Space Forces Aim to Highlight Value Amid Rising Threats

American space forces must work with other combatant commands to help them understand the service’s capabilities and vulnerabilities to adversarial attack, Brig. Gen. Jacob Middleton, commanding general of U.S. Space Forces Europe and Space Forces Africa, said during a conversation hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

Highlighting Space’s Importance

Middleton said that many military services and commercial partners do not understand how much of their digital capabilities are reliant on technology available in space, and that this blind spot opens the door for adversaries to exploit.

“When you’ve been doing things the same way for so long, space has always been there. It just hasn’t been highlighted,” Middleton said during the event. “You’ve got to change those processes, where you pull it out of the background into the front, because it is a target that has been challenging because people don’t know they’re reliant on it.”

Middleton said U.S. space forces are confronting the knowledge gap by investing in training, education and joint exercises to help allies, partners and fellow combatant commands understand where they have vulnerabilities and address them.

“We primarily are focused on right now, making sure that we train, educate, and then do the right exercises so people understand what we bring to the fight, and working with Space Command to integrate those capabilities,” Middleton said.

Middleton emphasized that space capabilities are critical to serving the warfighter of the future, allowing the military to achieve its political objectives with minimal loss of life and with speed, accuracy and precision that has not been available in the past.

Space-based capabilities like GPS and Wi-Fi are critical components of the digital battlefield. Middleton pointed to examples like the conflict in Ukraine to show that they are likely to be the first infrastructure targets that adversaries attack before a conventional war.

“Campaign level planning is important for all the components to understand those dependencies, because, like it or not, the adversary is trying to take that advantage away from us,” Middleton added.

Space Is No Longer a Safe Haven

The remoteness of space to the battlefield on the ground has previously given commanders a false sense of security, something that Middleton has emphasized is no longer the case, as adversaries are now capable of disrupting or disabling space-based infrastructure.

“The toughest thing for us was to accept the idea that space was no longer a safe haven,” Middleton said. “It had been a safe haven for so long that when we realized that our adversaries were no longer respecting that, and they get to make their own decision, that was kind of a shocker.”

He pointed out that changing the culture around physical security of assets and classification of intelligence needs to change in order for Space Forces to cooperate with allies, partners and combatant commands. Additionally, overclassification complicates the Space Forces’ ability to share information on a tactical level with commanders who need it.

“It still comes down to the three things of training, exercise and education. We all have limited resources,” Middleton told the audience. “When you talk to commanders, they never have enough things. What space provides is a way to efficiently utilize those resources.”

Middleton said his agency is working with NATO authorities to build a space operations “constellation with our allies and partners in mind” that is interoperable with U.S. Space Forces.

“This is a team effort, and we will get to the point where we are standalone, but it was important that we start now to get people to understand what we bring to the table, because space is just that important,” Middleton said.

Closing the Gaps

Exercises aimed at assessing the vulnerability of space capabilities have played a key role in preparing for future threats. Middleton pushed for commanders to lose their ability to use space-dependent capabilities in their war game exercises to realize how reliant they were on them.

“The first thing I told the team is no hand waving. This will be realistic. If [exercise planners] don’t want to protect the asset, if they don’t want to ask for the requirement, if they don’t want to do this, then it doesn’t exist, and they’re going to live with it through the exercise,” Middleton said.

As commanders recognized the gaps during the exercises, it allowed them to seek the necessary approvals from the Secretary of Defense and wargame out solutions to the possibility of losing an asset.

Middleton emphasized that the burden of educating other commands about space’s capabilities lies solely on services like Space Forces. The service must work toward an interoperable ecosystem where each combatant command is capable of protecting and managing its space capabilities in case of attack.

“We, space, put ourselves in this situation where nobody understands what we do. We, space, have to get ourselves out of this situation where nobody understands what we do. While at times it may seem frustrating, it’s important, and we have to do it,” Middleton said.