Arlington, VA | December 9, 2025 — The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies is pleased to announce a new entry in its Policy Paper series, Charting a Path to Space Superiority: The Cross-Domain Imperative, by Col Jennifer Reeves, USAF (Ret.), Senior Resident Fellow for Space Studies at the Mitchell Institute’s Spacepower Advantage Center of Excellence (MI-SPACE).

Space superiority is an essential U.S. national security imperative, as it underpins all U.S. military operations as well as key civil and commercial services. As China and Russia field increasingly potent space capabilities and counterspace weapons that threaten the U.S. space architecture in orbit and via its terrestrial components, all warfighters in all domains must prioritize achieving space superiority as a foundational condition for conducting successful operations.

The Department of Defense (DoD) must conduct a comprehensive review of space roles and missions across the national security enterprise to clarify institutional responsibilities and prioritize cross-domain capability investments to improve the survivability of the space architecture and provide operators with more flexible options. The next step in achieving a new space superiority construct involves changing the culture—to treat space as a true warfighting domain. The DoD must educate its warfighters about the scale and scope of the threat, help them understand space dependencies, and then focus on the multidomain training necessary to prevail in contested space scenarios. Deliberately employing contested space scenarios in major theater exercises must occur before conflict in space erupts—the United States cannot face these challenges for the first time with real lives at stake. Without these urgent reforms, space superiority will remain aspirational, and the United States risks defeat in this linchpin domain.

The Mitchell Institute Policy Papers is a series presenting new thinking and policy proposals to respond to the emerging security and air and space power challenges of the 21st century. These papers are written for lawmakers and their staffs, policy professionals, business and industry, academics, journalists, and the informed public.

For media inquiries, email our publications team at publications.mitchellaerospacepower@afa.org

Copies of Policy Papers can be downloaded at https://mitchellaerospacepower.org/category/publications/