Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Air, Space and Cyber Conference in September 2024. Photo: Department of the Air Force Photo

The U.S. Space Force will soon release a strategy outlining its framework for attaining space superiority and to give operational planners a common playbook, the service’s top uniformed official said on Wednesday.

The strategy will not contain anything new for “those of us that have been kind of working in the margins of this for a while” but it will create a “common vocabulary” and “common terms of reference,” and lay out how to achieve space superiority, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said during a webinar hosted by the Mitchell Institute. It will not be a “grand” strategy, he said.

Stood up in 2019, the Space Force is focusing on being able to fight and win in space as U.S. adversaries work to develop capabilities aimed at denying the country’s advantages in space. The strategy will lay out the targets on the ground, in space, and related networks that have to be part of operational planning, Saltzman said.

Saltzman highlighted how at the outset of the Russo-Ukraine war Russia used a ground-focused cyber-attack to degrade a satellite communications network operated by Viasat.

“We have to be ready to protect and think about space superiority in all of those dimensions,” he said. “And so, what the what the framework does is it lays those out, it defines our terms, so that planners, and this is space planners, but this is [also] joint planners to make sure that our capabilities are accounted for and integrated fully into all the operational design. We felt like we owed the joint force that set of framework, that set of definitions, so that we could have the right kinds of discussions.”

Saltzman and his fellow Guardians have been vocal about the need for the Space Force’s budget to grow at a faster rate than the incremental annual increases common throughout the Defense Department in the face of rapidly evolving threats in the space domain. Without a “step function” in its budget, 3% to 4% annual increases will not buy new capability, just enable the service to be “treading water,” he said in response to a question about an ongoing DoD review to reprioritize up to 8% from low priority needs in favor of high priority programs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the space domain is the most important in modern warfare, which Saltzman said gives him confidence about the reprioritization underway for the fiscal year 2026 budget in development. The service is assessing what its lower and higher priority programs as a “planning drill” but is not making any decisions for the moment, as this will be Hegseth’s “decision space,” he said.

“And so, I’m hopeful that the Space Force won’t take any cuts,” Saltzman said. “I certainly don’t want to talk about potential cuts that may not happen, because we want to keep everything we’ve got. We believe that the things we have are still necessary to modern warfare. They’re still necessary to support the joint force, but we just have to grow and add additional priorities.”

Saltzman did lament the continuing resolution (CR) that the federal government will operate under for funding the rest of fiscal year 2025. The resolution leaves the Space Force with less funding in FY ’25 than it had in FY ’24, “so we are literally shrinking in resources,” he said.

This means the Space Force will be on the same baseline budget for two years, and if there is a CR to start off FY ’26, then it will be more than two years, which is “stagnant, and in the face of an adversary who is not stagnant, I’m worried that we’re not going to be able to keep pace, certainly the way we want to,” Saltzman said.

This story was first published by Defense Daily