Task before U.S. troops is “to adapt right now, so the joint force is prepared to fight, endure, and win in global contested environments, from the seabed to cislunar space,” Joint Chiefs chairman says.
America’s armed forces must prepare to wage and win wars in all domains, including on and around the moon, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said this week.
The task before U.S. troops is “to adapt right now, so the joint force is prepared to fight, endure, and win in global contested environments, from the seabed to cislunar space,” Air Force Gen. Dan Caine told an audience of service members and defense industry leaders Wednesday at the Air, Space and Cyber Conference in Maryland.
Cislunar space refers to the vast region extending out from Earth’s surface to and including the moon.
“Future conflicts will demand that we operate without the assumptions of uncontested access, secure rear areas, or uninterrupted or uncontested sustainment,” he said.
Caine’s comments come just days after Air Force Secretary Troy Meink acknowledged publicly for the first time that the U.S. has stationed weapons in Earth’s orbit.
“We are increasing readiness against existing threats, and the United States has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action,” Meink said Monday on the opening day of the conference hosted by the Air and Space Forces Association, a nonprofit organization with members of both services.
Meink did not disclose the type of weapons or when they were deployed.
The Space Force was created in 2019 during President Donald Trump’s first administration. It was established to protect American military and commercial assets orbiting Earth, a recognition that space was poised to join land, sea, air and cyber as another contested warfighting domain.
The Space Force’s online “Space Threat” fact sheet states that Beijing and Moscow jeopardize U.S. interests in that domain.
“China and Russia are developing new space systems to enhance military effectiveness and end any reliance on U.S. space services,” the fact sheet states.
Those nations are also “testing and fielding sophisticated counterspace capabilities with the intent to disrupt and degrade U.S. space-enabled capabilities,” it continues.
The Chinese army “expects space to play an important role in future conflicts by enabling long-range precision strikes and denying other militaries the use of space-based information,” according to the fact sheet.
Meanwhile, Russia regards space as “a warfighting domain and believes space supremacy will be a decisive factor in future conflicts,” it states.
The U.S. and China are among 95 signatories of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that strove to implement international law to govern space exploration, weapons testing and territorial claims.
The Soviet Union, which included Russia until the federation dissolved in 1991, was also a signatory.
Two of the treaty’s key requirements are that countries cannot place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in Earth’s orbit, on the moon or any other celestial body and that the moon cannot be used to test weapons of any kind.
- Security