COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—U.S. Space Command top priority is to be combat ready by 2027 and command and control (C2) tops the list of capabilities that must be improved by then, Gen. Stephen Whiting, Space Command’s chief, said this week.
Maximizing combat readiness requires improving all the command’s capabilities “so that we can stitch them together seamlessly when called upon,” which is “referred to as closing the kill chain,” Whiting told attendees on Tuesday at the Space Symposium. Later, during a media roundtable, he said that “the list we’ve published inside the Department of Defense starts with command and control.”
To bring together smarter and more distributed capabilities, more C2 must be done at the “machine-to-machine,” Whiting said.
Next is “space fires and protection,” he said. “We need to protect and defense our assets.”
Improving the electronic warfare architecture is the third priority capability, Whiting said, adding that Space Command needs “good insight” when its operations in the electromagnetic spectrum are being jammed, where it is coming from and why.
The fourth capability area for improvement is space domain and battlespace awareness, in particular, keeping track of the growing number of objects on orbit, he said. Currently, the command is tracking 45,000 objects in space, a 78 percent increase from when the command stood up in August 2019
“We do it better than anyone in the world, but we would like to do it even better,” Whiting said.
The final capability area is defensive cyber, which is the “soft underbelly of the space enterprise,” he said.
China and Russia have demonstrated they have the kinetic anti-satellite capabilities and space is where they and others would prefer to attack using cyber means because it is less costly and difficult to attribute responsibility, he said.
“But if we’re not hardening ourselves in the cyber domain that will give them an easy access,” he said.
After building up combat readiness, the next priority for Space Command is being able to counter threats, which are now real and on “combat duty in China and Russia,” Whiting said during a symposium keynote. “They hold at risk our modern way of life and how we defend this nation. And we must be able to deter and counter these threats when called upon.”