US, close allies creating joint ‘orbital warfare’ plan

[Ben Dhyani]

US, close allies creating joint 'orbital warfare' plan: SPACECOM chief - Breaking Defense

Gen. Stephen Whiting told the Mitchell Institute today that SPACECOM also plans to Apollo Insights table-top exercises (TTXs) with commercial industry once a quarter this year.

breakingdefense.com

US, close allies creating joint ‘orbital warfare’ plan​

US Space Command (SPACECOM) and its six closest space-savvy allies expect to complete a joint plan for conducting future “orbital warfare” by the end of the year, SPACECOM Commander Gen. Stephen Whiting said today.

Like the US military, the allied militaries participating in SPACECOM’s Multinational Force Operation Olympic Defender (MF-OOD) have been internally discussing “the need for protect and defend capabilities, orbital warfare capabilities.” Thus, the group decided the time has come to figure out how to work together via a collective concept of operations (CONOPS), he told the Mitchell Institute.

“[W]e are in the process now of building a defense of orbital assets CONOPS together. So, how do we leverage all these capabilities that these nations will be bringing with our capabilities to deconflict them at a minimum, but really we want to be able to integrate them, synchronize them and synergize them going forward,” Whiting said.

“I expect it to be finished by about the end of this year,” he added.

MF-OOD largely serves as a combined military space operations planning cell involving: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and the US. However, SPACECOM for the past year has been moving to translate that planning into actual operational capability, including via stepping up the number of joint exercises.

The new orbital warfare plan would be a first for the MF-OOD group, especially given that not all of the allied members have publicly embraced the need for their militaries to conduct space war. That said, Australia, France, Germany and the UK all have in recent years expressed interest in developing counterspace capabilities.

The Space Force defines orbital warfare as one of its core missions, and, in its recent Objective Force document looking at future needs, explains that it involves not only actions to protect US space systems but also “offensive and defensive counterspace operations” to support “Joint Force maneuver and fires.”

Whiting largely dodged a question from Breaking Defense for more detail about what capabilities would be brought to bear under the collective orbital warfare plan, however he noted that “it’s building on the rendezvous and proximity operations that we’ve done three times now over the last 18 months with individual, Multinational Force Operation Olympic Defender partner nations.”

Whiting announced in April at the annual Space Symposium that the most recent such exercise, called Operation Selene, was led by Canada and involved all of the MF-OOD allies but provided few details.

He elaborated today that it was executed “a month or two ago,” and involved a “high interest target on orbit and brought together all seven nations’ space domain awareness capabilities to improve our ability to maintain custody of that.” He noted that because Operation Selene was so successful, “we’re going to make that a permanent operation now.”

Last year, France and Britain each participated in bilateral rendezvous and proximity operations with SPACECOM.

He further noted that the MF-OOD allies have already “written a series of CONOPS, [for] example, on space domain awareness.”

Domestically, Whiting said that SPACECOM intends to continue with its Apollo Insights table-top exercises (TTXs) with commercial industry with plans for one every quarter this year.

“We’ve done one already … focused on a nuclear payload on orbit, which of course, is a future we do not want to see, and that would violate the Outer Space Treaty. But we brought 60 something companies together at the classified level to share insights into what such a detonation might do, and then get their good ideas about how we could leverage capability have today or future technologies that might help us going forward,” he said.

(The US has accused Russia of developing a space nuke, which Moscow denies.)

“We’re going to have three more TTXs this year. The next will be on dynamic space operations and sustained space maneuver. And then we will focus on proliferated constellations and orbits. And then at the end of the year, we’ll do a missile warning event,” Whiting said.

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[DEFCON Warning System]

Well, this will make Russia very happy.

 

[Publius]

I asked myself why isn’t apart of this.
Little reading, Japan prefers bi-lateral ties with US. There is the 1960 mutual defense treaty. In 2023 the US and Japan extended to this defense pact to space. Both are accelerating technological cooperation.

Not in any a take away from the MF-OOD, it was just a question that came to mind that paralleled it.
Russia won’t be happy with this either.