On the two year anniversary of the war, the Breaking Defense team has assembled a series of pieces on the state of the conflict across multiple domains, what might come in year three, and what lessons the US has learned from the conflict.
"It's not going to be like a 'boom' milestone delivery where one day there's nothing and the next day, there's a finished system," Richard DalBello, director of the Office of Space Commerce, said of the swap from DoD to Commerce.
The US and its allies managed to block a move by China to open up the 6 GHz band Beijing uses for 5G mobile wireless communications to global use — a move that would have empowered Chinese telecom firms such as Huawei.
Long-range, high-speed optical communications will be critical for the service's plans for a "hybrid architecture" that would see networks of old and new military satellites, as well as commercial and allied networks, all communicating seamlessly to shift vast quantities of data around the world in near real-time.
Disputes over spectrum use by mega-constellations in low Earth orbit, such as SpaceX's Starlink, also carry heavy political baggage at the 2023 World Radio Conference that starts tomorrow in Dubai.
Amazon recently launched the first two prototypes for its Project Kuiper; OneWeb now has all 634 satellites it needs to provide global internet access.
“The destruction of a satellite may not have that same public effect as a missile attack into a civilian population, but from a military standpoint, you’ve still definitely created an act of war,” said Gen. Chance Saltzman.
"The capacity needed during times of crisis or conflict will exceed our steady state peacetime demand," said Col. Rich Kniseley, who leads Space Systems Commands Commercial Space Office.
"So, what worries me most is China's use of space to complete the kill chain necessary to generate long-range precision strikes against the maritime and air components scheme of maneuver. That's what concerns me the most," Brig. Gen. Anthony Mastalir, commander of Space Forces Indo-Pacific, said.
Moscow has charged that Starlink is directly enhancing the ability of Ukrainian forces to target weapons on Russian forces.
American initiatives are seeing more support, while rivals used the opportunity to raise a litany of complaints against Washington.
Learning from Russia's failures in Ukraine, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said a key focus going forward is "making sure that not only do we have the systems to do the mission, but that our operators have the training the experience, and we have validated tactics that actually enable those capabilities."
"China is replacing Russia as the No. 2 space power," Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., told Breaking Defense.