Mastalir said China is “copying the US playbook” with the way it integrates satellites into more conventional military operations on land, in the air, and at sea. “Their specific goals are to be able to track and target US high-value assets at the time and place of their choosing,” Mastalir said.
China’s strategy, known as Anti-Access/Area Denial, or A2AD, is centered on preventing US forces from accessing international waters extending hundreds or thousands of miles from mainland China. Some of the islands occupied by China within the last 15 years are closer to the Philippines, another treaty ally, than to China itself.
The A2AD strategy first “extended to the first island chain (bounded by the Philippines), and now the second island chain (extending to the US territory of Guam), and eventually all the way to the west coast of California,” Mastalir said.
US officials say China has based anti-ship, anti-air, and anti-ballistic weapons in the region, and many of these systems rely on satellite tracking and targeting. Mastalir said his priority at Indo-Pacific Command, headquartered in Hawaii, is to defend US and allied satellites, or “blue assets,” and challenge “red assets” to break the Chinese military’s “long-range kill chains and protect the joint force from space-enabled attack.”
What this means is the Space Force wants to have the ability to disable or destroy the satellites China would use to provide communication, command, tracking, navigation, or surveillance support during an attack against the US or its allies.
Mastalir said he believes China’s space-based capabilities are “sufficient” to achieve the country’s military ambitions, whatever they are. “The sophistication of their sensors is certainly continuing to increase—the interconnectedness, the interoperability. They’re a pacing challenge for a reason,” he said.
“We’re seeing all signs point to being able to target US aircraft carriers… high-value assets in the air like tankers, AWACS (Airborne Warning And Control System),” Mastalir said. “This is a strategy to keep the US from intervening, and that’s what their space architecture is.”
That’s not acceptable to Pentagon officials, so Space Force personnel are now training for orbital warfare. Just don’t expect to know the specifics of any of these weapons systems anytime soon.
“The details of that? No, you’re not going to get that from any war-fighting organization—’let me tell you precisely how I intend to attack an adversary so that they can respond and counter that’—those aren’t discussions we’re going to have,” Saltzman said. “We’re still going to protect some of those (details), but broadly, from an operational concept, we are going to be ready to contest space.”
A new administration
The Space Force will likely receive new policy directives after President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January. The Trump transition team hasn’t identified any changes coming for the Space Force, but a list of policy proposals known as Project 2025 may offer some clues.
Published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Project 2025 calls for the Pentagon to pivot the Space Force from a mostly defensive posture toward offensive weapons systems. Christopher Miller, who served as acting Secretary of Defense in the first Trump administration, authored the military section of Project 2025.
Miller wrote that the Space Force should “reestablish offensive capabilities to guarantee a favorable balance of forces, efficiently manage the full deterrence spectrum, and seriously complicate enemy calculations of a successful first strike against US space assets.”
Trump disavowed Project 2025 during the campaign, but since the election, he has nominated several of the policy agenda’s authors and contributors to key administration posts.
Saltzman met with Trump last month while attending a launch of SpaceX’s Starship rocket in Texas, but he said the encounter was incidental. Saltzman was already there for discussions with SpaceX officials, and Trump’s travel plans only became known the day before the launch.
The conversation with Trump at the Starship launch didn’t touch on any policy details, according to Saltzman. He added that the Space Force hasn’t yet had any formal discussions with the Trump transition team.
Regardless of the direction Trump takes with the Space Force, Saltzman said the service is already thinking about what to do to maintain what the Pentagon now calls “space superiority”—a twist on the term air superiority, which might have seemed equally as fanciful at the dawn of military aviation more than a century ago.
“That’s the reason we’re the Space Force,” Saltzman said. “So administration to administration, that’s still going to be true. Now, it’s just about resourcing and the discussions about what we want to do and when we want to do it, and we’re ready to have those discussions.”
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