The Space Force Has Its Vector. Now It Must Outpace The Threat.

General Chance Saltzman’s newly released Vector 2025 is the clearest articulation yet of the U.S. Space Force’s purpose, priorities, and philosophy. It captures the seriousness of today’s contested space environment and reflects a significant evolution from the benign operating conditions of earlier eras. Saltzman rightly emphasizes that America must be prepared not only to operate in space but also to deter, contest, and, when necessary, control the domain against capable and ambitious competitors.

His focus on competitive endurance – built on space domain awareness, resilience through disaggregation, and a credible counter-space posture establishes a strong conceptual foundation. As strategies go, Vector offers exactly the kind of high-level orientation a young service needs.

But strategy is only the very beginning. To deliver on the outcomes envisioned in Vector, the Space Force will need to lean much more forcefully – with the zeal of a religious convert – head-on into three areas where commercial innovation and operational realities are already accelerating at warp speed.

Fully Embracing the Space Force’s Identity as the First Digital Military Service

One of Space Force’s defining attributes is that it is, at its core, a digital service. More than any other military branch, it is shaped by software, networks, and decision-speed rather than by traditional measures of platforms or force structure. Fully realizing this identity means embracing a shift that surpasses even the transition the Air Force experienced after its creation in 1947.

Domain control in space will increasingly depend on rapidly deployed, continuously updated, secure, mesh-networked systems that operate as a distributed compute layer in orbit. Autonomy, crosslinks, data fusion, and real-time inference will deliver operational advantage far more effectively than the performance of any individual satellite.

The Space Force has already begun moving in this direction, but achieving a digital-service vision will require the adoption of commercial-grade practices. Continuous integration, iterative software deployment, secure-by-design cyber hardening, and architectures that treat satellites as intelligent, interdependent nodes – not isolated programs of record.

In short: the nation that controls the data layer, not merely the orbital layer, will control the domain.

Aligning Acquisition Tempo With the Demands of Competitive Endurance

Since its inception, Saltzman’s emphasis on competitive endurance has been well placed. Endurance in a dynamic threat environment though is inseparable from tempo – the speed at which the United States can deploy, learn, and improve.

Even the Secretary of War acknowledges how disastrously our current acquisition system struggles under its own weight to keep pace, and the challenge is magnified in a hybrid space era. Commercial space is the future, but the Space Force must be vigilant in preventing self-defeating business decisions while it remains such a dominant buyer inside commercial innovation cycles. No strategy can succeed if our Cold War iteration loop lags so far behind our competitors. But we must guard against inadvertently backing into an approach that could result in a “winner take all” mindset born in the tech sector and misapplied to national security.

The solution is not another round of analysis, modeling, and simulation. Instead, the Space Force should be empowered to proliferate and operate what exists today, enhance it through software tomorrow, and fold commercial and government funded breakthroughs into the architecture as they emerge. The Space Development Agency is demonstrating that this is possible, to the applause of the Space Force’s advocates on Capitol Hill. Its model of iterative development, rapid deployment, and continuous feedback and updates must now become the rule, not the exception.

Competitive endurance is achieved by fielding quickly and operating tirelessly, all while learning and updating continuously. The traditional linear, requirements-driven process simply cannot deliver at the tempo the strategy demands.

Safeguarding the Space Force’s Core Contributions to Joint Warfighting

As the Space Force modernizes and expands its role in higher-end orbital competition, it must remain fully committed to the hybrid architecture that underpins the joint force’s daily operations: precision navigation and timing (PNT), intelligence and surveillance, missile warning and tracking, secured global communications, and resilient ground infrastructure.

These functions are the connective tissue of all modern warfare. There is no commercial backstop, no “Space Merchant Marine” that can assume these responsibilities in crisis or conflict. Ensuring these missions stay robust and globally available – while evolving alongside commercial capabilities – will remain central to the nation’s ability to fight and win.

Strategic competition in space cannot be separated from tactical realities on the ground. A secure and accessible orbital domain has little meaning if soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and Guardians lack the positioning, communication, and situational awareness they need to locate, close with, and defeat the enemy.

Vector is the vision. The Space Force must match it with execution.

Vector clearly identifies where the Space Force needs to go. Its core ideas – endurance, resilience, awareness, and credible deterrence – are exactly what this moment demands. The next step is execution that outpaces the threat.

Success in the competition for space superiority will hinge on how quickly the United States can field new architectures, integrate autonomy, and harness data as the decisive element of modern operations. These are the areas where America’s commercial sector is strongest, and where partnership can accelerate progress right now.

In the end, it will be the actor that moves fastest, not the one that writes the most elaborate plans, that shapes the future of space. Vector points the way. Now the Space Force must seize the momentum and deliver at speed.