The United States Space Force recently released a document titled “Space Warfighting: A Framework for Planners,” providing a comprehensive guide on principles, tactics, and strategies aimed at preparing for potential conflicts in the realm of space. The manual offers insights into battling adversaries in what is considered one of the most crucial war domains of the future.

In the publication, the USSF outlined its strategies to safeguard US space capabilities and uphold the Joint Force’s ability to maintain “long-range kill chains and global power projection.” The ultimate goal is to establish and preserve space superiority over short, mid, and long-term periods. The manual, aimed at military community experts, serves as a strategic tool for achieving dominance in space.

The concept of “space superiority” is elucidated in the manual as the capacity to exercise control that enables forces to operate at a desired time and location without facing significant interference from space or counterspace threats. Simultaneously, it involves preventing adversaries from enjoying the same level of control in space operations.

“Space superiority may involve seeking out and destroying an enemy’s spacecraft, systems, and networks through measures designed to minimize the effectiveness of those systems, or countering enemy efforts in the other warfighting domains (land, maritime, air, and cyberspace),” the battle manual read.

“The ability to establish space superiority at the time and place of our choosing enables joint lethality in all domains,” the document stated.

“This document is really intended … to introduce sort of a common framework, common lexicon that we can use in our training and in our education programs,”  Lt. Gen. Shawn Bratton, Space Force deputy chief of space operations told reporters according to Defense One news. 

To achieve this goal of outright domain domination, the military branch laid out their plans of offensive and defensive tactics and strategies in three mission areas — Orbital Warfare, Electromagnetic Warfare, and Cyberspace Warfare.

Offensive counterspace operations include orbital strikes, terrestrial strikes, and space link interdictions — which include electromagnetic and cybernetwork attacks carried out to “disrupt, deny, or degrade an enemy’s critical space links.”

Defensive counterspace operations include passive tactics such as threat warning, military deception, “hardening,” dispersal, disaggregation, mobility, and redundancy. Active defenses include counterattacks and suppression of adversary counterspace targeting. 

Space superiority over “peer and near-peer adversaries” is characterized as when both sides can operate their space capabilities or when neither side can operate space capabilities, according to the document.

Peers and near-peers operating freely in space are categorized as “Very High Risk” to Joint Force operations.

“General superiority of space is achieved when the enemy is no longer able to act in a meaningful or dangerous way against friendly celestial lines of communication, and it also means that the enemy is unable to adequately defend or control its own assets or deliver space effects in support of its own operations,” the documented stated of achieving its self-described core function.

The framework laid out by the Space Force accounts for a decreased reliance on human decision making, relying mostly on “highly automated systems” due to the space domain’s “high speeds, long distances, and congested orbital regimes.”

In the same vein, the document harped on the “interdependence” of the space domain on the cyberspace domain in the critical realms of strategic communication — calling Space “almost entirely reliant on the network dimension.”

“Space superiority is not only a necessary precondition for Joint Force success but also something for which we must be prepared to fight,” USSF Chief of Space Operations General B. Chance Saltzman wrote in the document.