Many of the people familiar with the development of a Space Force have assumed that the current organization known as Air Force Space Command (AFSPC), headquartered at Peterson AFB in Colorado, will be transformed into this new service while remaining under the Secretary of the Air Force. This would be analogous to the Marine Corps being under the Secretary of the Navy. However, the mission of the new Space Force may well be quickly morphed into something quite different than the mission of the AFSPC.

The growing congestion in low orbits and adversarial challenges in low and high orbits may well inevitably lead to a major paradigm shift in space-based national security operations. Such operations would logically be assigned to the U.S. Space Force.

Currently, space-based national security operations are limited by old technologies and a lack needed systems to keep up with evolving threats. Simply put, the U.S. has a "peacetime" set of defenses for its valuable security assets in orbits about the Earth.

If real war should break out among the major powers, many of these assets could not be properly defended, even though much of America's military operations depend on these assets. The results would certainly be expensive in terms of resources and people.

Thus, one of the most important missions for the Space Force may be the direct and comprehensive protection of space-based security assets. This should involve a very aggressive set of operations that keep defense-supporting spacecraft separated from other objects in orbit and that offer protection from aggressive attacks.

This is not an easy mission because of the several variables and growing population of controlled adversarial devices and uncontrolled debris objects. The implications of such a mission may include the rapid advancement and deployment of new technologies and systems that can:

+ Create and defend a "military" zone in space that is reserved for security assets

+ Detect and track all potential threatening objects with much higher accuracy and responsiveness than is now available

+ Actively remove a portion of the threatening debris population on a permanent basis

+ Shield assets from direct kinetic attacks and RF jamming

+ Maintain an offensive space-based capability

These suggestions may seem rather extreme, but the alternative may be much more extreme.

Related Links
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Military Space News at SpaceWar.com

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