USSPACECOM Commander: New Technology Key To Maintaining Strategic Posture
By Sentry
The United States is the world’s leading space power but must continue to harness new technology to maintain its strategic posture, the Commander of U.S. Space Command said during a defense industry discussion. As nations including China and Russia develop their own capabilities, U.S. superiority — in space as well as other warfighting domains — depends on staying ahead of competitors, said U.S. Space Force Gen. Stephen Whiting. He spoke during the first Space Strategic Dialogue series of talks hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The space domain is an integral part of the modern battlefield, Gen. Whiting said. “Over the last 35 years, the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps have become optimized and assume that they’re going to have access to space capabilities through all levels of conflict. If space is lost, they cannot fight the way they are designed or sized. They do not have the force structure to fight the way we used to fight without space because space makes us tremendously more precise, lethal and far-ranging,” he said. “We’ve noted that the Chinese and the Russians have studied us since Desert Storm. They deeply have tried to understand how is it that the United States is able to create such global effects with what appear to be such small numbers of forces. And they’ve assessed that space is one of those foundational issues.”
The U.S. optimizes its space posture by using a layered approach that includes satellite communications, global positioning systems, missile warning systems and weather monitoring, he said. This approach includes not just land, air and marine capabilities but also the space and cyber domains. “We could talk about how it enables our modern way of life. But now we face determined opponents who, if we get into a conflict, are going to try to take that away from us,” he said. “We’ve got to be able to protect and defend our space capabilities so that we can continue to derive the advantages that [these capabilities] give to us.”
The layered approach to multidomain warfare includes the cyber realm, which is cheaper and easier to incorporate into attacks, Gen. Whiting said. He noted that the night Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, “Russia executed a cyberattack against a commercial satcom company because they wanted to deny Ukraine’s ability to leverage that satcom for command and control.”
“Unfortunately, that cyberattack got into the wild across Europe, and I think [40,000] or 50,000 satcom modems were taken off the air,” he said
U.S. capabilities must include systems that will deny adversaries the use of space for attack of the nation and its Allies and partners. “I think we’ve just seen the importance that China has placed on their space aspirations. They have moved unbelievably fast … every time we think they’re going fast, they accelerate,” Gen. Whiting said. “When a medium-sized power like Iran has the ability to build long-range strike weapons, whether ballistic missile or one-way attack drones, and then pair that with the ubiquity of imagery to strike fixed targets, that’s something we now have to contend with.”
In a space warfighting domain that is increasingly multipolar, leveraging emerging technologies will be key to meeting multiple pacing threats, Gen. Whiting said.
“I think artificial intelligence, machine learning can be very helpful in this,” he said. “We want the tools that help flag for our operators, ‘Hey, something’s happening,’ so then they can bring that human analytic judgement to figure out what it is.”
- This article was published by Sentry
