Breaking Defense:

In his new Commander’s Vision, the head of Space Command says that leading the fight to prevent adversaries from disabling or destroying U.S. space assets is his new focus.

“The intended audience is both internal and external,” Army Gen. James Dickinson told me in an interview yesterday. “Internally, the objective is to set the stage for SPACECOM personnel to develop and sustain a warfighting mindset necessary for our mission challenges in this new warfighting domain.”

Key to the vision is achieving “space superiority” — a loaded term to the public and U.S. allies, but, in military parlance, ‘superiority’ simply means being able to use the domain and keep the enemy from doing the same. “We must have fully integrated offensive and defensive operations across all of our services, as well as our partners,” he told me. “And I think it’s the combined work and expertise which truly enables us to project that combat power needed to deter and defeat -if necessary- our adversaries.”

“I will tell you, externally, the objective is to foster, really, a DoD-wide understanding of the difference between the mission requirements and objectives of the new U.S. Space Command, compared to that of our former predecessor — that command back in 1985 to 2002,” he said. That difference is that in its new incarnation, SPACECOM isn’t just providing space capabilities to others, it also has the reins in conducting combat operations to defense U.S. space assets…

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