Space Force Pushing to Finish 15-Year Force Design Plan by End of Year

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—The Space Force expects to wrap up a detailed analysis this year of its “objective force,” a forward-looking vision for what platforms, support structures, and manpower the service thinks it will need over the next 15 years.

Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said Sept. 23 at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference the document will forecast what capabilities and resources the service will need to counter future threats. 

“This detailed assessment, planning, and analysis will provide clarity on mission requirements and resources to inform industry on what the service will need over the next 15 years,” he said in a keynote speech. “Put simply, it ensures our operations and our programs are synchronized and that we are all working toward the same goal to build the force we need now and into the future.”

Saltzman told reporters in a briefing following his speech that while his end-of-year deadline is ambitious, he’s pushing his team to deliver on time. The plan is to refresh the document every five years, he added.

The Space Force is not alone in thinking about its long-term structure; the Air Force just recently completed a new force design of its own, though much of it remains classified, and the Army unveiled its Transformation Initiative in May.

USSF’s “objective force” document will be a first for the young service, though. The analysis has been led by the Space Warfighting Analysis Center, which in 2021 began a mission-by-mission review of the service’s satellite and ground system architecture. 

The force structure work fits into a larger Space Force initiative to ensure the service has the systems and technology it needs to operate in a changing space environment. While the objective force study looks internally at the service’s own capability needs, the service is also considering how adversaries like China and Russia may advance their own systems and what effect that could have on the domain and the Space Force’s missions and requirements. 

Those projections, combined with the objective force work, will form what the service calls its future operating environment and are informed by wargaming, exercises, and simulations from across the space enterprise—from intelligence professionals to acquirers and engineers. They also factor in joint force needs and technology trends, Saltzman told reporters.

“The idea is to bring everybody together, beat up the ideas, lock them down, and then test them,” he said. “We like this, we don’t like that, we see this as a gamechanger, this maybe is down the road a little bit. When we have all that data, then you put it together in a published document.”

The service intended to leverage a new Space Futures Command to stitch together this long-term, threat-informed force design. However, plans to establish the field command—part of the Department of the Air Force’s Re-Optimization for Great Power Competition—were put on hold earlier this year at the direction of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. 

Air Force Secretary Troy Meink is now weighing whether to implement the sweeping transformation, which was championed by former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and outgoing Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin. Meink said in a Sept. 22 briefing here he expects to reach a decision in the next few months.