WASHINGTON — Military planners have centuries of battlefield history to draw from when wargaming conflicts on land, at sea, and in the air. But in space — where no war has ever been waged — there is no historical precedent to guide strategy, no past battles to analyze, and no proven playbook for how a conflict might unfold. This presents a unique challenge for the U.S. Space Force as it works to build a wargaming and experimentation infrastructure capable of modeling a domain where the rules of warfare remain largely untested.
Col. Lincoln Bonner, deputy director of the Space Force’s Space Futures Command Task Force, said that simulating potential adversary actions in space is “absolutely essential” given the lack of historical conflicts to study.
“Fortunately, we’ve never engaged in space warfare, and what space warfare will look like is largely a matter of imagination. And that presents its own tremendous challenge,” he said Feb. 24 at an online forum hosted by the University of Tennessee Space Institute.
Bonner, a graduate of the institute, works under the Space Training and Readiness Command, and is supporting the planning of the proposed Space Futures Command, a new organization championed by Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman.
Traditional military planning cycles struggle to match the rapid pace of space technology development and emerging threats from adversaries like China, and the Space Force is trying to tackle that problem.
One of the components of the Futures Command would be a warfare analysis center using wargaming and artificial intelligence to guide investments in next-generation technologies.
“The biggest challenge when it comes to counter-space operations and space warfare is that we are in this arena where we are highly dependent on our ability to imagine what the outcomes are,” Bonner said. “And as a result, that really does make wargaming and field experimentation absolutely critical to our success, because that is an opportunity to reduce the uncertainty.”
Technological race with China
Bonner observed that in a competition with technologically advanced adversaries, having cutting-edge technology alone won’t guarantee success.
“Technological success is necessary and critical, but it is unlikely to be sufficient,” he said.
He noted that the United States and many other countries possess similar military systems. What creates an advantage, he argued, isn’t merely the technology itself but how systems are integrated and operated — precisely the type of analysis the proposed Space Futures Command would conduct.
“In a world in which you’re facing an opponent that can produce the kinds of technology that are similar to what we can produce, and can produce them in numbers, how can you keep pace? How can you stay ahead?” Bonner asked.
“We should almost always expect that any advantage from technology will be fleeting, and that the enduring advantages that we will enjoy will largely come from the ways in which we are able to think about and employ those technologies in concert with each other, so the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”
Futures Command criticized
The push for a new command isn’t without critics. In a paper released Tuesday, Todd Harrison, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, suggests that creating a new Futures Command could actually impede innovation rather than accelerate it.
Harrison criticizes the Space Force’s organizational approach of maintaining separate commands for different functions — Space Systems Command for acquisition, Space Operations Command for operations, and potentially Space Futures Command for concept development.
Having separate commands for acquisition, operations, and future concept development is counterproductive to innovation, Harrison wrote. “It separates personnel in different chains of command based on their function rather than the mission they support, and this limits their ability to interact and solve cross-functional problems within each mission area.”
Harrison noted that the Space Force competes primarily through its ability to innovate rapidly. He argued that combining engineers, acquisition specialists, intelligence analysts and operators within mission-focused teams accelerates feedback loops and improves understanding of operational needs.
Instead of establishing a new command, Harrison recommended combining existing commands into a structure organized around mission areas such as navigation, communications and missile warning.
