The Space Force Has Its Vector. Now It Must Outpace The Threat.
The post The Space Force Has Its Vector. Now It Must Outpace The Threat. appeared com. Gen. Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations for the U. S. Space Force Spacepower Conference Oped General Chance Saltzman’s newly released Vector 2025 is the clearest articulation yet of the U. S. Space Force’s purpose, priorities, and philosophy. It captures the seriousness of today’s contested space environment and reflects a significant evolution from the benign operating conditions of earlier eras. Saltzman rightly emphasizes that America must be prepared not only to operate in space but also to deter, contest, and, when necessary, control the domain against capable and ambitious competitors. His focus on competitive endurance built on space domain awareness, resilience through disaggregation, and a credible counter-space posture establishes a strong conceptual foundation. As strategies go, Vector offers exactly the kind of high-level orientation a young service needs. But strategy is only the very beginning. To deliver on the outcomes envisioned in Vector, the Space Force will need to lean much more forcefully with the zeal of a religious convert head-on into three areas where commercial innovation and operational realities are already accelerating at warp speed. Fully Embracing the Space Force’s Identity as the First Digital Military Service One of Space Force’s defining attributes is that it is, at its core, a digital service. More than any other military branch, it is shaped by software, networks, and decision-speed rather than by traditional measures of platforms or force structure. Fully realizing this identity means embracing a shift that surpasses even the transition the Air Force experienced after its creation in 1947. Domain control in space will increasingly depend on rapidly deployed, continuously updated, secure, mesh-networked systems that operate as a distributed compute layer in orbit. Autonomy, crosslinks, data fusion, and real-time inference will deliver operational advantage far more effectively than the performance of any individual satellite. The Space Force has already.