Space Command to Launch Wargame Series for Industry

U.S. Space Command will host the first in a series of “commercial wargames” on March 23, inviting industry participants to engage with “hard problems in orbit” at a classified level, according to SPACECOM’s director for joint force development.

There are 25 companies signed up for the inaugural event, which will be held in Colorado Springs, Colo., and follow-on exercises are slated for June, September, and December. Speaking March 18 at AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, Maj. Gen. Sam Keener said the wargame series offers a new venue for information sharing with industry.

“We’re going to look at some hard problems in orbit, threats that are faced, and how we can help secure and defend the domain in partnership with commercial entities,” Keener said. “I think it’s going to be a huge learning opportunity for both us and the commercial side and is going to be held at the classified level, so it will enable us to share a lot of things with them that ordinarily we haven’t been—and vice versa.”

Participants in the first tabletop exercise next week will focus on how the U.S. military and its partners should respond to the threat of “weapons of mass destruction” in orbit—a timely topic given reports that originated in 2024 that Russia is developing a nuclear anti-satellite weapon. According to SPACECOM, the wargame will explore what actions could be taken to prevent such a scenario “and ensure there is never a day without space.”

The exercise is part of a wider effort within Space Command and other agencies to better engage with private sector companies operating in the domain. The Defense Department has a number of offices focused on integrating commercial capabilities, including SPACECOM’s Joint Commercial Operations cell and the Space Force’s Commercial Integration Cell. The department in 2024 also released several strategies geared toward private sector collaboration—one from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, a second from the Space Force, and a third from Space Command.

SPACECOM’s strategy, an expanded version of a document it first rolled out in 2022, homes in on three primary lines of effort: identifying and advocating for new capabilities, operationalizing commercial technology, and sharing information with industry about potential threats.

While the upcoming commercial wargaming exercise is the first of its kind for SPACECOM, it follows a concerted effort within the Space Force to take better advantage of existing commercial systems and figure out how to integrate them during a conflict. In 2022, the service started to explore the creation of an at-the-ready pool of commercial satellite capacity that could be leveraged during a crisis—and in peacetime—to augment military capability. That concept turned into what is now the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve, or CASR.

The Space Force last March onboarded four companies with 90-day contracts worth just over $1 million to pilot CASR’s first mission area: space domain awareness. Last July, those firms participated in a wargame and the service is now looking to formalize and expand its partnership with that first cohort. That means those companies will participate in more wargames and larger government exercises and will potentially support operations. At the same time, it’s looking to award contracts this year to a second vendor pool with a different mission focus.