wages could alleviate child care staff shortages, she said. Miller was the only personnel boss with a developed model, which also affects the Space Force because the new service relies on the Space Force for CDC support.

“If military families can’t find child care, they just might not be able to serve,” Warren said.

USSF Brings Acquisition Reforms to New Nuclear Command and Control Program

April 9, 2025 | By Greg Hadley

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—Some of the Space Force’s biggest acquisition reforms have made their way into the service’s new nuclear command, control, and communications satellite program, the officer in charge of the effort said April 8.

Evolved Strategic SATCOM is one of the biggest pieces of the Space Force budget, set to replace the Advanced Extremely High Frequency constellation. Fielded mostly in the 2010s, AEHF is one of the last programs with an old-school approach to space acquisition: just six spacecraft, each the size of multiple school buses and weighing more than six tons, with software for the ground control stations delivered after first launch.

In recent years, the Space Force has shifted toward buying larger numbers of smaller spacecraft with “commercial off the shelf” components, and former acquisition czar Frank Calvelli pushed programs to have their ground segment ready to go before the satellites launched.

ESS is embracing that shift, Col. A.J. Ashby, senior materiel leader for strategic SATCOM, told reporters at the Space Symposium, starting with where its satellites will fly.

“ESS will have a proliferated architecture, unlike AEHF,” he said. “AEHF is currently just in the geostationary orbit, and so we’ll be proliferated. We’ll be in diverse orbits, and there’s certain threats that we will address. But the most significant thing about ESS is that we’ll be able to service an increased number of strategic users that the current system doesn’t currently support.”

Space Force leaders have touted proliferation as a way to make targeting harder for potential adversaries, challenging them to find different ways to attack objects in different orbits and narrowing the target window as spacecraft move relative to the Earth.

The exact number of satellites in the ESS constellation remains a secret. Space Force budget documents reference the need for four space vehicles to achieve initial operational capability by fiscal 2032, but Ashby declined to comment further than that.

Who exactly will build those satellites is still to be determined—the program is in source selection, with Boeing and Northrop Grumman as the top contenders after building prototypes. Ashby also declined to say when a contract might be awarded.

However, Ashby did suggest whoever does win the contract won’t necessarily be building the exquisite systems that have defined strategically vital programs in the past. While there is no commercial market for nuclear command, control, and communications functions, existing commercial components and parts could be useful.

“Spacecraft buses, we’re taking a hard look at that,” Ashby said. “With regard to crypto, we’ve got Viasat, we’re on contract with ViaSat right now for their chassis for our cryptographic units. Those are commercial products, right?”

There are limits to how much commercial can be used for the program. Asked if SpaceX’s massive Starlink communications constellations is being considered for any part of the ESS requirement, Ashby said, “Not right at this point in time.”

On the ground, though, ESS will embrace a commercial-like approach. Back in 2023, the Space Force awarded a contract to Lockheed Martin for what it calls the Ground Resilient Integration & Framework for Operational NC3, or GRIFFON, but Lockheed won’t be the only contributor.

“You kind of liken the framework to your cell phone, and then you have different applications that would ride on that framework,” Ashby said, explaining that Lockheed will build the framework and then allow smaller software developers to work within that framework.

“We have the best of breed, so leveraging the software acquisition pathway, we’re leveraging the Space Enterprise Consortium, other transaction authorities, we’re able to put the best of breed of software developers on contract to do that,” he said.

That approach is one borne out of hard lessons learned from other ground segments the Space Force has tried to develop all at once, only to encounter years of delays that have limited satellites’ capabilities.

The Space Force has outlined plans to spend $5.11 billion in research and development on ESS from 2025 to 2029, making it one of the service’s biggest programs.

Military AI Will Mean Overhauling Test as Well as Tactics: DOD’s First AI Chief

April 9, 2025 | By Shaun Waterman

To employ autonomous weapons systems like pilotless aircraft and other artificial intelligence-powered innovations, the U.S. military will have to overhaul not just its strategy and tactics in every domain, but also the way it tests its technology, according to the Defense Department’s first ever AI chief.

The Pentagon “is not well postured yet” for testing and evaluation, or T&E, of artificial intelligence, or any other kind of cutting edge software that requires continuous updating, said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. John “Jack” Shanahan, the inaugural director of the DOD’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), from 2018-2020.

Still, “there’s nobody better in the world at T&E than our military services … we’ve been doing it forever,” he told an audience at the Center for a New American Security.

That applies even to software as well as hardware, he added, so long as it is developed in a “very linear process.” Software like the Air Force’s Theater Battle Management Control System or Distributed Common Ground System was upgraded in “blocks” every couple of years, which allows for extensive multi-stage testing. “Upgrades went through development tests, operational tests, initial fielding, follow-on fielding, and all that,” he said.

But AI is different, he said: “We have got to get used to the fact that these updates may be happening in hours and days, not months and years.”

Like other systems that used the latest software engineering techniques, AI had to be updated regularly, Shanahan said, especially during a conflict. “If you don’t do that, it’s going to go stale. It’s not going to work as advertised. The adversary is going to corrupt it, and it’ll be worse than not having AI in the first place,” he said.

But how would such testing work in the midst of a shooting war, Shanahan mused, when the stakes and the pressure are high?

“For continuous integration/continuous deployment, I think we ought to be thinking about it down at unit level. … Does it always have to go back to some centralized T&E facility? Not in the heat of war,” he said. “Does someone wear a special patch, like they’ve been through Top Gun or the Air Force Weapons School, that says I am qualified to do AI T&E at the unit level? Maybe something like that. We’ve got to think our way through it.”

United States Air Force Test Pilot School students grapple with hands-on challenges of developing and testing AI robots during its inaugural “Test of AI and Emerging Technologies” course in partnership with Stanford University and the Department of the Air Force’s Stanford AI Studio. Photo by Tech. Sgt. Robert Cloys/Air Force Test Center

T&E can no longer be viewed as a “one and done” proposition that a system has to complete before deployment, he said. Instead, it had to be seen as a continuous process and one stage in a system life cycle.

“So we do have to look at this as a full life cycle approach, and that’s where we can start mitigating and managing risk, at the design and development phase, all the way through T&E, all the way through fielding and all the way through sustainability,” Shanahan said.

He added that the competitive pressure to deploy game-changing technology like AI before U.S. rivals creates a risk that T&E will get short changed.

“If we start saying we’re going to lose the competition against China unless we put this out in the field as fast as possible, that’s risky, because we will find [on the battlefield] that systems don’t work as intended, and the adversary always gets a vote. They will try to counter our systems,” he said.

Shanahan, now retired and working as a consultant, spoke during the launch of the new CNAS report “Safe and Effective: Advancing Department of Defense Test and Evaluation for Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems.”

Testing AI is challenging for other reasons too, report author and CNAS scholar Josh Wallin said. When the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) tested its autonomous dogfighting program, it did so in a digital simulation, where the program handily beat a human pilot. But when they put the program in a real plane with a human safety operator—a highly experienced test pilot who could disable the AI, take control, and land the plane if needed—it suddenly stopped performing as it had done in the digital simulator.

“They really quickly ran into this problem, which is … that so many of the novel behaviors that they’d been excited about in simulation were reasons that the test pilots would shut off the autonomy and kill the test right from the beginning,” he said.

User acceptance issues are a major challenge for the deployment of AI, he explained, adding that one of the major recommendations of the report was “just how important it is to integrate operators early from a development perspective and also from a testing perspective. You can’t wait until you get to operational tests to start talking to operators. You have to do it much earlier than that.”

Another big concern is integration, Wallis said: How autonomous systems would interact, not just with friendly operators and enemy troops, but with each other. Because it isn’t practical to test AI in every possible different combination of circumstances, he said, “there are always going to be edge cases” where systems behave in unanticipated ways, and because humans might be more removed from the process, there are a lot of questions about how to deal with such situations.

“When we’re deploying different [unmanned aerial systems] with each other, or with different [unmanned surface vehicles], when we have a [command and control] system that’s integrating some form of autonomy—How do all of these things actually work together now that we’re removing a lot of the operator role?” Wallin asked.

Wallis said he worries about DOD “getting bogged down in process when we’re developing these systems.” An AI-enabled administrative system that handles HR issues, for example, should be tested very differently and according to different criteria from a weapons system.

“I’m concerned about not moving quickly, because we’re lumping everything together rather than looking very specifically at what are the things that actually make these systems different,” he said.

Trump’s Picks for Joint Chiefs Chairman and Air Force Secretary Near Confirmation

April 9, 2025 | By Unshin Lee Harpley

President Donald Trump’s picks for the nation’s top uniformed officer and the Air Force’s highest-ranking civilian are on the verge of being confirmed after being approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 8.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. John “Dan” Caine is set to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, while current NRO principal deputy director Troy E. Meink is set to be Air Force Secretary.

Caine and Meink’s nominations were approved in roll call votes along with three other senior defense nominees, the committee announced April 9. The nominations were “immediately reported” to the Senate floor, where they await a vote from the full chamber.

The committee did not announce the vote totals on the nominations, but SASC chairman Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) disclosed in a statement that Caine was approved 23-4. His office did not immediately respond to a query on the vote for Meink.

During his confirmation hearing two weeks ago, Meink appeared to be on a glide path to confirmation, facing little to no opposition from lawmakers.

Meink has spent more than a decade at the NRO, where he oversaw the agency’s space acquisition projects for years, including managing national geospatial intelligence satellite acquisitions with a budget of over $15 billion. He has worked closely with the Space Force and has perhaps the deepest space expertise of any Air Force Secretary nominee ever.

During his confirmation hearing, Meink asserted the need for “offensive and defensive” space control capabilities, stressing that the Space Force’s investment priorities focus on “achieving space superiority through space control,” echoing the priorities of Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman.

He also served in the Air Force as a KC-135 tanker navigator from 1988 to 1993, before transitioning to a civilian career with the Air Force, where he held various space-related roles, including the now-defunct office of deputy undersecretary of the Air Force for space.

Meink’s background aligns with Trump’s space-centered vision; during his first term, Trump championed the creation of the Space Force. If confirmed, Meink could be a significant advocate for the Space Force, as service leaders have called for more resources and manpower to keep up with a growing mission set.

He may also be a key player in “Golden Dome,” Trump’s comprehensive defense initiative to protect the nation from missile threats. Many details about the project, which will require heavy lifting from various military branches, government agencies, and commercial industry, are still unclear, but the Space Force is likely to play a key role and Meink would be involved in key decisions from procurement to project oversight, as well as cross-agency coordination.

The committee also voted to advance Caine’s nomination for Joint Chiefs Chairman.

Unlike others, Caine’s nomination came unexpectedly in February, following the abrupt dismissal of the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., who was less than two years into his four-year term.

Caine is a highly unconventional nominee; he retired as a three-star lieutenant general in December, and U.S. law requires the chairman to have previous service as one of the joint chiefs or commander of a combatant command. However, the law also allows the President to waive that requirement. If confirmed, Caine would also be the first Air National Guardsman to be elevated to chairman.

During his confirmation hearing, Caine reaffirmed his commitment to remain apolitical and emphasized that, as Chairman, he would not be in the chain of command to operators.

The prospective CJCS said his focus will be to urge and motivate the service chiefs to find faster ways to field technology that will preserve the nation’s military superiority, which he said is at risk as China improves its own military at a rapid pace.

“Our national defense requires urgent action and reform across the board,” Caine said. He also expressed full support for modernizing the nuclear triad as the foundation of American security. All of Trump’s top Pentagon nominees have advocated for nuclear modernization to date.

The other nominees approved by the SASC include:

Michael P. Duffey, nominated as Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment

Emil G. Michael, nominated as Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering

Keith M. Bass, nominated as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs

New International Partnership Strategy ‘Touches Every Part’ of Space Force

April 9, 2025 | By Greg Hadley

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—The Space Force is looking at common standards, interoperable systems, robust data sharing, bigger exercises, and more with allies as part of its soon-to-be-released International Partnerships Strategy, service leaders said April 8 at the Space Symposium, pledging that it “touches every single part” of the USSF.

“In essence, our partnership strategy specifies the infrastructure for transforming policy into action, ensuring a unified, resilient approach to international space security,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman said in a keynote address to an audience that included scores of international officers.

Saltzman later told reporters that the strong international presence at the event made it a natural venue to preview the strategy, which he expects to officially sign and release in the next week or so. While some of its finer points are still under wraps, he outlined its three main goals during his speech:

Empower partners as force multipliers

Enhance interoperability and information sharing

Aligning service-level activities like force design, development, generation and employment

RAF Air Marshal Paul Godfrey, serving on the Space Staff as its first ever Assistant Chief of Space Operations for future concepts and partnerships, told reporters those three goals align with the fundamental responsibilities of the Space Force: force design, force development, and force employment.

“So you can see that touches every single part of the Space Force,” he said.

Godfrey led development of the strategy over the last five months or so and said interoperability will be a particular emphasis, referring to his past as a fighter pilot in the 1990s, when different datalinks hampered cooperation. Saltzman referred to a call for “common international standards” in the strategy, and Godfrey offered that “data standards, space refueling standards” could be part of it.

Saltzman and Godfrey also touted the importance of coordinating investments. In his address, Saltzman noted that the planned Space Futures Command will publish an “objective force” that the service intends to pursue.

“The objective force is going to state in very clear and simple terms the capability that we intend to develop, which will then, by extension, identify the capabilities that are unaddressed,” Saltzman said, suggesting other countries may then tailor their capabilities to match what the U.S. needs.

“You don’t want to buy two of things when you only have to buy one of them,” he told reporters. “You don’t want to buy things that don’t work together, because that creates a seam.”

Saltzman said the strategy won’t go quite so far as to suggest a combined coalition force design. But it will encourage allies to take advantage of specific capabilities and deepen their expertise.

Once allies have those capabilities, they also need to be able to operate them in conjunction with the U.S. That starts with a common operating picture.

“The number of partners with whom we share space domain awareness data has exploded in recent years, which is step one in ensuring we have the same operational awareness,” Saltzman said.

After that comes increased contact, ranging from more joint exercises to wargames to more exchange programs.

“Coalition operations will be far more successful if we work together well before those contingency operations become necessary,” Saltzman said. “If we’re not tightly coupled in our training, if we’re not reconciling our operational concepts, if we’re not integrating our capabilities, we will have a very steep learning curve when called upon in crisis or conflict.”

Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman hosts an office call to officially welcome U.K. Air Vice Marshal Paul Godfrey to the Space Force staff in the Pentagon, Arlington, Va., June 18, 2024. Godfrey is the former commander of U.K. Space Command and the first foreign officer to join the U.S. Space Force command staff. (U.S. Air Force photo by Andy Morataya)

Classification remains a sticking point, though. Despite changes to Pentagon policy aimed at moving more Space Force programs out of the ultra-secret “Special Access Program” status, Saltzman said he is still “not happy” with the lack of progress.

Still, Godfrey said the service has made improvements in declassifying intelligence so that allies can understand the threats they face.

As Saltzman and Godfrey touted their international strategy, questions swirl over how allies will work with the U.S. in the future. European nations, in particular, have some of the most advanced space industries, but leaders have suggested they want to depend less on the U.S. for military capabilities.

Both Saltzman and Godfrey said such questions are overblown, at least when it comes to space.

“It’s my fifth year here,” Godfrey said. “It’s been business as usual in terms of the collaboration with the partners and allies this week. And I think the space domain is different to the other domains. So obviously, I was involved in this in my previous role, from a European industrial base perspective, the U.S. has been doing this national security space for the longest time. So have to work together. There’s almost a level of mentorship, I think, from the U.S. to a lot of the emerging space commands, space squadrons, however allies are putting their forces together.

“Because if we just cut ties, let Europe get on with it, then they’re going to have to spend significant amounts of money to potentially go down dead ends, developing the sort of capabilities that the U.S. has put together over decades,” he added.