The Department of Defense’s directive to reapportion 8 percent of its spending to Trump administration priorities presents distinct opportunities and challenges. The nation faces a historic array of national security threats, with China at the top of the list. Ensuring available funds are best directed to decisively address these dangers is extremely prudent. However, in seeking to realign funding, leaders must be careful not to cut to the bone of core capabilities and capacity. Nowhere is this more germane than in the U.S. Space Force.
President Donald Trump created the nation’s newest service in 2019 to protect and defend America’s interests in space. Adversary actions in contesting this domain, combined with a burgeoning demand for space-based capabilities on earth, required a robust response to consolidate and align national security space activities, while also developing new strategies, operational concepts, tactics, and technologies. This includes offensive and defensive measures. This was a major shift given that for decades, U.S. policy prevented members of the military from even using the words “warfighting” and “space” in the same sentence.
Today, Space Force leadership is aggressively transforming the service into a warfighting enterprise. Chief of Space Operations General Chance Saltzman and his team created the key operating concept, the Space Force’s Theory of Competitive Endurance, and they outlined the defining six core truths about space warfighting. They also implemented the Space Force Generation model to generate, present, and sustain combat-ready forces for combatant command missions. It has reorganized its units of action around mission areas to focus on readiness and it is rapidly establishing service components in all the Combatant Commands to ensure effective joint integration. These vectors provide the foundational vision and tenets to deter, and if necessary, fight and win a conflict in space. This is crucial as the service develops new tactics, techniques, procedures, and training to decisively address adversary threats on orbit. This includes new levels of situational awareness and the ability to gain a maneuver advantage with our assets in space.
This is an incredibly complex, demanding set of challenges, and Guardians are making rapid progress—delivering results in months and years that would normally take decades. The scale and scope of the threat demands nothing less.
Teamwork is also important given that space does not exist as an isolated domain. Spacepower is something every service branch must embrace. No activity, whether on land, in the air, or at sea, can execute successfully without the Space Force. Further, joint exercises are crucial to ensure all warfighters are empowered to defend and harness a space advantage.
To execute all these functions, the Space Force is having to literally reinvent most of its operations—everything from how it manages space launch to satellite constellation architectures and the networks that connect them. Failure is not an option, for as Gen. Saltzman declared: “We have a responsibility to secure the space domain to defend U.S. service members in harm’s way. We must contest to control the space domain, or else those service members will be at unacceptable risk of attack.” Spacepower is a key component of combat lethality anytime, anywhere.
However, despite the Space Force’s crucial role in U.S. national security, it is the smallest of all the military services. It consumes just 3 percent of the total Department of Defense budget. The entire service is comprised of just 9,900 uniformed personnel and 8,000 essential civilian experts. This represents the greatest bargain in DOD. Other service branches have individual bases with larger populations. Never-the-less, the Biden Administration issued a 2 percent funding cut in their fiscal 2025 defense budget request. This came on top of decreased buying power due to inflation. Resourcing will become more constrained if Congress fails to pass an 2025 budget given automatic cuts mandated by the Fiscal Responsibility Act.
Given this context, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s 8 percent budget realignment can smartly redistribute critically needed resources to the Space Force. As a new service, its success continues to be premised on growth to meet surging mission demand and advanced U.S. warfighting concepts. President Trump set a very clear vector when he created the service five years ago. Guardians have been working hard toward realizing these objectives. Hegseth must also consider that the Golden Dome air and missile defense initiative will be largely space-based and represents additive mission growth.
Any government institution can absorb cuts. Whether that is prudent for such a small, vital service with burgeoning demand is another question. The reality is that the Space Force will likely need more funds to achieve the effects expected of it across all military domains.
Space Force missions are foundational to America’s defense. No other service can effectively operate without the capabilities Guardians bring to the fight. Gen. Saltzman and his team get this and are pushing hard to transform the service. The Department of Defense must ensure they are sufficiently resourced to execute the missions asked of them. There comes a point where more cannot be done with less. The nation is asking a great deal of the Space Force, and the realities of the modern threat environment are demanding even more. War-winning lethality must always be America’s national security vector—it is the bedrock of “peace through strength.” Robust spacepower is the quintessential element of that bedrock.
