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The U.S. Army is reshaping its role in the space domain following the 2019 establishment of the U.S. Space Force.
The U.S. Army is preparing to go on the offensive in space: It is exploring nonkinetic offensive capabilities to deny an adversary’s use of space—as China invests heavily in systems to operate in that domain—and pushing new guidance on the role of space in land warfare for future conflicts.
The moves come amid a restructuring of the Army’s responsibilities among the stars following the inception of the U.S. Space Force nearly five years ago. While the Army has long been considered the largest consumer of satellite services in the U.S. military, many of the space-related capabilities and functions it once owned have been divested to the nascent Space Force.
- Fighting in Ukraine shows the nature of war is changing
- The service is establishing a Theater Strike Effects Group in the Indo-Pacific
Army officials are proposing a new role for soldiers in the space domain. The Army plans to establish a Theater Strike Effects Groups (TSEG) responsible for handling new space control capabilities, which it calls “space interdiction fires.”
The first TSEG is due to become operational as part of Indo-Pacific Command, Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC) leader Lt. Gen. Sean Gainey said. That initial unit should attain an interim capability around 2027, he told reporters on Aug. 6, with the longer-term objective of having a TSEG support every U.S. combatant command.
SMDC is working with Army Futures Command to determine the long-term size and structure of the TSEGs and their role in a future warfighting concept. That work should wrap up by the end of 2025, Gainey said.
The need for such capabilities is demonstrated almost daily in the Indo-Pacific, military officials noted during the Space and Missile Defense Symposium Aug. 6-8 in Huntsville, Alabama.
For example, U.S. operators witness regular GPS signal spoofing as part of China’s extraterritorial claims on the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, and some officials worry about the impact on vulnerable satcom links of electromagnetic interference or jamming by the Chinese. The Defense Department in recent years has used its annual assessment of Chinese military capabilities to highlight Beijing’s focus on being able to disrupt and attack space-based systems.
Local U.S. commanders already have an idea of the type of capabilities they would like. Col. Nate Vosters, director of requirements, resources and programs at U.S. Space Forces Indo-Pacific, said he is looking for ways to disrupt a proliferated low-Earth-orbit communications satellite constellation to better understand how an adversary might attack the on-orbit systems the Defense Department is increasingly embracing.
The Pentagon and militaries around the world are taking lessons from the Russian war in Ukraine that has highlighted the extent to which space systems are now part of military operations. Moscow coupled its full-scale invasion in February 2022 with a cyberattack on Ukrainian commercial satellite services from Viasat.
Russia also has deployed advanced electronic warfare technologies that can disrupt or jam adversary space capabilities against Ukraine’s forces to great effect, giving military planners a look at how adversaries might try to deny U.S. access to on-orbit satcom and GPS services.
“The war in Ukraine has given us a stark warning: The character of war is changing,” Col. Princeton Wright, SMDC capability manager for space and high altitude, said at the conference.
The Army issued guidance for the role of space in land warfare in a January memo titled “Army Space Vision Supporting Multi Domain Operations.” It describes two priorities for the service, including the ability to interdict adversary space capabilities to protect friendly forces while integrating those of friendly, joint coalition and commercial providers to gain an operational edge.
The memo calls for next-generation tactical terminals that can harness new multi-orbit satcom services and access space-enabled intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms. The service is interested in layering those capabilities with high-altitude balloons and long-endurance, semi-autonomous fixed-wing aircraft to provide resilient and redundant capabilities for operators on a future battlefield with limited or intermittent bandwidth.
The need for integrated space fires was voiced across Pentagon leadership at the symposium. Space Force Gen. Stephen Whiting, the head of Space Command, called space fires a top priority during the symposium, and he included them on his organization’s integrated priority list submitted to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for both fiscal 2026 and 2027 to help inform the Pentagon’s annual budget development.
Whiting and Gainey did not detail the scope of space fires beyond characterizing them as nonkinetic. Still, recent comments signal a greater Pentagon willingness to discuss offensive space operations publicly.
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