Space Force Still Planning Futures-Like Command, Perhaps With a New Name

The Space Force is moving ahead with plans to create a fourth field command focused on wringing out future capabilities, although details around timing—and the new organization’s name—are still in flux.

In early 2024, the Space Force announced plans to establish Space Futures Command to identify and evaluate future missions and concepts, but that vision was delayed amid the Pentagon and Air Force leadership transition. Speaking Nov. 20 at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event, Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman said that while the service is “readjusting” its earlier thinking around the finer details, the Space Force still intends to launch a futures-like field command.

“We’re going to do it,” Saltzman said.

The Space Force debuted its initial plans for a Space Futures Command amid a broader Department of the Air Force “re-optimization” initiative aimed at focusing the Air Force and Space Force’s organizations, structures, and processes on countering threats in the Indo-Pacific. The Pentagon put that work on hold earlier this year amid senior leader transitions and as Air Force Secretary Troy Meink settled into his role and identified his own priorities for the service.

Meink has since abandoned some elements of the Air Force’s plan, including the standup of an Integrated Capabilities Command to oversee requirements and capability development in a more holistic way. There had been speculation that Space Futures Command may also fail to launch, but Saltzman said the effort is moving ahead.

As originally envisioned, he said, the field command will leverage the existing Space Warfighting Analysis Center, which was established in 2021 to flesh out the service’s force structure needs, and combine it with two new centers—a Wargaming Center and a Concept and Technology Center. Whereas the SWAC has focused on systems and architectures, the expanded organization will explore the concepts and logistics chains needed to support those platforms.

“What we’re really doing is taking the work that SWAC did and expanding it, adding to it a Concepts and Technology Center, adding to it modeling and sim, a Wargaming Center, that allows us to expand on what they were doing to more wholly comprehensively put together what it takes to field a combat-credible force—not just a capable system, but a combat-credible force,” Saltzman said. “So, we’re going to build a new field command that does that.”

Saltzman didn’t discuss how the command might differ from the service’s original vision. A Space Force spokesperson said the “why” behind the organization remains the same, and said the service is still working through the paperwork and processes that come with establishing a new command.

The Space Force had hoped to have the new field command’s structure in place late last year or early this year, in part to help draft the service’s first “objective force” document, a detailed vision for what platforms, support, and structure it will need over the next 15 years. The service is on track to complete that plan this year and publish it in early 2026, and Saltzman said it relied on SWAC and other existing organizations to conduct the analysis.

The new command will play a key role in crafting future versions of the objective force—which will be updated annually and rescoped at least every five years—as well as other documents meant to provide a “clearly articulated demand signal” to industry and other stakeholders, Saltzman said.

“When you think about this new field command, the ultimate product that they produce on a recurring basis is called the objective force,” he said. “The objective force will be a very detailed document. … It’ll be a list of the systems, a broad-based understanding of the systems—some that exist, some that are in development, and some that haven’t started yet.”