Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman (right). (DoD photo by Chad J. McNeeley)
AFA WARFARE SYMPOSIUM — Space Force chief Gen. Chance Saltzman said today that the service’s new Futures Command has yet to be fully conceptualized, but that work will begin “right away” to start putting meat on its bones.
“The first step is I’m going to put a relatively small team together, a couple dozen people, and they’re going to do a mission analysis,” he told reporters. “So, they’re going to do mission analysis, probably through the summer into the fall, to make sure we understand exactly what we’re trying to attack.”
Saltzman explained that there are a number of questions the team needs to ask and answer, including how the two new centers planned under Futures Command will work with the Space Warfighting Analysis Center.
“What are the requirements? Where are the positions that people are currently in the Space Force? How do we decrement them from those organizations and come over? How will we organize them and what are the procedures?” he said.
Saltzman announced those two centers, one for wargaming and one for developing new operational concepts and technologies, on Monday as part of the Department of the Air Force’s sweeping reorganization efforts designed to increase Air and Space Force readiness to compete with China.
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The hope is that “by late this year, we might start actually moving people and moving positions to start to stand up those centers,” he said today. “By next year. hopefully we may have a solution on leadership from a headquarters standpoint and be able to start to move those decisions.”
One thing for sure, Saltzman elaborated, is that the new Futures Command will not just be looking at what new capabilities the Space Force should build, own and operate, but also at how commercial tech, systems and services can fill some needs.
“We absolutely are going to leverage industry in the Futures Command,” he said. “We know we don’t have the best ideas inside the military on what technologies maybe an adversary would use against us, or which ones might be a true force multiplier for us to use. I expect industry to maybe have some ideas about that.”
Likewise, industry is already providing insights for new operational concepts, and thus Saltzman said his plan is to involve them is some Space Force wargames and tabletop exercises put together by Futures Command.
“Then they’ll know what our challenges are. They’ll know what our needs are. We can inform our S&T [scientific and technical] community to help make this a tightly coupled community as we move forward on those what those requirements are,” he said.
Meanwhile, Saltzman said the service is getting closer to releasing its long-awaited commercial strategy.
“We’ve really come almost to closure on the commercial space strategy. I’m hesitant to say imminent because I think I’ve said that too many times now to losing credibility on what imminent really means,” he said.
Saltzman noted that one of the reasons for the “current delay” is that the Space Force is working to synchronize its strategy with that being worked on by the Office of the Secretary of Defense under the auspices of John Plumb, assistant secretary for space.
Plumb told reporters on Jan. 17 that the Pentagon is “hoping that they will be released in the near future as we kind of push them up through the building and get approval for the most senior folks.” He noted that the OSD document is more strategic in nature while the Space Force strategy is a “little bit more focused towards acquisition.”
That said, Saltzman in his keynote speech to the AFA Warfare Symposium this morning gave at least one example where the Space Force already is pushing the envelope on utilizing commercial space services — a pilot program for gathering and disseminating unclassified information gleaned from commercial remote sensing satellite operators.
That program “now officially kicked off and has already directly supported four combatant commands,” he said.
Space Systems Command (SSC) established the Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Tracking (Tac SRT) pilot program “this last year” to “leverage the global data marketplace to deliver commercially sourced sensing and data-fusion analytics to meet the unclassified space awareness needs of our downrange joint and partner warfighters,” he said.
As examples of the pilot program’s activities so far, Saltzman said the SSC team has “responded to earthquakes in Morocco and Japan, floods in Libya, and the most recent outbreak of wildfires in South America by providing near real time information and support.”
Tac-SRT is the new(ish) Space Force term of art for what the service over the past few years has called “tactical” intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) — a construct that has been a hot button issue subject to a long-running service tug of war with the Intelligence Community about roles and responsibilities for gathering ISR from satellites.
SSC in May stood up the Tac-SRT commercial marketplace that pools vetted vendors, which then can be contracted for services. The marketplace is focused primarily on acquiring analytics platforms that synthesize raw imagery and other sensor data into information that can be use by commanders.