Want ‘Competitive endurance?’ Focus on maneuver in space

Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman delivers a keynote address on the state of the Space Force during the Air and Space Forces Association 2024 Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colo., Feb. 13, 2024. (US Air Force photo by Eric Dietrich)

For almost two years, the Chief of Space Operations has championed his proposed theory of success, Competitive Endurance, which includes a detailed white paper published January 2024. Yet despite his urging of Guardians to challenge the theory and share their ideas broadly, the public discourse has been underwhelming.

Space Security professionals owe the CSO the critical thinking and feedback he calls for, so here are some thoughts.

Although the theory gets a lot of things right, it does not completely account for the significant risks inherent within its own assumptions. Identifying and challenging the assumptions upon which the theory is built is the essential next step to assess potential risks and ensure a coherent strategy for competition emerges. In doing so, the principle of maneuver becomes an important element vital to completing the theory and mitigating the inherent risks.

There are two critical assumptions inherent within the theory that, when challenged, reveal significant risks to achieving its intended goal: space superiority.

The first critical assumption is that competition and conflict follow linear logic. The reality of strategy is that competition and conflict instead follow paradoxical logic — where strategic competitors deliberately confound logical actions. This is not to argue that a theory of success should follow non-linear logic; rather, it must better account for uncertainty and surprise against a thinking and cunning adversary.

The second critical assumption is that strategic competitors will come to the same logical conclusion: that their use of space and counterspace capabilities against US military forces will be impractical and self-defeating. The reality is that strategic competitors are likely to assume a lower risk threshold for initiating or extending conflict into space than the theory assumes — an error of mirror imaging and strategy mismatching. Strategic competitors possess fundamentally different principles and values, see escalation and competition in considerably different ways, and are attempting to achieve their strategic objectives against US and ally military forces that increasingly depend on space capabilities.

The Space Force must carefully consider the importance of maneuver as a way to attain the necessary flexibility and adaptability against uncertainty and surprise.

Integrating maneuver within a revised Competitive Endurance will improve the Space Force’s ability to achieve and maintain space superiority throughout the competition continuum. The principle of maneuver as a core component of its theory of success, will enable the service to better posture forces, deter nefarious activity, impose dilemmas, and ultimately hedge against unanticipated strategic challenges. (It is interesting that Competitive Endurance already acknowledges the importance of contesting and controlling the space domain just as other services do, yet stops just short of acknowledging how maneuver has proven to be an essential principle in achieving domain control throughout history.)

In addition, integrating maneuver within Competitive Endurance enhances and complements its three tenets, further mitigating the inherent risks. The capacity to maneuver complements space domain awareness to better deny operational surprise by enabling space forces to preempt or respond to hostile action, let alone deter such hostile action in the first place. Maneuver also complements resilience to better deny a first-mover advantage by making systems more difficult to precisely target and by enabling changes in force posture to disrupt and complicate a competitor’s decision-making process. Lastly, it also complements counterspace campaigning by expanding the types and numbers of flexible deterrence and response options that allow US Space Command to better confront challenges and mitigate the risk of escalation.

Integrating maneuver will also have positive impacts on national and economic security in indirect ways. It will help signal to industry the importance of maneuver-related technologies, convincing them there is a market worth investing their R&D in. Such investment will also complement other related commercial and civil efforts tied to on-orbit servicing, refueling, and active debris removal capabilities. Even more promising are the potential opportunities for partnering and building interoperability with allied space maneuver capabilities and even open up areas of investment from allied commercial space industries.

Despite these benefits, there is currently a level of uncertainty on the utility of leveraging the principle of maneuver in space. Such uncertainty has already led to cuts in maneuver-related technologies. However, to attain the necessary flexibility and adaptability needed in the near-future, the Space Force must invest in maneuver capabilities now so that they are delivered for tomorrow.

In strategy, few things ever work out the way they are intended, and the probability of things working out the way Competitive Endurance anticipates is unlikely, especially in an immature space domain where even greater uncertainty exists — exacerbating such improbability. While Competitive Endurance serves as a logical departure point for hypothesizing strategic success in space, it must now evolve to articulate how it will attain the necessary flexibility and adaptability needed for an uncertain operational environment. To do so, Competitive Endurance must integrate maneuver as an instrumental component, much like it has done so with resiliency.

Such a revision would enhance and complement the current theory of success and provide improved strategic direction to the national security space enterprise commensurate with the evolving operational environment. Changes in strategic and operational environments should drive changes in strategic approaches — like a theory of success — that then drive changes in space capabilities and operating concepts.

The other military services demonstrated this throughout the twentieth century; the US Space Force now has an opportunity to demonstrate its ability to do this as well.

Major Benjamin Staats is an Army Space Operations Officer who currently serves at US Space Command. He is a graduate of the George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute at the Elliot School of International Affairs and is a Schriever Space Scholar graduate.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the US Army or the Department of Defense.