New Report Looks at US Options for Potential Escalating Conflict in Space

With Space Force leaders making the case that the service must grow to meet the demand of new threats, a recent workshop with 50 experts studied how those threats could impact American civilian and military capabilities as they escalate in severity and how the U.S. might respond to them.

The Mitchell Institute Spacepower Advantage Center of Excellence hosted the workshop in January and is releasing a 40-page report summarizing the results this week, coauthored by retired Cols. Charles Galbreath, Jennifer Reeves, and Kyle Pumroy.

The report includes six key findings and seven recommendations based on them, but the big picture takeaway, Galbreath told reporters on June 22, is that the threat, especially from China, is such that the Space Force needs sustained growth on top of the sizable increase being proposed for fiscal 2027.

The Space Force’s 2027 budget request is for $71.1 billion, up 124 percent over 2026’s $31.6 billion. But future budget projections aren’t quite as high, and Galbreath said the U.S. is behind in its preparations and needs to catch.

“China has been thinking about countering our ability to deliver effects from space since the 1990s. They’ve been investing in weapon systems—from direct ascent to jammers and cyber attacks, co-orbital systems—for a lot longer than the United States has been recognizing that space is a warfighting domain,” Galbreath said.

Public reporting shows the Chinese government is already operating in the “gray zone,” including jamming and lazing U.S. assets and conducting cyber attacks. Galbreath said one of the objectives of the workshop was to look at how the U.S. might identify a “trigger point” for conflict in space and what options leaders had to respond.

A big part of what the report recommends is building a “robust space domain awareness” to both identify what’s happening in space and who’s behind it, Galbreath said.

Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman has said that growing the force’s domain awareness funding is essential to how the USSF will operate.

“We cannot, as a country or a service, miscalculate the capabilities, force posture, or intentions of our potential adversaries,” Saltzman said at the Mitchell Institute’s Spacepower Security Forum on March 27. “We must have timely and relevant indications and warnings to help us avoid operational surprise in crisis where appropriate to take defensive actions. This means we need to have access to and invest in actionable space domain awareness.”

Vignettes

The January workshop saw four teams with a total of 50 experts from military, government, industry, and academia look at what the U.S. must do now to prevent or prevail in a potential space-based conflict.

The two-day event focused the teams on a series of five scenarios, or vignettes. Those ranged from a “show of force” from the Chinese military and escalated to an unattributed nuclear detonation in low-Earth orbit.

The effects of these scenarios spanned the globe to involved combatant commands like U.S. Pacific Command, European Command, Central Command, and Northern Command.

Within those vignettes, participants looked at how potential Chinese military and government actions would affect various combatant commands and those commands’ responses. Most scenarios involved coordinated attacks from China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela.

Key findings include:

Conflict in space is complex
Increased gray zone activity can lead to the normalization of hostile behavior
Cooperation between adversaries can escalate perceptions of hostile behavior
Proper attribution of actions and attacks is essential, highlighting the need for space domain awareness
Strategic communication is decisive
A range of credible military options is needed

In one vignette, commercial satellite operations stopped working after two Chinese satellites came within 125 miles of them. In another, undersea cables were cut, impacting communications between Europe and North America, while commercial airlines traveling through the Persian Gulf saw GPS disruptions and U.S. Northern Command was hit with a coordinated cyberattack.

As the coordinated campaign rolled on, another vignette had Chinese satellites maneuver onto the same plane as U.S. and allied satellites as the Chinese military begins an invasion of Taiwan.

Finally, at 180 days into the larger campaign, a nuclear weapon of unknown origin detonated over the North Atlantic. The combined explosion and electromagnetic pulse disables hundreds of satellites, taking out communications, limiting or ending U.S. military operations and causing a ripple effect across the globe.

Reeves made the case that these scenarios, while hypothetical, fit with the approach that U.S. adversaries, particularly, China, have been pursuing.

“The Chinese have been singled-minded in the last at least two decades, getting after this, when we perhaps have been afraid to use the terms conflict and space in one sentence,” Reeves said.

The results, Reeves added, underscore the need for the Space Force to develop better capabilities and integrate them with joint and allied operations to survive any punches that might come.

To that end, the report authors included these recommendations:

Accelerate decision-making
Integrate more with partners
Focus on strategic messaging
Build the Space Force’s resilience in orbit so adversaries are less incentivized to attack
Defend critical infrastructure in space
Build credible capabilities and capacity to respond to threats
Focus on high-end training and exercises to counter the threat