USSF Future Objectives and International Partnerships
March 4, 2025
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This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.
Sian Griffiths:
Good afternoon, everyone, and it’s wonderful to see such an elite crowd of people here for this panel. I would like to start off first by welcoming our panelists. They actually deserve almost no introduction, but from the right, General Shawn Bratton, Lieutenant General Shawn Bratton, CISRO, a person who I know and love and interact with all the time, a fellow countryman, Air Marshal Paul Godfrey. This is a mouthful, so I’m gonna get it wrong. Assistant Chief of Space Operations for the Future Concepts and Partnerships, and Major General Dennis Bythewood, Special Assistant to the CSO and man about town for the Space Force. So to kick us off, I think over the last couple of days, it’s become increasingly clear the role that space and future space capabilities play in the joint fight and in all of the joint kill chains. My initial question to the panel, and Dennis, this is to you, is what do you see as the key technological and operational milestones that the Space Force aims to achieve over the next five years to both enable the joint fight and to achieve space superiority?
Maj. Gen. Dennis Bythewood:
Yeah, I’m sure my compatriots will jump in here in a second, but I think you have to start with the pointy end of the spear, and so you reach out to our components that are in the fight, integrating with combatant commands across the globe, and you look at what they need. And you tie that to what the CSO said yesterday. So space superiority and being able to drive that globally is key to the Space Force as we move forward. And then the next piece that we’ve gotta do is enable joint force maneuver anywhere on the planet that it needs to happen. So when you look at the technologies and the capabilities that we’ve gotta deliver for that, it ultimately comes down to a set of capes. Space domain awareness for a maneuvering fight on orbit to understand exactly what’s going on and being able to pinpoint operations. Counter space capabilities that allow us to contest and control the space environment, just like any other service would. And then all of the global mission operation capabilities that we’ve done throughout the ages and continue to perfect as we walk forward to support terrestrial operations around the globe. I’ll defer to you for specifics.
Lt. Gen. Shawn Bratton:
Yeah, Dennis, I think you nailed it. And first off, for the Tuesday afternoon crowd out here, well done. It’s easy to fade out at the end of the second day and you guys are bringing it strong. And a shout out to 11 Swiss. I told them earlier, I don’t think they believe me, I was on crew at 11 Swiss back in the day. And still the best squadron in Space Force, well done. It really is about you guys, ’cause we owe them just the best possible kit. The Guardians will bring it with whatever we give them and we have high confidence in their ability, but we gotta take advantage of the technology. We owe them just the best that we can. And I think these two both work in the futures arena and identifying those things that we can mature rapidly and bring into the warfighting force, whether it’s 11 Swiss or any of the units out there, I mean, I think is the key. And so not only finding that kind of magic thing that we wanna take advantage of, but the maturing it to a point where we can get it into the force rapidly. And if we can’t get it there rapidly, then holding it back in S&T and demo, if that’s appropriate, until it’s ready. So we’re delivering a fully burdened kit to the war fighters out there. I think that’s a key element to all of this.
Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:
I think I’ll add on this one as well, from an Allied perspective. It was one of the most difficult things in my last job as Commander of the UK Space Command was to look out and see exactly what technologies might make a difference. And we were all, as Allies stand up Space Commanders, looking to add value to the United States. You guys have been doing this for years. So it is about trying to find that sort of silver bullet out there. And I will come back to what you said, Dennis, that I think the CFIELD comms, the Component Field Commands, are really important because they’re on the ground speaking to all of these nations in their particular AORs. And they’re the ones that can maybe have that conversation that introduces a particular technology that can then flow up the chain. The big thing for us up here on the stage is to take that idea and try and work a process so it goes through concepts and development, ends up in the objective force. So that we can use that technology in the future.
Sian Griffiths:
I’d actually like to push on that a little bit. And I did warn you that I was gonna ask for specifics here within the constraints of the room. But as you look forward to enabling the joint fight and the key priorities of both CSO and of the President and of the combat commands, what do you see as the key technological innovations that the Space Force wants to focus on as we look forward to the future fight? General Bratton, would you like to start?
Lt. Gen. Shawn Bratton:
Yeah, I don’t know if it’s a particular innovation, but what comes to mind right away is the ability to scale up the things that we do today. So, I mean, we’re really good. We can bring the Space Force together and accomplish pretty incredible things. But it takes a lot of mass and a lot of just, you know, determined Guardians to get it through. And in combat, we gotta be able to scale that thing. These things that, you know, we do one or two of in peacetime or in competition, you might have to do that 100 times in the first 24 hours of conflict. And what does that look like? What’s the burden on the crew force? And maybe you guys are the exemplar with the activity, you know, the Iran launches. You know, that day is different than all those training days that lead up to it. And so how do we take what we do in peacetime and make sure that we can scale it? Part of that is in training. Part of that is in exercises. But there are technologies needed. We do have to understand the sort of crew resource management aspect of when does a crew force become saturated? And that informs us in our thinking of, okay, maybe that’s time we need another ops floor, another squadron, another whatever to do that same thing. I think we’re on the cusp of that right now, especially in space superiority, where we’re coming together and figure out these very hard problems, and now we gotta be able to scale that and deliver it.
Sian Griffiths:
Dennis, what about you?
Maj. Gen. Dennis Bythewood:
Yeah, I think there’s a couple things. You know, part of it, you know, is taking advantage of technological advances that we’ve already seen in the commercial marketplaces and in our lives at home. And then bringing them into the department, right? One of that is just the worldwide global communications, you know, capabilities that we’ve got now to be able to push resilient communications across the combat force. We’re actively working those pieces to make sure that we can connect everything on orbit to everything on the face of the planet and underneath the ocean in dynamic ways as we go forward to support that combat maneuver that I was talking about earlier. That’s critical. That’s available in many cases. It’s called bringing it into the service and really incorporating. The other ones that really come to mind are we look at the sensor proliferation, right, across not just the Space Force, but writ large, you know, across all of the services. And that can be, you know, through, you know, the usage of drones, UASs, you know, Seaborn, you know, unmanned vehicles, all the space sensors that we’re putting out there. The amount of data that we will bring back from those platforms really becomes overwhelming, right? So the taking advantage of the AI/ML that many of us are running, right, in various forms on our own computers at home, right, into the combat architectures that we put in there to help triage data, you know, put decision quality information in front of Guardians and soldiers, sailors, Marines across the Joint Force, you know, is critical. Those are all things that are new technologies to us that are getting pulled into the mix and rapidly incorporated into there. And the last one that I put into that mix, and there’s others, would be the movement of much of our, I’ll call it hardware-centric capabilities into software-centric capabilities, right? The ability to, you know, to update on the fly as we move forward, adjust to things that we see in the environment or other technological innovations, and being able to port that across the architecture is enabled by the broad software-based capabilities that we’re seeing proliferate everywhere. And it is something that we’re actively looking at, how do we bring that into the architecture at all levels?
Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:
I think the only thing I’d add is, so when an ally comes along with a particular capability, and it’s easy to go down the route of thinking of a thing, either satellite or a ground network, it’s probably a prototype at that particular point, you know, given the budgets abroad. How do we bring that into the system that you’re talking about? How do we make it interoperable? How does it work? Outside of a thing, it could be something like geography or launch capability. I was just, I think I saw him in the audience, I was talking to Major General Jonas Winkman, who, the Swedish Air Chief, and we were talking about S-range and the possibility of launch in Sweden. Same in Norway, up at Andoya, same in the United Kingdom. How do you develop that and bring that into US thinking so it’s kind of seamless when we need it, especially when we get to things like responsive launch? So it is keeping an eye on all of these things, and at this highest level at the service headquarters, just trying to bring it in and make it work seamlessly.
Sian Griffiths:
I’d actually like to talk about–
Maj. Gen. Dennis Bythewood:
Let me add one more thing
Sian Griffiths:
Please go ahead…
Maj. Gen. Dennis Bythewood:
Right, and it carries off of, you know, kind of the fully burdened discussion, right? This is not to, you know, belittle fully burdened. I think, you know, as we look about bringing capabilities, you know, to operations across the world, we need to understand how they’re gonna fare and we need to make sure that we put what we call all the illities in place that Guardians can operate those in a repeated way. For those of us who are then looking for what’s next and what’s the next next, I think the onus is on us to look through how do we reduce the burden to new systems coming in as we walk down that line, which starts to then move to what are the foundational things, being able to abstract the unique, and I’m thinking there of, you know, ground systems that ultimately can, you know, interact with satellites from any provider. The Guardian doesn’t need to know which satellite they’re on and the peculiarities of that. It’s a common interface. And on one hand, you just look at that as, hey, that simplifies the Guardian’s day-to-day activity as they’re working space command and control across things. But from a warfighting perspective, in my mind, what it does is it allows you to bring prototypes, new capability that we may not have like a full complement built out, but I can abstract all the things that would be a deterrence to being able to quickly operationalize them and ultimately deliver a capability that a combatant commander could utilize in the fight. Doesn’t mean that it’s haphazard. It doesn’t mean anything else. There’s still a ton of work that needs to be done. But I think it’s incumbent on us to look at what are the barriers for rapid and then be knocking them out of the architecture at every spot that we can.
Lt. Gen. Shawn Bratton:
Yeah, Dennis and I were talking about this this morning, and it’s the dilemma of new technologies, ’cause, you know, probably everyone in here has been on an ops floor and someone walks in and drops a new tool, a new container, a new piece of software, and you’re immediately in operations, but you haven’t had the training, you don’t have the TO. When does the benefit outweigh the risk of that? And we, I would argue, have not been great about that. We drop a lot of new things without all the support functions. But at the same time, to wait until it’s 100% ready delays a pretty critical capability. And so, you know, Goddard, you stood up UK Space Command. How did you, you must have had a bunch of new things coming into your ops center, I saw you over there. I mean, how did you wrestle with that, delivering new capability versus waiting?
Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:
It was a tricky one. And one of the things is we didn’t start from point zero. There had already been a space operations center there. They just hadn’t had a focal point to bring that sort of thinking. And so that’s what we brought. And certainly the dot mil PFP type approach is called TEPIDOL in the UK. To get a program over the budget line, you have to have put down everything, you know, how much this is gonna cost over a 10 year period for training equipment, personnel, infrastructure, et cetera, et cetera, all the way down to logistics and security at the end of it. It’s a big budget for some of these things. It’s a big training burden, which is why it was a sort of a step by step approach. And, you know, I don’t speak to the UK a lot in this particular job because I’m kind of doing it for all of the allies and partners out there. But certainly I saw in the news the other day that the things that we had done, there was an electro-optical satellite that’s now up there working for the United Kingdom. They just got a synthetic aperture radar on contract. They just done a complete redevelopment of the space operations center and the next development of the software. That’s taken three years to get to this particular point. But now we’ve got to those points. I think we’re iterating pretty quickly after that. And that’s what you see certainly in some of the more mature space commands like France has been doing this longer than the UK has, Germany standing up, Australia, Canada. So there’s a lot of prototyping going on and rapid technology insertion. But actually an awful lot of the time it is down to training and education. That’s where most of those allied space commands, if not all, are looking to the US to provide a bit of that training education to understand what squadron size do you need in a space warning squadron if you’re gonna get into overhead persistent infrared. These sorts of things we’re looking to the US to determine. And it’ll be really interesting to see as you start getting into being able to use AI and becoming more efficient at doing this, how we can sort of reduce the footprint size and cost required in order to do it ’cause that’s what people are looking for.
Sian Griffiths:
So pulling on that a little bit, from the side of the table where I spend a lot of time, so on the acquisition side, both software driven programs and software development and the deployment of AI are some of the biggest sticking points for programs right now. So software development is responsible for a lot of program delays. And any progress that we have made about deploying AI on the systems that would need to be deployed on to really support space operations has been incredibly difficult. So I would actually love to hear from all of your perspectives, what are the key kind of barriers and unlocks both on the Space Force side and on the industry side that you see could happen to make this idea of software driven capabilities, AI deployment, some of those kind of more exquisite technological capabilities easier for space operators and space programs? General Bratton, would you like to go first?
Lt. Gen. Shawn Bratton:
Yeah, Dennis will have a better answer so I’m gonna buy him some time to think. But the, you know, one of the things that comes into play is really the human capital management piece. And I think General Miller deals with this all the time. We still have to absorb Guardians into the Space Force. Second lieutenants, you know, need a job, specialists need a job. Where they are exposed to the crew rotations, exposed to operations, spot for a gen model, and they get those sort of foundational principles built in. Those are also probably the easiest jobs in some ways to automate. We could reduce the size of all the crews out there, create a lot of efficiencies in that way, but it doesn’t always lead in that instance to the most effective force. We still need exposure to warfighting. We need folks on crew, in spot for a gen, in the commit phase, doing the job every day. And so we gotta balance that sort of absorption problem of hey, where do you go to learn the fundamentals of being a Guardian in the Space Force? How do we expose you to competition and conflict, to all the things that you learn on an ops floor, but still at the same time take advantage of automation, AI, ML, to make ourselves more effective and not necessarily have efficiency be the driving force to that. Dennis is gonna say something really smart.
Maj. Gen. Dennis Bythewood:
Yeah, I’d say two kind of angles that come to mind. One, you know, and the CSO talked about this, the CSO talked about it yesterday, right? We’ve moved forward with our integrated mission deltas to try to bring back operations and really all of those elements of driving readiness, and we’re continuing to develop and lay out how our systems deltas work. When you think about software delivery, it becomes an interesting line as we walk that piece, and I was talking to a couple people over the last two days. There is a flow from requirements all the way to operations that never ends, right? I mean, it’s just a circle that keeps flowing along that line, and as we think about how we organize for effect, right, across the board, we need to be cognizant of the systems that enable that, and that we either don’t put barriers in the middle of that or we’re cognizant of where those barriers come, and in this case, I would talk, the barriers tend to be about places of systems deltas, building out software systems that get delivered to an operational IMD, and all of that team has to work together, right? They are separate elements, and that doesn’t mean they have to be the same element. It means that we have to put the structure in place that allows that continuous flow of information, right, that General Miller’s IMDs are interacting with General Grant’s systems deltas in a way that allows that cycle to flow. It is critical, and you’ve gotta be able to lay those pieces down, and then the second thread that I think becomes a barrier, and this probably is more on the AI side that we have to work through, it’s really the underlying data, right? There’s massive amounts of what I call commercial data, just available data out there that can support Guardian operations across the board, and we’ve talked about it in many forums. When we get down to what I call actual target recognition and those kinds of things, whether it’s on systems that are supporting terrestrial operations or on-orbit operations, understanding the fidelity of the data that you’re using to teach the models that are triaging data to provide you information that you can use is critical to the trust as you walk down that mix, and it is something that we still have to dive through and understand thoroughly, right, as we promulgate these capabilities.
Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:
Yeah, you know what, I really, I think IMDs, SMDs will be really key in this, and so in terms of getting through those barriers, getting stuff like software in the hands of the operators as early as you can so you can iterate is the best way of doing things. It was, I mean, I was just thinking about the timings. It was 1995 I volunteered when I was on my first squadron to be one of the, to use a prototype of a mission planning software, and at that time, every two weeks, we were getting a drop from having used it, collated the lessons, and this thing was awesome within months, rather than a sort of centralized acquisition system that sets a bunch of requirements, takes years to deliver, and then it’s not quite what you want because things have moved on, so I think that’s where the integrated mission deltas and system deltas can actually make a huge difference, and in terms of the barriers, I’d be remiss if I didn’t sit up here and talk about information sharing and classification. It’s easy to say that, though, and just, you know, a carte blanche, and I think we need to be specific in areas, you know, not every nation is gonna keep its own secrets, and we’re not gonna give up everything, but I’ll give you an example as a Allied Space Commander. I went to LA, must have been a couple of years ago now, visited all the major companies, every single company, I wanted a discussion, a more classified discussion about space control, various other things, because certainly most of the Allied Space Commands, we have not got huge budgets, so when it comes to space control, when it comes to protecting and defending, when it comes to space superiority, without understanding what is available, especially from US companies that have been doing this for a long time, we’ve gotta go and invent it ourselves, and it’s gonna take money, it’s gonna take time, and, you know, we can shorten that process by deliberately, I think, and this is where objective force comes in, are there any gaps in the objective force, where do we want the Allies and partners to concentrate on, and by deliberately then having a release of information on a particular capability or whatever, then there’s the possibility of buying into it, and, or, you know, co-developing these sorts of things, so I think it’s easy to say information sharing classification, but I think we do need to be specific, and we do need to prioritize, ’cause we can’t do everything everywhere all at once.
Sian Griffiths:
So we’ve talked a lot about the kind of the need for innovation, the need for integration, and kind of how this is driving, you know, the view of the future force. General Gagnon earlier was talking about just the speed of the red threat, like how fast that is advancing. Can you all talk a little bit about the process changes that you are making in order to drive agility in the programming, like in the planning process, in the programming process, and then also in how you think about bringing Allies in, both Allies and commercial partners in faster, like what are the key shifts have you made in order to accelerate that to keep up with the threat? Shawn.
Lt. Gen. Shawn Bratton:
Yeah, the framework we use, and Gartner and I spent a lot of time working through this, and Dennis owns a piece of it, but the objective force, we use that term, that’s all the kit we need to defeat the enemy, and usually it’s in a given time horizon, almost always in the future, and so the objective force of 2030 or 2035, that’s what we think we need to defeat the adversary based on the intel we’re getting, and then as the money guy, I gotta go buy all that stuff, and we can never afford it all, and so we talk about the programmed force as the part of the objective force that we’ve bought, and we’ve given out to the squadrons in the field of force, so I know what I need, I can’t afford it all, I buy a subset of it, but then I think the Allied and partner piece, that’s where there’s really an opportunity to fill those gaps in what we can afford and what we need if we are tightly coupled with our Allies and having open discussions at all security levels about hey, we’re gonna spend our dollars here, if you guys are buying that thing, then I don’t need to and I can put my money over here. I think all that is informed by someone whose eyes are further down the road in the future who is looking at what are the threats that are coming on the 10 year time horizon, on the 15 year time horizon, and feeding that back into the 5A for the programmed force decisions on, hey, based on the threat projections, we really think this piece of kit is most important, but there’s never gonna be a budget that supports all that, even in the best of days, and so I think this partnership thing, both partnership with industry on commercial capabilities, partnership with Allies on delivering, that whole partner to win, it isn’t about one or the other, it’s about both of those coming together to deliver the force that General Schiess, General Miller need to go to war.
Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:
On that front, it’s about developing a process that isn’t Byzantine complex when it comes to understanding what Allies and partners have to offer and matching it to a place in the objective force and then developing what we need to, whether it’s through FMS, whether it’s through direct commercial sales, or whatever, that whole gearing in the system so that that doesn’t take 10, 15 years. I think that’s what we need to work on and certainly my role in future concepts of partnerships, it is about that. What is the gearing in the system so that Gov has, hey, here’s some areas we want to concentrate on. There’s a bottom-up approach where the component field commands are out looking at what Allies and partners can provide. We match the two together and then we’re off to the races at that particular point. Sounds easy, a little bit more complex when you come to do it, but that’s what we’re working towards. And it’s not surprising we haven’t got there yet. The US Space Force is only five years old and it takes, it do not, again, you mentioned having stood up a command and that was only a two-star command of 500 odd people. Do not underestimate the difficulty of standing up an entire service in terms of getting these processes right and trying to make them different from what has come before you so that we can be quick and react to what is an ever-changing space domain and an ever-changing threat in that space domain as well. But we’re at exactly the right point now where all of these things, with us three on stage, are starting to come together with the operators, you know, the teams out there, SSC, SPOC. You know, I think we’re in a really good place for taking this forward.
Maj. Gen. Dennis Bythewood:
Yeah, I’d say that when we look at innovation, and I mentioned this earlier, there’s a lot of innovation that has already happened that, you know, that has taken place in the commercial market, you know, in our everyday lives that we’re still bringing into the military departments. And so one angle of that is just being open to that as you walk down. And we find a lot of barriers as we bring in those, usually because we’re bringing them into closed systems, you know, which we then have to figure out how do we break that system open to drive innovation. From small players, you’ve got new ideas and others. And we have spent the last couple of years, and we’ll continue to do this, of looking at how do we break open those architectures and basically lay in the foundational elements that allow us to change out parts of the architecture without having to change the entirety of the architecture. Right, that allows for what I call a lot of small scale innovation, both at the edges and fundamentally within our programs. The broader piece for what I call, you know, kind of the blue sky, you know, hadn’t thought about that before. Maybe, you know, our architecture still isn’t built in a way to, you know, to accept this change readily is back to your point on really the foresighting, you know, side of this. Some things are gonna get developed and show up on our doorstep ready to go that no one even thought about. And those will still be complex things for us to go struggle with. But we are looking to build, you know, a process and a system that allows us to continue to look out forward and understand what’s going on. I look at it from at the concept side as we’re building these things out in the beginning, that that is an open conversation that we’re having on many parts of the capabilities, you know, that we’re needing to address. One is, just what is the operating environment that we’ll be operating in, and that not being a closed conversation of its own. Engage with industry, engage broadly about what we’re seeing as trends, and how those trends impact the operating environment that we’ll have to conduct operations in. The second one is, where we see technological advances and how we see them playing within the architectures that we think will win in that environment. That’s our view, right? We intend to be very open in that conversation with industry so that we get the advantage of other people’s view who are looking at this differently. So that we can bring in things that hadn’t been thought about. And in the case of innovations that we’re not yet ready to accept, I’d argue that we’ve laid out a construct that allows anybody who’s got some new thing to at least be able to look at what we think we’re doing, and then argue with us about how whatever they’re bringing into the mix advances our warfighting capabilities in whole or in part. So that is a big part of it. That will bring in allies and partners as well as commercial and everyone else as we do it. And then continuing with that integration through war gaming that doesn’t only look internal. We do this in our space domain awareness already, right? The joint space operations team, as they looked at commercial operations, has set up forums for space domain awareness teams that are doing various things to bring kit into an environment where we’re running live and synthetic data and test what they’re doing with Guardians and others who are using that data to be able to see how it looks. They don’t necessarily field anything directly to us at that point. They may just learn here are gaps in what their offer was that they want to bring it back. We need to be doing that across the entire architecture so that we can prototype and innovate and move forward, and it’s not last minute learning when we finally buy it. We’ve been doing this and burning down that risk throughout. And then ultimately when we get down to your point and making the fiscal decisions about where we’re applying dollars, we then need to be able to lay out between the now and the future architecture, when are the key touch points where we have to make trades. Those trades might be driven by the adversary, moving in a way that changes the threat environment in such a manner that the current kit just is not gonna prevail. And that’s out of our control. The other parts will be technology is available, but not yet needed, right? And that then provides trade space to our programmers to go when’s the right time to bring this into the architecture and really drive that. And all of that is in continual interaction with the acquisition teams who actually have to go out and buy these things and build the contracts and the structures and the strategies to make it happen. So we’re working to make sure that the front end of that is coherent and complex and comprehensive rather than complex, to your point, Connors, that gets all of that captured in, and then ties into the rest of those pieces to allow others to do their jobs well with that information.
Sian Griffiths:
Anything you’d like to add? Or should we move on to the next thing?
Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:
I think I’ve said my piece on that one.
Sian Griffiths:
I think you’re probably right.
Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:
I’m just hoping someone wrote down what Dennis just said.
Sian Griffiths:
We can talk about it afterwards. So I think a little bit of a subject change, but actually very much on the topic of innovation and kind of future capabilities. I think unless you’ve been living in a cave, everyone will have seen a lot of the headlines coming out around Golden Dome and around the potential opportunity for Space Force to be a key participant in that. I would actually just love to hear your reflections from both the Space Force perspective, so the programming and the future, and the Allied perspective, is how has that administration priority, how is that informing kind of your key decisions or your key things over the next six to 12 months? Like how is that shaping what you’re thinking about, and how has it kind of like changed what you think the next horizon will look like for you? Dennis, would you like to start?
Maj. Gen. Dennis Bythewood:
Sure.
Sian Griffiths:
Given I stitched up Shawn with a hard question last time, so maybe you go first this time.
Maj. Gen. Dennis Bythewood:
I’ll give General Bratton in a couple of minutes to think up a good answer. So as you look at, and we look at the future architectures and where we’re driving, a national imperative like the Golden Dome really makes you come back and look at ‘Where do we sit from a technological space in all of the capabilities that we have?’ All of the capabilities we’re bringing, right? If you look across the things that are necessary to support that project, the Space Force has many that we’ve already been working out on from global sensing to communications, the ability to move data in large spots, to ground architectures and others. There is still a lot of work to do, but many of the foundational elements that we’ve already set in place and we’ll need to move forward. The key as you look forward is, hey, what are the technological gaps for us that we then have to drive and close? That then becomes advice, right? That comes back to this team as we look at what are the near-term buys and changes that we need to make in the architecture that allows them to think through what are the risk-based pieces as we walk down that line? Where can we get away, to use that term, with continuing in the direction that we were already heading because we think that will cover the need, and where do we need to drive investment to close down? I think that’s been a big push over these last couple of weeks as we’ve really been delving into that and will be continuing as we go forward.
Lt. Gen. Shawn Bratton:
Yeah, we’re, you know, the process we talked about earlier is great when priorities don’t change and budgets stay the same, but when someone drops a, you know, the president says, “Go do, “here’s an executive order on Golden Dome,” you know, Iron Dome, now called Golden Dome, we gotta get after it. We owe back to the White House, by the executive order, 60 days to figure out architecture, how do we think this all comes together? And, you know, Space Force certainly cannot solve that on their own. There’s players across the Department of Defense and intelligence community all working on this problem, and we’re side by side with those teammates, but in the end, you gotta do some architecture work, and you pull in the best and brightest you got, you start creating kind of OV-1s, and you look at the capabilities that we have today, and the things that are already programmed, and what’s coming, and in the Space Force, that’s a lot of the sensing, you know, from space. How do we think about what we can see from space in terms of space-based sensing and targeting, moving target indicator, missile warning, missile track, what can those things see, and does that contribute to the, ultimately, to the nation’s solution for Golden Dome? And then there’s some real challenges in there. If you just read that straight language that you can Google up on the executive order, I mean, boost phase intercept from space, that is no joke of a physics problem, but we owe an answer, you know, to the Secretary of Defense who will give it to the administration. So we gotta, we can’t just say that’s too hard. We have to deliver on these capabilities, and so, you know, we give our best answer, our best advice, and our best kind of estimate of how much this is gonna cost, and we package that up, and with a lot of eyes on it, then, put together, you know, the fully-burdened thing, and that is happening right now. I mean, we are working on Golden Dome every single day, and we’ll be up until, you know, the DOD delivers that back to the White House. It is no small challenge, but I feel like we’re up to these challenges, and so we’re getting after it.
Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:
Unsurprisingly, as the single-issue maniac up here, these guys hate the fact I keep knocking on the door and going, “Remember the international partners,” and closing the door, which they love, ’cause they’ve got a lot on their plate, you know, just develop, everything we’re doing in the day jobs is busy enough, but then, clearly, there is a huge focus, and I completely agree, you know, seeing Eleven Swizz shout out again. A lot of the stuff is already there. I think the biggest thing is, how is the DOD bringing this together? Who is leading it? And then, what are the international opportunities? Again, I just sat on a previous brief, and certainly a Canadian and a Swedish perspective of the two guys who are on stage. Integrated air and missile defense is clearly a huge thing, depending on who you border, and what you think the particular threat is. Certainly, prior to me leaving the UK last year, there was an awful lot of discussion about, how do we protect our air and space areas? And so, you know, I think it’s great that there is this very specific look at a very specific capability, which ultimately is integrated air and missile defense. And I think there will be huge opportunities for allies and partners to contribute to this, and then as a result, you know, get the benefit of a Golden Dome, which hopefully starts to extend, you know, around various areas. But you can see why it’s an immediate focus on CONUS, and then we just take it from there.
Sian Griffiths:
So, if I had to kind of sum up everything that we’ve talked about over the last 40 minutes, I think it does come down to, you know, the future of space is all around, kind of enabling integration and innovation to keep up with the threat. We only have a few minutes left, and so what I would like to hear from each of you is one, like, what is a goal or a commitment on the part of the Space Force that you have like a key change that you would like to make in the near future to enable that? And what would be the ask of, like, of industry and of your commercial partners to help you achieve, like, to help you achieve that vision? General Bratton, would you mind if we started with you?
Lt. Gen. Shawn Bratton:
Yeah, I think I’d go back to, you know, the thing that the Space Force, I think, is ready to turn the corner on, or we really have to be able to do for conflict is to scale up these things. You know, we’ve had some incredible demonstrations of capability. You think of, like, the VICTUS series that SSC has run on, you know, rapid launch and delivery of capability to orbit. Awesome. We need to be able to do that now at scale in conflict. And so making that transition from, you know, we can get a room full of just the best together with industry and all, you know, work as hard as we can to do something once, that needs to be normalized now into just standard procedures at the squadron level, straight up warfighting at scale, just like happens in the Air Force and the Army and the Marine Corps and the Navy every single day. And so, I mean, I think that change is right where they’re at, we’re really starting to see, really thanks to industry, incredible capabilities. Now we gotta scale those and we owe the squadrons kind of the training, the materials, the facilities, the tools that will enable us to make that leap from, you know, these one-off demonstrations to just mass producing warfighting effects out of the Space Force.
Maj. Gen. Dennis Bythewood:
Yeah, so when we look at, you know, the next 12 months and we think about the future, you know, we really are focused on that, you know, where do we need to be in 2040 and what are all the changes that need to happen between now and then to get us there? And so it is a far look vision, you know, that allows us to then, you know, transition that all the way back to the now. From industry, and allies and partners, right, Goddard, as we look at this across the board, really what I’m looking for is partnership, right, on all the things that I said before, right, as we’re thinking about how do we operate in that environment and driving that, challenge assumptions, bring new ideas, you know, help us formulate the many various ways that that environment might shape itself, right, ’cause it is a continuum of options. And then the second one would be, support us and engage us throughout that process as we look at what are the solutions to close and ensure we’ve got a viable force that can win in any one of those environments that actually shows up on our doorstep in 15 years.
Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:
So in terms of commitment, for me, it’s about getting out the international partnership strategy in the next few months. What that will do was, we’ll look at three areas, I think, the force design, that sort of seven to 15, five to 15 year period, force development, you know, which is that interim period where you’re working up the forces, and operations, you know, ultimately force operations with the generation and operation of those particular forces. So across all of those areas, we’ll run, the strategy is one thing, right, that’s for an internal audience, the Space Force is how we’re gonna do it, hopefully a few tasks in there, the external audience so that they know who they’re gonna speak to about various places, how they get into force design, force development, force operations. And the action plan, the implementation plan for this strategy, I think is key, and that will touch every area of the Space Force, all of the field commands, the component field commands, and the headquarters as well. And hopefully, with SAFIA, with OSD, with an eye on US Space Command as well, we’ll provide a coherent message to allies and partners to what we need, and then allow allies and partners just to bring something in, and for us to then bring that into the architecture of the United States Space Force.
Sian Griffiths:
Amazing, well, General Bratton, General Bythewood, and Marshal Godfrey, I’d just like to personally thank you so much for your comments on here and your time, and thank you everyone, thank you to AFA and to the organizers of the Air Warfare Symposium for this opportunity, and thank you for the time.