Heather “Lucky” Penney: Welcome to the Aerospace Advantage Podcast, brought to you by PenFed. I’m your host, Heather “Lucky” Penney. Here on the Aerospace Advantage, we speak with leaders in the DOD, industry, and other subject matter experts to explore the intersection of strategy, operational concepts, technology and policy when it comes to air and space power. And just a note for our listeners, the views expressed in this podcast are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the US Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the US Government.

So this week we’re taking a deep dive into the Space Force’s recent publication, Space Warfighting – A Framework for Planners. This document published in March of 2025 represents a significant step in the evolution of space as a warfighting domain. It establishes basic principles for the use of military power in pursuit of space superiority, and defines a common strategic framework for operating in this critical domain. So today I’m honored to have with me Major Kyle Genghis Rimando. Genghis, welcome.

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: Hi. Thank you for having me.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: And Genghis serves as the Chief of the Space Strategy Branch for the Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Strategy, Plans, Programs, and Requirements. And we also have Dr. John “Patsy” Klein. Patsy, welcome.

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: Thank you for having me.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Patsy’s, a Senior Fellow and Strategist at Falcon Research Incorporated and an adjunct professor at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute.

They are the key architects of this framework. So we’re going to explore this document, how it was constructed, its purpose, its content, all the elements vital to understanding the future of space operations. So to help with that, I’ve also got our Senior Space Fellows, Jen “Boots” Reeves.

Jennifer “Boots” Reeves: So glad to be here.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Boots. Love it when you’re here. And Charles “Socks” Galbreath. Socks?

Charles Galbreath: Great to be back with you.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Alright, we’re gonna take a picture of your socks. Preclude the show notes.

Charles Galbreath: Yeah, we’ll later.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Yeah, later. So anyhow, they’re here to help add their insights to this conversation.

Jennifer “Boots” Reeves: Yeah. I’m really looking forward to our discussion about the framework.

As we all know space is, it’s just more and more contested, congested, competitive. We can no longer take space access and space superiority for granted. And so this document is critically important for just laying out how the Space Force plans to approach these challenges. And I’m, these guys are the perfect people to be here to talk about it.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Fabulous. So, to get on with that conversation, I’d like to get started Genghis with you. Could you give us some background on how the framework came to be and what drove the need for this specific document at this time? And who was involved in this development?

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: Of course. Yeah. So this document started really with a meeting with the Chief of Space Operations General Saltzman to drive the language and build the culture for how the Space Force needs to achieve its purpose of achieving space superiority. Leveraging existing concepts, theories, doctrine, and applying that to the space domain. We’ve always leveraged space for homeland defense, missile warning and missile tracking for awareness of ballistic missile threats. We’ve put in decades of deterring adversaries, with our information capabilities like GPS and communications like MILSTAR, but now how do we need to start learning and understanding how to defeat adversaries in the space domain. Just like we do in the other domains and also accelerating the speed and scale of war fighting functions to the space domain.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Yeah, and that’s a major shift because previously, I think we all operated under this assumption, at least from a policy perspective, that space was not a warfighting domain, that it was not going to be militarized or weaponized. So this is a really foundational document in that shift because we’re recognizing that space, whether we like it or not. I mean, our adversaries have already chosen it. That space is a warfighting domain. So we’ve got to accelerate that so that we can maintain that space superiority.

So what was that writing process like? We’ve never fought a war in space, so you can’t really take historical lessons from the past to help guide your vision for the future.

So what did you use regarding real world operations and feedbacks from operational units to create this document?

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: Well, the task started with a handwritten note by the CSO and Patsy actually, I think is, will have way more detail about the specifics on how this process evolved over the months.

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: So to what kind of process was it? It was a very passionate process, as you can imagine, folks writing a seminal work called Space Warfighting.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Yeah.

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: But for your listeners out there, I want to kind of set the stage. Have we never seen war in space? I say we have, and as you look at the competition and crisis going on right now, we have 50 years of experience. What we’re seeing with the daily jamming, lazing, rendezvousing and proximity operations isn’t peace. So it’s more of this gray zone course of activities.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: So we’ve just not been acknowledging that war fighting has been going on in space for 50 years. For the American public. I mean, we’ve been operating as if it’s like this permissive environment, and I think the vast majority of Americans say like, no space is a peaceful domain. It’s, there’s nothing weaponized going on up there.

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: So I’m gonna put on my academic hat and say it depends. So, my definition

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Our favorite answer to everything.

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: My definition of a strategist is someone who quotes dead people. And to give you your first dead person quote of the day, so back to Carl von Clausewitz. He writes on, what is war? And the most distinguishing characteristic is violence. So have we seen Clausewitzian violence in space? I would say no. But we’ve seen activities that are coercive, crisis-like, non-peace-like so

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Non-kinetic. Non-kinetic operations, right?

Charles Galbreath: We’ve seen Kinetic too. I mean,

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: yeah. I mean,

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Is that the rendezvous and proximity operations?

Charles Galbreath: Well, not just that, but the terrestrial segments. So, we’ve had ground attacks against our assets. In fact, the recent Iranian rocket launch. The one thing that got through and hit a target, it was a satellite antenna on the ground. You know, we, we’ve seen violence affecting the space architecture.

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: And to the, let’s talk about Russia’s ASAT test. From 2021, they knew exactly what they were doing. It’s still unclear why, but why did they create large fields of debris prior to the invasion of Ukraine? It’s still, so, it’s like, again, we’d like to say something is this or that, it’s war, it’s peace, but sometimes there’s this messy middle.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Yeah, no, there’s always a messy middle.

We’ve had a really great little discussion there. Did you wanna go into the title, subtitle? I think we’ve actually covered it fairly well. Do you wanna move on?

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: Yeah, we can keep going.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Okay.

Jennifer “Boots” Reeves: Okay. So great conversation. Tell me more about the document and how it actually fits in with existing joint doctrine and maybe other Space Force strategic guidance. Was there a particular gap in doctrine or guidance that you guys were trying to fill?

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: Well, it doesn’t really align with doctrine at all, and I think that was, kind of the point where doctrine starts as best practices and lessons learned and how we’ve already talked about, we’ve never really gone to a full scale war in space yet. So a mashup of doctrine, theory, and concepts really to start framing and igniting the conversation to think about the things we need to understand to win wars in space.

Jennifer “Boots” Reeves: So we’re getting ahead of it.

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: Yeah, you touched on the thing. What is it? Is it doctrine? Like, Genghis was saying it’s a mashup of all three. It’s th eory, strategy, and doctrine. Sometimes there’s blending between the all three. We like distinctions, but I think we took a great job of doctrine, like elements. We took real world examples from Ukraine. And then we also took enduring ideas from Clausewitz and other seminal strategists.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: So in Space Warfighting’s forward General Saltzman states that, “it is the formative purpose of the Space Force to achieve space superiority.” So could you explain what space superiority means in this context? And why it’s so central?

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: For me, space superiority is like the bumper sticker for the Space Force. It’s like, why do they exist? What do they do? What they do is achieve space superiority. So the document will go into a definition, and again, this is where it kind of, it marries up with joint doctrine. So you’ll see perfect alignment between this document and a Space Force doctrine. So space superiority allows military forces in all domains to operate at a time and place of their choosing without prohibitive interference from space or counter space threats while denying the same to an adversary.

You know, space superiority is how the Space Force will fight and win in space, and it’s actually how it’s gonna deal with what’s going on day to day.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: It sounds a lot like air superiority.

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: It, it does. There’s some elements and we’ll talk about, some of the nuances between those.

Charles Galbreath: So one of the things that I, I think is really interesting about this document is, you do pull from air power theory as we would expect. The Space Force largely came from the Air Force, but you’re also pulling from other domain strategists and theorists because warfare is warfare. And so maybe there’s some better analogies in the maritime domain. So could you talk a little bit about that, Patsy?

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: Yes, exactly right. So, Genghis talked about how we got the original task, and part of it was the handwritten note by General Saltzman, which basically directed do something similar to like air doctrine with the counterspace framework.

But again, quoting our dead uncle Carl von Clausewitz you know, a paraphrase of him is, and I would say extrapolating into space, is space isn’t special it’s just wonderfully different. And this has to do with the enduring nature of war, but it’s changing character, so you can draw upon seminal strategists. In this case, Julian Corbett, who was a premier strategist from the early nineteen hundreds, a contemporary of Alfred Thayer Mahan. So Space Warfighting quotes him directly and some other worker, strategists such as Colin Gray.

Jennifer “Boots” Reeves: Okay. So to follow on the framework discusses dimensions of space superiority in both spatial and temporal terms. So can you elaborate on the difference between general and local superiority and between persistent and temporary superiority?

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: Yeah. I know it can be kind of dense when we start talking about this terminology, but going back, you know, we pulled from Julian Corbett’s ideas almost exclusively in this. And what we tried to do with this document was right a wrong. So from my point of view, and I would say seeing how Guardians talk about space superiority, it was connoted as an absolute, either you have it or you don’t. And that’s not really true. Space is too big. You can’t have superiority at all places all times. So that’s where we kind of drew upon the maritime domain because Corbett lays out that you can have, he calls it sea control or maybe command of the seas, but you can have it at a time and a place. But to your question, you know, we kind of do a two by two matrix there. So you have a general superiority, which is the spatial dimension. Which is the enemy can no longer act in a meaningful way. We have local [00:11:00] superiority, which is in a specific location. We have temporary, which is for a small period of time, you can achieve it. And then persistent is where time is no longer a factor. So for the folks and the listeners out there who says, “gimme an example?” So when the US says that it has space superiority, I would argue it’s talking about near earth orbits. We’re not talking necessarily cislunar or lunar activities or activities around Mars. So this is an implied idea, so, when we look at how our middle powers and emerging powers will achieve space superiority in their view, it could be low earth orbits, geostationary orbits, could have a different level of space superiority. So again, it’s time and place where you are and for how long.

Charles Galbreath: Patsy, can I just pull on that thread a little bit? You say that we have space superiority in the near earth, you know, orbits, and that’s, that sounds great. But when you say that space superiority is also the ability to deny the adversary use of their space activities are you saying that we can do that today? I think we can exploit space, but we can’t necessarily deny it today.

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: And this is the rub. And again, I would love to read from the hand of Corbett, but you know, even when they said, like, when Britannia ruled the waves in the age of sail and Great Britain had command of the seas. Rivals could still act. So what we need to understand, even when you have the highest, general persistent space superiority, all places, all times in this case near earth orbits, rivals can still act. And we need to understand that, there’s no guarantee that a thinking intelligent, capable adversary will not act, but you just have to prepare for that.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Well, this sounds a lot like air superiority because I think that this notion that superiority means that you have complete and utter dominance really comes from a misunderstanding of the permissive environments that we operated in for the last 25 years.

Air superiority really is also localized and temporal because you need to ensure that you have that superiority to execute what you want to do to maneuver with the freedom, and also to go offensive and deny the adversary their ability. And it doesn’t mean that you control that airspace all the time.

It’s really about having that targeted capability, that targeted air superiority to protect your assets, to maneuver at your will, as well as also targeting the adversary’s assets to prevent them. So if you think about it in those terms, it allows you more efficient use of your capabilities because you’re only targeting specific locals, localized areas, as well as specific times.

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: And just the pile on there and the air superiority, how it was used was mostly used incorrectly, but you’re spot on. Like I’m an old Navy guy, Iraq, when we achieved space, air superiority, in this case it was over the joint operating area. And it was during vul windows. So we had implicit in these ideas it was time and place then, but we say we have air superiority and you kinda lose all that. But one of the, sorry, you’re,

Heather “Lucky” Penney: And you’re also really only providing that air superiority in those target areas that you care about. It’s not the entire theater region. And so that, that does again, allow you to be very targeted and very specific where you need to for efficiency of force.

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: But one of the reasons we wrote this document, again, to prepare for these things, is to understand and describe what is space superiority. We’ve never really understood that and why it matters, right, for the specific purpose of achieving an objective and understanding, describing space superiority regardless of the conditions as important to allow guardians to focus on these things, and then when we apply that to reality, to time and space, it becomes a local and temporary, and that’s just the reality of a fight where it’s a blend of competition and superiority and you’re really just constantly pursuing advantage over an adversary.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Yeah, it is that cat and mouse game. It is, that’s the nature of something being contested.

Charles Galbreath: Yeah. So Patsy, the document also talks about counterspace operations and offensive and defensive, but what I love is it goes well beyond just those broad headings and talks about some specific activities that can be binned within those categories.

Can you elaborate a little bit on, on what those actions are?

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: Yeah. Back to the, what the document’s purpose was. It was, part of its education and to use enduring language. So we wanted to kind of peel back some of the jargon and buzzwords that we had been using in the national security space and you’ve been around a while, you, you remember ’em all. But going back to Clausewitz and using offensive, defensive terminology. You know, according to Clausewitz, he was doing a lot of stuff on Newtonian physics which was in vogue when he was writing. But the offense has a positive object and seeks to take away something from the adversary. Defense has a negative object and seeks to prevent or deny something from the adversary. So in this counterspace framework we have offense and we have defense. In a space context, offensive actions directly enable space superiority while, which is a priority for the joint force, and defensive actions protect friendly forces cap abilities from attack interference and hazards.

So you’ll see this beautiful, much debated and passionate counterspace operations framework, but we have offensive actions, and we have defensive actions and we can go into more detail on what they are. But again, it’s, it’s going back, you haven’t seen this framework in joint doctrine before, and for your listeners, this is an unclassified open source document and we’re talking using terminology even though it’s conceptual of orbital strike and terrestrial strike in a document. So this is a groundbreaking document.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: This sounds a lot like offensive counterair and defensive counterair in pursuit of air superiority. So offensive counterspace and defensive counterspace, I think is something that’s intuitive for our listeners if they’re familiar with the air domain. And so then when you expand that to orbital strike and terrestrial strike with kinetic operations, again, that really makes it intuitive for our listeners to grasp.

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: And that’s where why we designed this document is a framework for planners and is the title, it’s not just for Guardians, it’s for the entire joint force to understand that every branch of the military and every every part of the joint force may have a role in achieving space superiority. It’s definitely not something any branch does on its own.

And I think being able to use these words is just another level of decomposition from some of the existing language we’ve always talked about. Like, protect and defend. Protection has four specific ways according to joint doctrine that’s achieved. And passive and active defense, emergency communications and emergency response. But how do we translate that and what does that mean for us as far as activities in the space domain, is really important to capture in this document and start understanding these things across the joint force.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: So let’s drill down on some of those offensive space actions. The framework identifies orbital strike, space link interdiction, and terrestrial strike.

So can you help us understand the differences between these approaches and when each might be most appropriate? I’m already gonculating in my noggin like, what am I gonna blow up? You know, what am I gonna jam? What non-kinetic and what kinetic opportunities do I have? And also who might be responsible for doing that? So those, those multi-domain kind of operations.

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: So in this framework, we try to go back to again basics. For the offensive piece, let’s, conceptually, what are we talking about? We’re talking about shiny things like satellites, we’re talking about ground stations and the like, but we’re also talking about signals, electromagnetic spectrum. So we’re talking about the physical and the non-physical or electromagnetic spectrum. And this is where the framework kind of deviates from air power doctrine, I would say. So for the orbital strike this is actions taken to destroy, disrupt, degrade adversary space platforms in the space domain can be accomplished through kinetic, non-kinetic, reversible, and non-reversible. Terrestrial strike, again that’s can sometimes cause eyebrows, but it’s actions taken on part by the joint force, Any member of the joint force in this case, intended to destroy, disrupt, degrade, adversary, launch capabilities, space systems, architectures, again through kinetic, non kinetic, reversible, and non-reversible. Space link interdiction. This is the electromagnetic spectrum. This is the non-physical, and this is where we kind of, overlay into some cyber activities. But space link interdiction or actions taken to disrupt, deny, degrade, enemy’s critical space links and again, usually non-kinetic factors is how this is achieved.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: And so for our listeners, I wanna give you a little bit of a preview. Boots is gonna have a paper coming out regarding cross-domain operations for space superiority. And this is completely aligned with what she’s, analyzed and discovered. So stay tuned for that. But back to the conversation. Boots.

Jennifer “Boots” Reeves: Thanks, Heather. So, yes, I’m excited about that paper. I wanna go back and talk to Genghis because we just talked about offensive actions that we need to do to get space superiority. But let’s go back and talk about defensive actions again. Right? We see that they’re divided into active and passive defense, and, and I wanna know why that’s important and what the key differences are in how we deploy active and passive defenses.

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: Yeah, thank you. The passive defense really needs to be understood across force design and campaigning and shaping an operational environment that maximizes the joint forces opportunities for decisive action. Again, at a time and place of our choosing. As we described earlier, there’s already been conflicts or counterspace activities, not necessarily full on campaign for a war in space. And so most of our plans so far have been reactive or preparing for additional counter space activities, not necessarily for a full campaign. And passive defense really preparing for these things shaping the operational environment it’s, it’s boring and it happens on longer timeframes, but it’s still just as important.

Jennifer “Boots” Reeves: Awesome.

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: And just to, add some additional details. So when you look at the passive space defense, it has a long laundry list of stuff. You know, it includes like threat warning, deception, hardening, dispersal, disaggregation, and others. But we know this in the space community, this is just resilience. So again, we’re using, we’re trying to use a taxonomy to help the joint war fighter, but these are enduring concepts because we’ve been operating in the space domain for decades.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Yeah. And I, I think, you know, talking about that active defense and passive defense, or offensive and defensive defense I think that’s something that’s intuitive for our listeners.

So the document also discusses the space segments, the orbital, the link and the terrestrial, and emphasizes that operations must be synchronized across all three. Why is this multi-segment approach so important? Why don’t we just focus on one, like this orbital domain and, and just kind of ignore the terrestrial?

Why do we need to have all?

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: In the space domain being able to describe the three segments and understand where are parts of these operations happening, what would terrain look like for activities that we need to achieve space superiority. When you’re increasing speed in space, you’re increasing the risk of desynchronizing operations and effects. And, and as space operations happen simultaneously across all these three segments any lack of awareness or any issues with communications or information leads to breakdowns in command and control, that allow for, vulnerabilities that our adversaries can exploit faster than potentially our ability to reconstitute our capabilities.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: When you say speed increases the risk of desynchronizing operations and effects, increasing speed of what?

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: Any activity. So across the joint war fighting functions, right? If we’re increasing speed of, or our rate of maneuver, our rate of fires, there’s elements of command and control and information and intelligence that all have to happen at the right time and place, not necessarily the fastest time and place.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: So do you mean we’re, our OODA loop is going faster than the adversaries? Is that what you’re getting at?

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: I think it’s more important that our OODA loop is synchronized with ourselves. And then as we get reps in, as we, as we start developing our strengths and our abilities of where these capabilities tie into each other, then we can focus on accelerating our OODA loop.

Charles Galbreath: So you, you’ve talked about terrain a couple times and I want to just dig at that a little bit, no pun intended, but you know, on earth, not all places are equal. There’s hilltops are better to defend than valleys. You don’t want to go into Box Canyon, that sort of stuff. So when you’re looking at, at the space domain are there some areas that you would consider as, as key terrain or, or strategic lines of communications even to use a navy term. Patsy back to you. On some of the things that we have to defend.

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: Yeah. I always try to give some love to the often forgotten terrestrial ground segment. Everyone forgets about the the network dimension, the ground stations. A lot of these stations are under cyber attack on a daily basis. You know, for the lines of communication we talk about from terrestrial to space and cross links and others. We have strategic positions which are important. We have high value units on orbit too. So it’s easy to use a lot of air domain or maritime domain in thinking about these celestial lines of communication and what is important or like, we did try to keep it simple. It’s a 20 page document and if you start layering on a bunch of good ideas, which is when happens when you do a staffing process of something like this important, it’s easy to do that.

But we tried to go, like Genghis was saying, using the orbital, link, and terrestrial segment, when we talk about celestial lines of communication and what is important and what is not.

Charles Galbreath: Yeah. So the framework also talks about the criticality of cyber. General Burt was with us recently and she said there’s no space heroes without ones and zeroes. Right? The relationship between cyber and space is just inextricable. Can you talk a little bit about how this document approaches cyber?

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: This is actually probably a great part to introduce, my core career field is actually cyberspace operations. I’m actually not a space operator. I’ve just always loved and studied space. And again, just want to reiterate the same war fighting principles apply to cyber as well as space. And why that’s important is ’cause the cyberspace domain is an important part and whether that’s directly adjacent or related to space operations. So it’s in the cyber domain, you’re gonna have different risks, different surface attack areas, and those are all gonna require different capabilities and unique functions that have to be integrated every step of the way for the space domain.

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: So this is where we kind of deviate from, I would say, classical air power doctrine. So we went back to Corbett, and when he defines what a maritime strategy is, it requires the closest interaction of the sea upon the land. So maritime strategy is actually two domains. You can’t have one without the other. And this is where we kind of went for our Space Warfighting document. We wanted to show the closest interaction between the space and cyberspace domains. Now for your listeners, since everyone’s an expert in this, you know that space architectures include the terrestrial segment network dimension. So by definition, by definition, the space architectures, the space domain activities include the cyberspace domain. So if for the listeners out there, if you could vision or envision like two interlocking circles, it would be space domain and cyberspace domain, and they share common characteristics. This is lines of communication, informational environment, network dimension, and the link segment. So again, this is kind of, I would say groundbreaking for the document and for the folks in the professional military education system, perhaps an opportunity to write some papers on what is the significance of this? I think what we’re seeing from Ukraine where we had a cyber attack against the company Viasat, was that a cyber warfare or was that a space attack? Or was it both? So we could talk more. I think it’s both, I think. And what I think you’ll see is you’ll see an action reaction between the space domain and cyberspace domain. TBD, we’ll see how the next few decades pan out.

Charles Galbreath: Yeah. Back to our earlier conversation about, is space, have we seen war fighting in space? We can’t ignore the fact that the very first move that Russia took with, before they invaded Ukraine was this attack against Viasat. There, that opens up a whole other set of, discussions as well in including commercial and, and whatnot. But, but your point about the interrelationship between space and cyber it came to fruition in, in that move.

Jennifer “Boots” Reeves: And that further underpins that the foundational concept of what a space system is that it includes that orbital segment, it includes the terrestrial segment, and it includes the link segment. And to affect a space system, you can do it by affecting any of these segments. And we have seen that actually happen multiple times now.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Yeah. And because a Guardian’s connection to their weapon system is fundamentally through that ground segment and through that link segment, that is one of the reasons why cyber is so embedded within space warfighting because it is the ones and the zeros that connect you, to the ability to control the satellite, to control the systems and sensors on that satellite and to maneuver within warfare so that there’s no guardians in space yet, so that’s really it.

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: And, and just like, as warfare is evolving and expanding in the space domain. Again, Russia’s tactics to use cyberattacks before conflict are not new. They’ve done this before their invasion in Georgia as well too. But that was not necessarily extended into the space domain until recently as Patsy described.

Charles Galbreath: So the framework also talks about the theory of competitive endurance, that’s the Space Force’s theory of success. Can you explain a little bit about how that fits into this warfighting framework?

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: Yeah. We’re, we’re in a state of competition right now and enduring in competition without ever having to escalate to conflict is ideal, right? And we don’t want to escalate to a level of conflict that requires victory and defeating an adversary. So staying in competition essentially just means building a bigger, and better team. We need to avoid operational surprise through awareness of any activities in our domain to include our own activities not just our adversaries. We need the capabilities to deny first mover advantage, which are primarily in the other services as this time as we talk about things like terrestrial strike, right? But these are things we may need to understand and develop as part of this for the Space Force. And responsible counterspace campaigning requires us to communicate, collaborate, and increase trust with partners in American industry as well as internationally to accomplish the development, the posturing and, and the employment and campaign planning to shape an operational environment where our adversaries don’t ever want to attack in space.

Jennifer “Boots” Reeves: Okay. So, um, how does the framework though, address the tension between military effectiveness and the long-term, long-term sustainability of the space environment? That can be a real challenge. You know, cases where kinetic actions might create orbital debris, and that’s a challenge. How do we deal with that?

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: This is a, a key point of the document and probably could even warrant a, a podcast on its own, but we’ll go back to the, the tagline. Space is not special, it’s just wonderfully different.

Again, I’ll pull on my own, experience in, naval aviation as a lot of the listeners out there that are air power enthusiasts or practitioners. In the air domain we knew there were certain weapons you couldn’t use.

You can’t use a rock eye, you can’t use anti-personnel type weapons that look like little bomblets that kids pick up because that’s just bad. You can’t use open water mines in the Navy because they’re an indiscriminate hazard. I would say similarly in the space domain, there’s certain types of weapons we need to think about. Are they indiscriminate, are they against what we believe? Are they against international humanitarian law? So in this case it’s debris. L ike the seas and oceans of the world, the space domain is a shared domain. We use it with civil, we see it, use it with commercial. It’s gonna be used between belligerents. So as we think about what type of kinetic effects or weapons effects we’re gonna have, we need to think about the debris. And we have the DOD tenants of responsible behavior, which also calls called out minimizing the creation of long-lived debris. This even applies to the electromagnetic spectrum. When we do jamming, if we do jamming of GPS in Ukraine, and we’re seeing it on both sides. So if I, if I take away this capability from my rival or my adversary, I may actually take it away from ourselves. Now, there may be some folks out there, “Hey, in time to the war, Patsy, it’s a mentality of killing ’em all and let God sort ’em out.” But I’ll say, you know, the US and the West, we stand for certain things. A nd why it matters and what we say on how we’re going to fight and win in space is important because our allies and partners are looking to us. So having norms of behavior, what we believe is a responsible way to conduct warfighting operations in the space domain is important. It lets us have more allies and partners, and it lets you form a coalition more quickly in times of conflict because you’ve already agreed on how you should fight.

Jennifer “Boots” Reeves: Okay. So speaking about how space is not special, just wonderfully different, movement and maneuver in space is quite different from terrestrial domains. So how does the framework address the unique aspects of space maneuver, including orbital mechanics and fuel constraints?

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: Yeah. How, how we, maneuver is gonna be different in space, but why we do it, the military utility of the function is, is a known principle of warfare, especially in the other domains, right? And then, and generally propellant in space just means more Delta-v which is an option to contribute to sustaining the missions or satellites already due today, but that’s slightly different from maneuver, right? Maneuver in general, the war fighting function that actually allows us to achieve, deny, degrade, destroy, deceive effects against an adversary, not necessarily fires. And fires are generally shaping the operational environment. So planning, movement, maneuver, fires, and sustainment around space operations and planning around fuel constraints is just another form of resource management that we need to understand, according to the capabilities we have or may have in the future, when we start applying these to the joint warfighting functions.

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: So sometimes folks may kind of take exception that I lean heavily on maritime strategy and in my writing or when I talk about stuff. I have a good friend of mine, Coyote Smith down in Maxwell Air Force Base, and he’ll say, “All analogies are wrong. Some are useful.” So you gotta be really careful when you’re taking this enduring concept of movement and maneuver. So, and this is, this is where it’s part art. So when we’re talking movement and maneuver, it’s not just shiny metal things. We’re also talking about the electromagnetic spectrum and the like. So, this document acknowledges that movement and maneuver actually, it applies to that, it’s an enduring concept. It includes the rapid sustain, maneuver, moving satellites to different orbits, changing spacecraft locations such as lunar, cislunar, it can be jamming, lasing in different operating areas, frequency hopping, and then also dispersing capabilities across different domains and different architectures.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Seems to me like one of the analogies that’s really, pertinent here from the air domain is remotely piloted aircraft operations. So if you take a look at RPAs and the way that those operators and pilots interact with their weapons system and the way that they bounce through the atmosphere, through their links and across space, the space domain as well as their engagement through the cyber is actually a pretty apt analogy. And so it helps me understand more what you mean by movement and maneuver, because those are very creative and very effective operations. But I’d like to shift gears slightly because this is a document for planners and talk about the planning and execution considerations that you outlined in the warfighting framework.

What are some of the key factors that space warfighters and other planners need to to consider when crafting these operations?

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: So this is a section where we try to address a critique of our writing early on, that we didn’t wanna have a document of aspirational platitudes.

So you can’t just have, you can’t just have theory and strategy. And then how are you measuring it? How do you know if you’re winning, if you’re achieving space superiority, if guardians are doing their job, and this is, you know, this is a part of the document where we leaned heavily on established, Air Force doctrine on how it lays out the measures of effectiveness and measures of performance.

So yeah, we did look at the Air Force doctrine. We need to understand how joint operations fit in this. So some, we give a long list. I’m not gonna go through all of them, but some of the planning considerations include intelligence preparation of the operational environment. Listeners are very familiar with that. Rules of engagement. How you fight and win in this space domain. We’re talking about weaponeering, okay? So again, this is a, this is a, we’re normalizing space warfighting, so we can talk about weapons and we can talk about weaponeering. Along that has to do with targeting. Reduction of the enemy targeting, effectiveness, how you actually impact the adversary’s ability to reach out and touch you is also talked about.

And then another key one is it’s just not fighting and breaking things. It’s the recovery and reconstitution. So after conflict has started or after you’ve reached a sustainable peace, how do you reconstitute? How do you get more, satellites on orbit? What’s your launch tempo gonna be? Which satellite or spacecraft are most important to, replenish?

Heather “Lucky” Penney: So this is only 20 pages. This is inherently readable for every Airman, for every operator, for everyone within the DOD. We really need to do this because if we don’t have space superiority, nothing else matters. We can’t even achieve air superiority without some level of space control. The document also emphasizes the importance of targeting and counter space operations and you just spoke a little bit about that. How does the joint targeting process apply to space operations and what unique considerations exist?

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: The, joint targeting process applies a hundred percent to space operations exactly the way it is, and it’s more on us to understand how do we apply that to the space domain, right?

The timing of counterspace operations is going be different. It’s not necessarily captured, appropriately in existing constructs like a 72 hour air tasking order, right? The quality of data that we need for counterspace operations across the entire kill chain is going look drastically different compared to what we’re used to doing now, across find, fix, track, target, engage, assess an adversary, right? What does track, what does track and target quality data look like for a counterspace operation? Where that data needs to be, when it needs to get there, who it needs to go to is gonna be unique for space operations. And then again, the, the amount of data is gonna be different too, so it’s most likely higher than what we’re able to, collect process and understand today. Um, and it’s not just going to Guardians, right? This has to go across the entire joint force.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: It does have to go across because cross-domain operations, a lot of the counterspace operations will be executed by the other services, especially the Air Force.

Jennifer “Boots” Reeves: So I, so the document discusses the challenges of assessing space operations and it also emphasizes the need for both measures of performance and measures of effectiveness and we’ve already touched on that, but I’m super interested in why the assessment is particularly challenging in the space domain and how the framework actually addresses this.

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: Yeah, this is to go after trying to prevent from just being aspirational platitudes. How do you, how do you measure that you’re achieving what the goal is? So, back to space superiority the assessment should include basically two objectives. It’s ensuring freedom to maneuver, freedom to attack, and freedom from attack. And two, achieving space superiority should be logically tied to these three items.

So, you know, for an effective assessment, indicators should be developed at, at the same time that you’re looking to deliver these military objectives and effects, not after the fact. So some thinking needs to be done now in peace time before you go into potential conflict on how you’re going to measure what you’re trying to achieve with regards to space superiority. They should be qualitative. Sometimes we use stoplight charts, red, yellow, green, but they should also be measurable. So quantitative. So what are those? What are those things you’re gonna measure? As most of the folks, that have been around the, the department know what you decide to measure sometimes affect what you do. So we gotta be, it’s not the number of emails you send or meetings you have that dictate effectiveness, but we need to think hard about what that is. But the time to have that robust and passionate debate is now.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Anyone hear effects based operations in that answer? I sure do.

Jennifer “Boots” Reeves: Related to all of that, the framework mentions again, the electromagnetic magnetic spectrum as absolutely crucial to space operations, and we certainly have talked about that, a little bit. How does the framework approach the EM spectrum operations as they relate though specifically to space superiority?

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: Yeah. Electromagnetic warfare, again, is a mission area that’s part of our core function of achieving space control. And similar principles again to the electromagnetic domain how EW will contribute to achieving decisive effects in context with other capabilities from the joint force and also provides a unique ability to provide reversible and non-reversible, non-kinetic effects. Especially when it comes to EW and the capabilities that we have today, or maybe have in the future, they’re gonna have different force posture considerations. Whether that’s a footprint on earth or if we’re talking about EW from different directions beyond the systems that we’re putting on Earth right now.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Oh my gosh. We’re talking EW we’re talking EMS. That [00:41:00] is like totally hitting one of my buttons. I love it. But, you know, as we wrap up, um, I’d like to ask about the education and training implications of this framework, because this is something that needs to be disseminated, not just to our guardians, but across all of the DOD.

So, how is the Space Force preparing Guardians to implement these concepts, and how are you also looking at, at spreading that further out?

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: Right. Well, it’s part of, publishing the document. We, engage directly with a lot of the guardians at STARCOM, Delta 10, the National Security Space Institute, and all their existing efforts in the courses that exist today.

And, and how do we, again, evolve our existing courses to start addressing these principles that we address in Space Warfighting. We’ve also reached out to several schools and are working to setup competitions and prizes, really for essays and any more thought pieces expanding the work of Space Warfighting.

Charles Galbreath: So this, this document and we’ve talked about it here, it stresses the importance of cross domain effects. It’s written at an unclassified level, so it can be shared with not just guardians, but soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines across the board. But it is not joint doctrine and it is not a joint document.

So how do we, you know, reach out to our sister services to say, “Hey, you really need to start, training folks and educating them on the value of this document at your PME, whether you’re the Navy or the Army or the Air Force”?

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: I think a lot of that just has to, because we’ve used the, the joint doctrine and the terminology it’s easy for Marines, Army folks across the different sectors to understand what’s in it.

Fortunately for us, a lot of the professional military education institutes, they’re joint. So by putting the prizes that Genghis talked about in there, that’ll help spread the word. We also have a, a lot of civilian universities are incorporating this into their syllabus. So you’re not just getting the national security space community, you’re getting a lot of, foreign students talking about it too, again, just to normalize this, this from the air domain, none of this stuff is earth shattering. You’re talking about weapons and targeting, but it’s just kinda like, t alking about it in a common sense, and I’ll say there’s some folks out there that may say, here we go again, US is just overly belligerent. You know, they’re gonna, lead to a security dilemma. We’re gonna just see competition, you know, China and Russia are gonna follow suit. We could say historical experience does not support that self restraint actually, prevents conflict. It’s okay to just talk about it. I would rather talk about stuff than folks presume we have a capability and not talk about it.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Well, and also China and Russia have already made their voices known. They have already engaged in hostile operations in space. So if we restrain ourselves, we’re fighting, you know, with our hands tied behind our back, we can’t even fight if that’s the case.

Charles Galbreath: The past 30 plus years of restraint that we’ve shown has not prevented China or Russia from developing weapons at all. So we need to start talking about this b ecause if they do a full on attack, we’ve gotta be prepared.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Exactly. Peace through strength.

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: And a lot of this document was created to, not necessarily change joint doctrine, but use existing, known joint language to apply to the Space Force. Right. If we, if we walk with a joint force and quack like a joint force, we’re probably not a duck. We’re probably part of the joint force. So how do we start understanding our role and what the Space Force does and contributes alongside the rest of the joint force?

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Well, and this is also really crucial because, you know, the DOD has operated for a long time with the space capabilities, but many of those space capabilities have not been exercised during the course of major exercises, whether that’s the Air Force or joint operations, joint exercises. And so if we don’t integrate them, not just with a common language, but an understanding at a very basic level for all planners, then we’re not gonna be able to use Space Force capabilities when the balloon goes up, right? So we need to begin these operations now and it begins with that understanding, the warfighting concept. And that’s not just for Guardians, it’s for everybody. Because we all need to understand how to integrate those operations

Jennifer “Boots” Reeves: Well, and I’m particularly excited about this document because again, I’ve been working on this paper that we’re gonna be rolling out probably in about six weeks or so. And it is, it really covers a lot of things that you guys have talked about today and actions for the future about how to make this more normalized and how we also need help, cross domain help to create and establish space superiority at the time and place of our choosing. But I do have one final question. And that is, how do you guys see this framework evolving in the future? Right? As technology changes, maybe as threats continue to get I don’t know, bigger, weirder, who knows? And really how the space environment, will change for us?

Dr. John “Patsy” Klein: You know this, because we wrote something that was part theory, strategy and a little bit of doctrine, it will change. So Clausewitz goes back to the enduring nature of war, the changing character. So certain parts of this document will be enduring, and that’s, that’s a beauty of it. When we talk about that spatial and temporal dimensions of space, superiority, that’ll be enduring. Celestial lines of communication that’ll be enduring. Offense and defensive? Enduring ’cause that’s just Clausewitz. But when you have, talk about concept of operations. When you talk about tactics, techniques, and procedures that use specific technology, that’s gonna change. Probably some of our terminology will change over time, and that’s to be expected too. But fundamentally I think we could use this document a hundred years from now, at least as a starting point.

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: I personally wouldn’t be surprised if everything we wrote in here is a hundred percent completely wrong and [inaudible].

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Oh, no, no, no, no. But, but you know, also, things will change as adversaries launch new capabilities, develop new systems and so forth. So it is a dynamic that, that character of war is dynamic. And so that will evolve.

Charles Galbreath: But Patsy, back to your point, there are some enduring principles to warfare that will just, regardless of domain, they’re gonna, they’re gonna matter. Maneuver, surprise, those sorts of things are gonna be inherent in any domain conflict. And so talking about how they can apply to space and how space can leverage them to achieve superiority and enable all sorts of other activities and other domains, is absolutely critical.

So thank you both for taking the lead and writing this document.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: So Genghis and Patsy, this has been a great conversation, very insightful. And thank you for sharing your expertise and your role in developing this framework. The clarity that the warfighting framework provides around space superiority and counterspace operations will be invaluable, both for the Space Force personnel and the broader national security community. And as I said, it’s inherently readable. It’s 20 pages, and every member of the DOD, every service member should take some time to read it so they can understand how to integrate space operations [00:48:00] into their own domain.

Jennifer “Boots” Reeves: Yeah, really you guys, this has been such a tremendously informative conversation. Thank you so much for being here. I hope you both have a great space power kind of day.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Ooh,

Maj. Kyle “Genghis” Rimando: Have a great space warfighting day. Thanks for having us.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Thank you. And with that, I’d like to extend a big thank you to our guests for joining in today’s conversation. I’d also like to extend a big thank you to you, our listeners, for your continued support and for tuning into today’s show.

If you like what you heard today, don’t forget to hit that like button or follow or subscribe to the Aerospace Advantage. You can also leave a comment to let us know what you think about our show or areas that you would like us to explore further. As always, you can join in on the conversation by following the Mitchell Institute on X, Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn. And you can always find us at mitchellaerospacepower.org. Thanks again for joining us and have a great aerospace power kind of day. See you next time.