COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman on Wednesday introduced the Space Force’s first international strategy, a roadmap to tighten coordination and collaboration with allies and partners.
Enhancing the partnerships toward a “common vision” will entail working together across an array of efforts, Saltzman said at the annual Space Symposium here.
“We’re going to embed more of our allies and partners into our force design from the beginning,” Saltzman said in a morning keynote. “That means integrating across policies and training. That means driving adoption of common international standards and aligning strategies to them. That also means expanding joint exercises, exchanging personnel and deliberately increasing, the way we leverage ally and partner capabilities.”
A key player in the development of the International Partnership Strategy is Air Marshal Paul Godfrey, who is Saltzman’s assistant space chief for future concepts and partnerships. Godfrey, an officer in the Royal Air Force, was first commander of Britain’s Space Command.
Despite the increased friction the Trump administration is causing with allies and partners globally due to tariffs, tepid support for NATO, and worse so for Ukraine in its war against Russia, both Saltzman and Godfrey told reporters that at the military-to-military level, “it’s business as usual.”
In a media roundtable Saltzman, Godfrey outlined three key areas of focus moving forward with the strategy, including force design, force development, and force employment, all of which intersect with “every single part of the Space Force,” and other parts of the Defense Department, intelligence community, and U.S. Space Command.
The Space Force is developing an implementation plan for the strategy over the next six to nine months that will lay out the tasks, and “implied tasks,” and understanding them, Godfrey said.
“And it’s embedding that golden thread of partner integration through the processes that the Space Force have pulled together over the last five years,” he said.
One way Saltzman believes that integration can be enhanced is by adding unclassified war games to the current classified exercises the Space Force conducts with its international partners. A challenge with classified events is that when the Space Force and its partners go back to their home countries, everyone has a difficult time explaining the results to their “ministries” and “our budget people because it’s classified,” he said.
Plans for an unclassified war game are in the “early stages” but the fact that a lot of the on-orbit threats have been declassified bolsters the changes for such an event, Saltzman said. This would give participants “kind of the narrative to go back and make the case to their respective governments in a way that they may not be able to if it’s classified.”
Multinational cooperation is nothing new for the Space Force. The service manages the Combined Space Operations (CSpO) initiative, which is where it works with representatives from nine other nations on responsible space behavior.
Operations are with partner nations are also a focus for the U.S.
On Tuesday, U.S. Space Command Commander Gen. Stephen Whiting told the symposium that over the last year his command has been “working to operationalize our relationships in space with our most capable allies.” For example, he announced that the U.S. and France recently conducted the “first ever bilateral rendezvous and proximity operation to demonstrate combined capabilities in space in the vicinity of a strategic competitor spacecraft.”
Saltzman said there are “tremendous benefits” when the Space Force can train and practice with its partners, adding that “they learned a lot of lessons because the communication has to work, the planning efforts have to be joint.”
The Space Symposium is a key event for the Space Force, in part because of the attendance by international officers, Saltzman said. The nation’s top space officer said he has had “really good key leader engagements with a number of countries” and on Thursday is hosting space chiefs from 20 countries and a NATO representative to discuss different topics, including the new partnership strategy.”
The CSpO members will meet on Friday to discuss plans for the year, he said.
The International Partnership Strategy is expected to be publicly released in about a week, Saltzman said.