Shaping the joint fight in air, space, and cyberspace

Joint Force Quarterly, April, 2008 by C. Robert Kehler

The game is unified action up and down the floor.

--Jack Ramsay (1)

September 18, 1947, marked the birthday of the U.S. Air Force as a separate Service. Less than a month later, Captain Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, and since then America's Air Force has continued to push the envelope as the Nation's sword and shield over its own skies, while serving heroically in locations around the world. In addition to flying and fighting, the Air Force has maintained a credible nuclear deterrent, exploited space, and is now tapping the potential of cyberspace as a warfighting domain. In short, the Air Force has transformed itself for over 60 years in the face of dramatic world change.

The Service's missions now extend past the Earth's atmosphere and across a boundless virtual landscape. Today's Air Force operates in three domains: air, space, and cyberspace. As a result, Airmen bring distinctive perspectives and capabilities to influence targets and actions anywhere around the globe as a multidimensional maneuver force. While the Air Force must continue to develop capabilities in its three operating domains, it must also transform and exploit shared, cross-domain attributes as it continues to provide decisive options for national leaders, combatant commanders, and joint forces. Maintaining a future joint military advantage in an era of exponential change requires a more concerted effort to integrate these domains. Airmen who are experts in the space domain will play a key role in that integration as they build upon a proud heritage to meet the challenges of a dynamic future.

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Early Integration and Synchronization

When the Air Force celebrated 60 years as a Service in September 2007, one of its major commands, Air Force Space Command (AFSPC), marked a quarter century of service in joint military operations. The establishment of AFSPC in 1982 signaled the Air Force's recognition of the importance of space and the need to mature capabilities within this separate warfighting domain.

Even a quarter century ago, space capabilities were impressive. The realm above Earth's atmosphere had become the strategic high ground in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Air Force intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) forces provided the Nation with a powerful strategic deterrent. Defense Support Program satellites were poised to provide advanced warning of adversary ICBM launches; the Defense Satellite Communications System enabled worldwide command and control of U.S. forces; and Defense Meteorological Satellite Program systems provided global weather coverage. Moreover, a constellation of prototype Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites was already demonstrating the benefits of precise timing and highly accurate, space-based geolocation.

Although several brief contingencies in the late 1980s furnished tantalizing glimpses of how space systems might support forces at the theater level or in tactical situations, it took the first Gulf War to highlight their true benefits to the joint warfighter. In early 1991 during Operation Desert Storm, space enabled a wide range of U.S. and coalition capabilities including missile warning, communications, weather, surveillance and reconnaissance, as well as positioning, navigation, and timing--all in a major theater combat environment. Defense Support Program satellites and a reworked ground infrastructure proved sufficiently sensitive to detect Scud missiles launched from Iraq, and military satellite communications permitted transmission of voice alerts and warnings to forces in the area of operations. Military and commercial satellite links carried 90 percent of all communications into theater and most of General Norman Schwarzkopf's intratheater command and control communications. Weather satellites supported strike planning and weapons selection, aerial refueling operations, and detection of flood plains while a young GPS constellation helped troops maneuver across a featureless desert.

Capitalizing on the Desert Storm experience, the Air Force focused its efforts on enabling warfighters to leverage space capabilities by creating the Space Warfare Center in 1993. (2) This led to the rapid exploitation of space capabilities such as GPS, satellite communications, and national space systems to enhance joint warfighting tasks. Space capabilities allowed quicker recovery of downed pilots, fostered the development of extremely precise GPS-aided munitions, and enabled a Global Broadcast Service to pump previously unimagined amounts of data to and from theater warfighters. Air operations in the Balkans would later validate that GPS could dramatically enhance the precision and lethality of weapons systems--effectively revolutionizing the American way of war.

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The Air Force continued its efforts to bring space to the fight by establishing the Space Division at the U.S. Air Force Weapons School in 1996 (now the 328th Weapons Squadron). This effort was a seminal event for space integration. The Air Force has since worked hard to place these Weapons School graduates into joint theater organizations to develop key relationships between theater-based and continental U.S.-based space organizations and to integrate space at the operational level of war. The school continues to train tactically focused, space-experienced Airmen to better integrate with combat and mobility air forces and to deliver world-class space expertise to theaters worldwide.