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NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—The top priority of the Space Force’s commander that supplies warfighting units in support of the combatant command charged with military operations in space is having assets to conduct orbital warfare.
Generally, “I want more things,” Lt. Gen. Douglas Schiess, commander of U.S. Space Forces-Space, said on Wednesday. “Specifically,” when it comes to orbital warfare, Schiess said “I need more fires. I need the ability to deny, degrade, disrupt our potential adversaries so that they cannot attack our forces and they cannot attack our homeland.”
Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman and U.S. Space Command Commander Gen. Stephen Whiting agree, Schiess said at the annual Air Force Association Air Space Cyber Conference. U.S. Space Command is the combatant command whose area of responsibility is space.
“And so, we have to have those forces, we have to have those munitions, we have to have those fires,” he said.
More space domain awareness is next on the priority list, Schiess said. He mentioned the Northrop Grumman [NOC]-supplied ground-based Deep-Space Advanced Radar Capability, and the Space Force and National Reconnaissance Office-led space-based SILENTBARKER program as coming online to help with space domain awareness.
Still, the space warfighting components need the ability to have real-time domain awareness, including knowing adversary intentions, “so that we can be there before them and take action,” Schiess said.
The last major need is command, control, and communications, from the strategic level down to the “combat crew commander” and his or her “team that’s on the floor,” he said.
Filling all these gaps will give the U.S. space superiority for all the military services to fulfill their missions, Schiess said.
“I need more of the kit to be able to do that, so that our bombers, our tankers and our carriers, our DDGs, all of them, can get to the fight, so that we can win,” he said.
