P-51 Mustangs from Eighth Air Force's Fighter Command fly over England In July 1944
Bettmann Archive
In January 1944, Major General James Doolittle, the new commander of the U.S. Eighth Air Force in England, was touring a subordinate unit when he saw a sign on a wall: “The first duty of Eighth Air Force fighters is to bring the bombers back alive.”
Doolittle ordered the sign to be taken down. The new sign hung by the next day read: “The first duty of Eighth Air Force fighters is to destroy German fighters.”
From that small change grew a new strategy, where fighters, rather than closely escorting the bombers in formation, instead ranged widely and attacked German aircraft and support infrastructure. This pivot from bomber support to air superiority — taking the fight to the enemy via wide-ranging maneuver in the air domain — led to the destruction of German airpower. Doolittle later assessed, “this was the most important and far-reaching military decision I made during the war.”
For the last few decades, the “first duty” of military space professionals has been to deliver space effects down to the terrestrial domains in the form of space support.
We achieved this with satellites operating in fixed, static orbits (an operational design approach known as positional space operations) relatively close to Earth. This is still a vital and enduring mandate for the U.S. Space Force and U.S. Space Command, and, as we’ve seen with recent operations, will continue to be increasingly important to modern warfare.
But as adversary threats in and from space proliferate, the first duty of the U.S. Space Force and U.S. Space Command will shift — just as Doolittle’s fighters did — from space support to space superiority, with a primary focus of deterring and defeating adversaries within that domain. This will enable enhanced, more robust critical support to terrestrial domains, much as Doolittle’s Eighth Air Force fighters’ relentless focus on air superiority best enabled the broader success of strategic bombardment and subsequent land operations.
We can already see the early foundational components of this shift in recent speeches by Space Force leaders and strategy documents. What must soon follow is the harder work: the translation of this first duty into new doctrine, tactics, concepts of operations, warfighting requirements, force design and structure, and operational employment from peacetime to major conflict.
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This cannot happen without an equally fundamental paradigm shift from a traditional positional approach to space operations to a more dynamic one best described as space maneuver warfare. Here are at least five ways that imminent paradigm shift will play out in the days ahead:
Space superiority will be a means to protect and secure all U.S. national interests in space.
President Trump’s December 2025 Executive Order on Ensuring American Space Superiority remarkably links the fullest range of space-centered U.S. national interests. It is really the first high-level government document of its kind to bring space exploration, economics and security together in an action-focused framework.
While it is just an Executive Order and much work (and appropriate resource allocation) remains, it is a vital first step toward a not-yet existing grand U.S. strategy for space. And, from a military space perspective, it sets wider and more demanding standards for the U.S. Space Force and U.S. Space Command for the protection of American interests in space. The clearest terrestrial analogy is the wide set of responsibilities given the U.S Navy and U.S. Coast Guard in the maritime domain; there are distinct roles for warfighting, but also for protection of sea commerce, awareness and mitigation of navigational hazards and threats, rescue and evacuation of those in distress, and more.
As human activities expand into the broader Earth-Moon system and beyond, security issues – and military capabilities providing options to address them – will necessarily follow. This is no different than what we’ve seen historically in every other domain.
A significantly increased focus and rapid expansion toward the lunar region is happening now, punctuated most clearly by the Artemis II mission, sending humans back to lunar space for the first time in 50 years. But that is only one piece among many. There are dozens of planned missions to lunar space in the next few years, led by American and Chinese human spaceflight missions, and each nation’s objective to establish permanent bases and a sustained human presence on the moon. As this activity intensifies, consistent with the Space Superiority Executive Order, military space involvement will become increasingly necessary and intertwined to ensure safety, security and transparency.
For example, as human and robotic activities proliferate in the lunar region, how will the United States ensure safe and secure freedom of movement and security via awareness of hazards — natural or otherwise? Right now, that task is being performed by a small team of NASA specialists. But as this task grows from monitoring a few primarily inactive objects to a multitude of active platforms (all hazards and some potentially threats), it logically falls under the purview of U.S. Space Command and the capabilities procured, presented and operated by the U.S. Space Force.
To meet the new demands of space superiority across national interests and vast spaces, how must things change?
If the future of military space activities were simply an extension of the past – with the continued near-exclusive focus on earth-facing space support missions conducted from near-earth static orbits in a benign domain – then continuing purely positional space architectures might be the default course. But a space-superiority first duty, coupled with a need to range across the vast Earth-Moon system (over a quarter of a million times larger in volume than the low-earth orbit region where the International Space Station operates today), will drive a more aggressive approach that embraces frequent maneuver and an operational need to change orbital energy at a tempo and magnitude far different from near-earth static operations.
Future space commanders will need to project reach, control and power across greater distances and volumes than just-off-the-beach, low-Earth orbit. And this will not be limited to combat operations. Across the spectrum of conflict, space commanders must be able to test, train, develop tactics, patrol, inspect, posture and withdraw for messaging purposes, conduct prolonged dynamic station-keeping, pursue and evade, and much more.
To achieve and sustain the full capabilities of space maneuver warfare, many military space platforms of the future will need new designs with new support and sustainability architectures that differ significantly from those in a traditional space support approach.
Take the Reconnaissance-Geosynchronous-1 or RG-1 program, formerly known as the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program, which involves a few Space Force craft with the Space Command mission of patrolling in geosynchronous orbit and frequently inspecting objects of interest. These spacecraft were designed and built during the space support era, with the fixed fuel and long intended lifetime that we expected from positional space operations platforms that rarely maneuvered and changed their orbital energy.
If Space Command could operate those platforms today in an unconstrained fashion to meet all its current mission needs, each RG-1 would likely exhaust its fuel at 20 times the current rate. Future mission requirements would drive this up even further. How do we close that massive capability gap in the era of space maneuver warfare necessary to ensure space superiority?
We need to design these systems and their sustainment architectures differently, whether that means launching them at 20-plus times the rate we do now; frequently refueling them; leveraging a new propulsion method and higher peak thrust levels; or perhaps a combination of all these and more. All of this would be to enable the desired maneuver-without-regret concept of operations.
An added virtuous cycle benefit is that space maneuver warfare will, in turn, accelerate space superiority in military space professional cultural identity. The United States military uses — and the Space Force endorses — the term mission command to describe a leadership philosophy promoting empowered decision-making at every echelon of command, It emphasizes freedom of action and flexibility in pursuit of commanders’ intent rather than adherence to rigid constraints and checklist approaches. The more dynamic approach of space maneuver will afford commanders at all levels far more options to act independently than do positional space operations.
In military terms and practice, domain superiority and maneuver go hand in hand.
Military forces that limit themselves to positional, defensive postures usually find themselves lacking the ability to seize initiative, destined for wars of attrition. Even worse, such forces that encounter an adversary engaging in maneuver warfare against them find themselves at a severe disadvantage.
This is not to say that many current and future space-support capabilities will not continue in their positional space operations modes, much as we have fixed facilities in the land and maritime domains. But platforms and capabilities operating within the domain on space superiority missions must and will employ sustained maneuver to be effective.
It’s an old adage in the profession of arms: Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.
To properly support space maneuver warfare, space logistics will need to grow beyond the traditional one-dimensional space support paradigm, where all platforms are self-contained for their static, multi-year lifetimes, and the only method of replenishment is wholesale platform replacement from launch sites on the Earth’s surface.
While some simpler solutions will involve commoditization (basic, cheap, limited range platforms, much like the drones we see today in terrestrial warfare), other more advanced and complex capabilities will need to follow a reuse path to sustainment; i.e. consumables and even some components will be replaced or repaired as a continuous process in the platform’s lifetime. Again, we see this need in every other domain. Such logistics sustainment will be increasingly needed the more complex the platform and the further it operates from Earth’s surface.
A word of caution: We must not mistakenly expect that commercial business cases or civil-space requirements by themselves can drive and solve the logistics needs of space maneuver warfare. This would be tantamount to expecting United Airlines’ or Delta Airlines’ fuel economy business cases to drive and solve the aerial refueling needs of the U.S. Air Force.
Current commercial business cases for refueling, for example, merely involve extending the multi-year lifetimes of satellites conducting positional space operations, seeking to maintain their static positions on orbit.
The military concepts of operations for sustained space maneuver warfare platforms will be about quality of life rather than quantity of life, and increased combat capability, driving their own logistics needs for servicing and replenishment. But all spacefaring actors and ventures – civil, commercial, as well as military – can benefit from the development of an in-space logistics infrastructure. Even the aerial refueling analogy above falls far short. On-orbit servicing platforms would just as much resemble the precious far-flung coaling stations, far from home ports, that globe-traveling naval fleets relied upon in the early age of steam. These same stations also enabled merchant traffic then, much as in-space servicing “depots” will enable far more than military spacecraft in the future.
Every added component, then, to in-space logistics contributes to a virtuous cycle of value for all U.S. national space interests.
The scale, scope, complexity, remoteness and non-intuitive (to humans, anyway) dynamics of the space domain make leading-edge artificial intelligence applications extremely attractive to anyone seeking to operate in space. Autonomous spacecraft – especially as the number of spacecraft rapidly increase — are even more compelling a concept than counterparts in the terrestrial domains. This is already happening in an embryonic way; Starlink’s thousands of satellites in low-Earth orbit are already maneuvering autonomously to avoid hazards and to optimize constellation performance.
As space missions and operations become more dynamic, more complex, and further-reaching, the need for open-ended decision-making platforms will rise.
We will soon see orbital agentic platforms that operate on goal-oriented principles, autonomously conducting operations based on human commander intent rather than specific algorithms.
It is not hard to imagine a future space environment where large numbers of platforms are operating autonomously in concert, to include primary mission platforms and re-fuelers, tankers, on-orbit servicers, depots, supply craft and more that all leverage machine-learned methods to optimally sustain a space maneuver warfare force structure. These same kinds of developments will occur in the terrestrial domains as well, but space will likely lead the way. The very characteristics of space that make it a challenge for humans are what will make it a fertile arena for AI.
The imminent paradigm shift from positional space support to dynamic space maneuver warfare as the new primary focus for military space operations will be crucial to achieving and maintaining the new “first duty” of space superiority. It will not be easy.
It will require a greater budget, a larger workforce, and deeper technical expertise than the U.S. Space Force and U.S. Space Command currently have. It will also require all of the innovation and technological application that an all-hands-on-deck effort across government and industry can bring to bear. And perhaps most importantly, it will require speed – to ensure the U.S. can achieve and sustain space superiority through space maneuver warfare in the face of adversaries who are also moving swiftly and imminently to do the same.
John Shaw is a retired U.S. Space Force Lieutenant General and astronautical engineer. He served as Deputy Commander of U.S. Space Command and as the first commander of U.S. Space Force Space Operations Command.
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