ENSURING A SPACEPOWER ADVANTAGE IN A PROLONGED COMPETITION (Mitchell Inst), Feb 19, 2025, virtual, 1:00 pm ET

The Mitchell Institute will hold a webinar on February 19, 2025 at 1:00 pm ET to release a new policy paper — Ensuring a Spacepower Advantage in a Prolonged Competition– with findings and recommendations from a two-day Space Endurance Workshop held in October 2024.

More information and registration instructions are on the event’s website, which says:

By Charles Galbreath and Jennifer Reeves
When: February 19, 2025 at 1:00 PM EST
Where: Zoom

In China’s ongoing attempt to gain global dominance, maintaining an enduring spacepower advantage will be critical for the United States. Space will continue to underpin all military operations and multiple facets of daily life for all Americans. This, and China’s aggressive actions, have put the space domain on the frontline. Understanding what steps the United States, our allies, and partners must take today to secure an enduring spacepower advantage is essential to ensuring a favorable outcome to competition. To that end, the Mitchell Institute’s Spacepower Advantage Center of Excellence (MI-SPACE) convened its inaugural spacepower workshop in October 2024. This report summarizes the findings and recommendations of this two-day workshop.

Key Takeaways:

• The Space Force must proactively lead cooperative efforts with Allies and international and commercial Partners to fully integrate and synchronize capability development and operations in a deliberate manner to ensure the most effective and efficient use of resources for all
• Over a protracted competition with China, the ability of the U.S. Space Force, U.S. Space Command, Allies, and Partners to have a spacepower advantage hinges on maintaining popular support and national will
• To gain support and sustain national will, the Space Force must actively and continually articulate why it exists and what it does to Congress, the American people, and even to Guardians
• Given existing policy, budget, and personnel realities, the Space Force’s Theory of Competitive Endurance provides a stable way forward but may create unintended consequences that undermine a warfighting mentality and Guardian identity
• Systemic issues exist within the Space Force and Department of Defense threatening the success of the Space Force in a long-term competition with China, e.g., proper authorities and resources, a lack of clearly defined and understood roles & missions, and a warfighting ethos
• Workshop findings reinforced that existing Space Force lines of effort, such as improved domain awareness, architecture resilience, and security classification reform, are critical and must be expanded to overcome a range of challenges that the United States might face throughout an extended competition
• For the Space Force to succeed as a military service, defensive and offensive counterspace operations must be normalized with warfighting operations to gain superiority like those in all other domains performed by the Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps