NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. (AFNS) —  As Delivered by Chief of Space Operations U.S. Space Force Gen. Chance Saltzman on September 17, 2024 –

Good morning and thank you! It’s always such a pleasure to be back here with all of you. Feels a little bit like a family reunion with 19,000 of your closest friends to talk about old times.

Thanks, Bernie, for that kind introduction, and thanks to everyone here at AFA that helped make this incredible event happen.

For a speech entitled “the State of the Space Force,” I would be remiss if I didn’t take the opportunity to thank some of the people who have done so much to get us where we are today.

First, thank you, Secretary Kendall, for your steadfast leadership, your constant support of the Space Force, and—above all—your passion for preparing our department to succeed in Great Power Competition.

We are off to a very fast start but the changes we are making are significant and will take time to fully implement. Let me just say publicly that I am fully committed to the Space Force’s transformation into a warfighting service, purpose-built for space superiority, assured access to space, and global mission operations to meet the challenges of Great Power Competition. Thanks to your direction, Secretary Kendall, I am confident that we are on the right path and will be for the years to come.

General Allvin and the rest of the Air Force, we value your teamwork. We wouldn’t be where we are without you. So, thank you for that.

Let me also say thank you to Chief Bentivegna, my partner in crime, for keeping us laser focused on the needs of our Guardians. B9, your dedication to the force is inspiring, and I’m grateful to have you by my side.

And speaking of partners, Jennifer and I just celebrated our 32nd wedding anniversary. Of course, I appreciate all that you’ve done to help me, but, really, I’d like to say thanks on behalf of the Space Force for all that you have done for the Guardians and their families. It’s tremendous.

Ladies and gentlemen, today is an auspicious day. 237 years ago, on September 17th, 1787, the Constitutional Convention signed the U.S. Constitution into existence. This seminal document became the blueprint for American democracy as we understand it today.

It marked a turning point in our country’s history: a transformation from a loose federation of states into a unified Nation, bound by common purpose and shared governance.

I cannot overstate the scale of this change, which continues to shape so much of what it means to be an American today.

Though difficult, that transformation was essential, because post-Revolution America was not yet postured to overcome the challenges it faced as a new country… and it might even have crumbled had the Convention failed to reach agreement.

In fact, as the last names were being signed onto the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin observed that George Washington’s chair was marked by the emblem of half a sun.

And he was heard to reflect, “I have often, in the course of the Session, looked at that behind the President, without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length, I have the happiness to know, that it is a rising and not a setting sun.” America was rising as a new nation, and the world would soon take notice.

Today, we find ourselves in a time of more change. As we approach our 5th birthday as a Service, that concept of change…of transformation… is always on my mind. Because to some degree, the Space Force was established in recognition of the need to transform our military space capabilities for Great Power Competition.

In the same way that the Constitution built upon the experiences under the Articles of Confederacy, the Space Force inherited a legacy of operations not quite suited to our new demands. And like the colonials of 18th century America, we must maintain some of our processes and practices but be willing to fundamentally change others.

Since its ratification, the Constitution has been amended 27 times. It turns out, when you’re trying to build… to transform one thing into another… to build something fundamentally new, it’s unlikely to get everything correct and exactly right from the beginning. It’s important that you learn and adapt with a willing to change to make things better.

Now, building a Space Force is a very different task from building a country, but the nature of our transformation is not so different. If you’ve heard me speak in recent years… then you’ve heard this story before.

But I do love telling it…so if you will indulge me…

Once upon a time, in a galaxy right here around us, the space domain was a benign environment. It was a place of exploration, innovation and strategic advantage for the few nations who could afford to access it. But as technologies advanced, the domain became economically lucrative, participation in space expanded, and national interests grew. And from this growth there arose a collection of competitors intent on challenging the advantages that peaceful nations derived from the benign space domain. And they invested heavily to develop the means to contest these advantages.

Perhaps even more concerning, these competitors developed space-enabled targeting capabilities that threaten our Joint Force in all domains. And anti-satellite weapons that would destabilize the space domain and deny it to everyone.

But, in the face of these significant challenges, your United States Space Force was established and is now rising to meet them. And while the ending to this story has not been written, there are a few things that are becoming clear.

The peaceful use of space may no longer be assumed… and yet, our Nation depends on space every day, both for National Security and for our prosperity.

So, it was no surprise that Secretary Kendall named a resilient and effective space order of battle as one of his operational imperatives. This operational imperative and the optimization of the Space Force for Great Power Competition are how we are rising to meet these challenges.

Where it was once only necessary to access and use the domain for the national benefit, now an essential job of the Space Force is to control the domain—that means achieving space superiority so that we can continue to access and exploit the domain, while also denying our adversaries the use of space capabilities against us.

The Space Force secures our Nation’s interests in, from, and to space… that’s our mission. And now, that mission must be accomplished in an era of Great Power Competition, which means we face new requirements, new expectations, new threats… we are required to field new organizations, new training, new equipment, and new operational concepts.

What we were is not what we must become, and so our only choice is to transform ourselves to thrive in this new environment, optimized for Great Power Competition.

The task is daunting… but you know what? None of that worries me. None of that worries me because we have the most dedicated and capable space professionals anywhere in the world. And I mean that. Time and again, Guardians have risen to the challenge. Furthermore, we have the world’s greatest space industries underpinning our advancements.

You all have worked hard to make our transformation a reality over the last five years. While I know that we have more change to come in the years ahead, so long as we have you, I’m confident that we will accomplish our critical missions.

This morning, I’d like to share with you how the Space Force is already implementing the changes we need to make and highlight how we are gaining steam in fielding a purpose-built service.

So much goodness going on—it’s just an exciting time to be in the space business.

I’ve shared a version of this slide before, but I think the message is worth repeating. The work of our transformation requires a lot of different but related efforts… but a collection of tactical activities does not equal a strategy.

We only have so much time and so many resources, so we need to be disciplined in how we approach our transformation.

Change is necessary, but that doesn’t mean that we just change for the sake of change. All the pieces have to fit for any of them to make sense… for the whole to become greater than the sum of its parts.

For me, everything we do has to trace back to our foundational service responsibilities… our building blocks. For a military Service to execute its mission, it needs to do four things: Force Design, Force Development, Force Generation, and Force Employment.

The Space Force is overhauling every one of these, aligning our form with our function to become what we need to be—a Service purpose-built for Great Power Competition.

So, I’d like to spend some time bringing you all up to speed on where we are with our GPC initiatives and where we’re going.

Let’s start with Force Design. At the 2024 Warfare Symposium in February, I announced our intention to stand up a new institutional Field Command dedicated to Force Design: Space Futures Command will be responsible for ensuring our long-term technical advantage in space.

Our plan is for Futures Command to incorporate three centers working in tandem to forecast the future operating environment, define our Service’s operational concepts, and ultimately document the objective force—the force we need for future success.

While that all sounds well and good, standing up a new Field Command is no small task… but we’ve made significant progress since last February. Since then, we’ve established Task Force Futures to stitch together pockets of excellence across the Service into something new, something better.

We’ve identified a team to get us to IOC, and they are going to make it happen, if not this year, then within a year. But we’re not stopping there. What we’re talking about here is nothing less than re-baselining the way we identify, mature, and develop the concepts that will shape our Service for years to come. This is critical… because there are so many things we need to get right.

How do we take in new ideas? How do we test them? How do we align them with the art of the possible, then resource them according to the science of the practical?

Just last month, Task Force Futures completed a tabletop exercise to start answering these questions and more. Form must follow function, and the lessons we are learning will be built into our foundation from the outset, ensuring that robust Force Design is integrated into every aspect of the Space Force by design.

Fortunately, we have wonderful partners who are committed to helping us move forward. I have nothing to announce quite yet, but I can tell you that we are working with a number of universities and educational institutions to ensure we have access to the best and brightest. Just like we did with Johns Hopkins in the development of our leadership education, we intend to leverage everything that academia has to offer.

I have often said that Allies and Partners are critical to our success, and nowhere is this truer than in Force Design. How can you work effectively with teammates if they don’t know what you’re trying to achieve? If they don’t understand the heights you aspire to?

Defining our objective force will be one piece of the solution to this, but another is deepening the ties with those that share our values.

Back in December of 2023, I had preliminary discussions with my leadership team as well as the Royal Air Force about a groundbreaking idea. I wanted to embed a Foreign Officer at the very highest levels of our Service.

You see, I want our Force Design process to account for everything our Partners are bringing to the table. I want to make certain we were taking full advantage of one of our greatest strengths by ensuring the Space Force is Integrated by Design with our Allies, from the generation of concepts all the way through to execution.

Six months later… after a monumental staffing effort by International Affairs… and Legal, Security, Manpower, and Public Affairs on both sides of the pond… as they say… we announced that Air Marshal Paul Godfrey is the first foreign-exchange Assistant CSO. And we stood up the office of Future Concepts and Partnerships around him.

AM Godfrey has hit the ground running and is already driving the Space Force to think through the integration of Allies, Partners, and Industry into every capability, every operation, every mission. Godders, please stand up and give a wave!

Great uniform by the way, and I know something about great uniforms! Thanks, Godders.

While Force Design frames the problem we face, Force Development prepares our Service to confront it. Earlier this year, I told you we had to do better developing leaders for modern warfare in the space domain—to grow Guardians that could meet the high tech demands of our operations. For me, that’s what Force Development means. Step one, frankly, is ensuring that Guardians understand exactly what the Service demands of them.

This is why we published guidance for the roles, responsibilities, and duties of Officer, Enlisted, and Civilian Guardians.

Put simply, we expect Officers to be our leaders and planners, with breadth and understanding in all disciplines of spacepower.

We expect our Enlisted to be our primary warfighters—weapon system experts with deep technical knowledge.

And we expect Civilians to support every aspect of the Service, providing stability, vital specialization and expertise, and corporate knowledge to ensure continuity of operations.

With this as our foundation, we are redesigning career paths for all Guardians… laying the groundwork for development opportunities to match.

For example, for the Officers, we have implemented a new initial skills training—an Officer Training Course that every new Lieutenant will attend. Over the course of 12 months, these new Officers will receive education across the full spectrum of Space Force operations. This includes satellite operations, intelligence operations, and cyber-warfare operations as well as exposure to force modernization and the joint planning process.

When they graduate this training course, our new Officers will serve in the operational force, building the understanding that will serve them well as they move forward in their careers as Space Force leaders. OTC is just one small piece of the process, but it’s a critical step towards developing the multidisciplinary Officer corps that we need. This is not just a good idea anymore—we’ve started doing it.

Just two weeks ago, STARCOM welcomed the first class of OTC students, and they’re already off and running.

This effort will not be limited to officers, of course. We’re already turning our attention to how we train and develop our Enlisted and Civilian Guardians. STARCOM is working to stand up a Space Acclimation Course for new Civilians that works similarly to this training course, establishing a firm foundation for these Guardians. I’m hoping we can start our first course next month.

Similarly, for our Enlisted force, we are planning a tailorable pipeline in our schoolhouses that builds the depth and technical expertise we need in our space-minded warfighters, as Chief B9 likes to call them.

These are concrete steps towards transforming the way we develop our force—it will take time, but it is critical, because the Guardians that attend these courses are the future of the Space Force.

And the Space Force future will require new, different, and uniquely developed leaders to drive our success in the era of Great Power Competition.

Speaking of new and different in Force Development, let’s talk about the Space Force Personnel Management Act. For some time now, I’ve spoken about needing to build a modern personnel management system—one that can retain the crucial skillsets of our Guardians without forcing them to make permanent career choices when life gets complicated.

With the help of Congress and the Administration, the FY24 National Defense Authorization Act gave us the authority we need to do exactly that. The short version is that the Space Force is not going to have an “Active Duty” and a “Reserve”… we’re going to have one component, composed of Guardians serving in full and part-time billets with the capacity to move between the two. Such a simple idea, but the benefits are tremendous!

We strip away the bureaucracy, break down the barriers, and what you’re left with is career flexibility. The ability to continue your military service while pursuing an advanced academic degree… or supporting a sick family member… or experiencing life in the private sector.

You see, once upon a time, you had to choose. The career you want… or something you need. Hard choices… and we lost a lot of talented people because they were forced to make a choice they had to make. Well, now we have a better option.

If you need proof, look no further than our first five transferees. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce the first five Air Force Reservists who raised their hands to transfer into the Space Force as fully-fledged Guardians.

We are thrilled to welcome you onto the Space Force team, and we are excited to welcome the many others who will follow in your wake. These Airmen volunteered to be part of our first transfer board back in July, and they will complete their transfer as soon as they conclude their Reservist duties. The lessons we learn from you guys will shape our efforts moving forward.

So, we’ve talked about how we design an objective force and how we develop ourselves to achieve it… what do we do with the forces we have today—our fielded force?

The process by which we present combat-ready forces is the work of Force Generation, and I’ve spoken at length about the need to enhance the way we approach this.

Every military Service has a process by which they generate forces, and that’s important because the Joint Force needs to know what to expect from the forces they receive. And our job is to present force elements to Combatant Commands, delivering repeatable, predictable, and consistent effects from space at scale.

Space forces pose a unique challenge, because the majority of them are employed in place. In the past, all our forces were 100% committed—always in operations.

That was the efficient way to do the job, but it’s just not effective for maintaining the readiness necessary for our pacing threat.

You see, the reality is that day-to-day operations simply do not build the readiness required for the high intensity fight. It’s one thing to sit on crew and operate a payload under normal conditions—it’s something else entirely to figure out how you operate through adversary action, balancing your contribution to the Joint Force against a threat to your mission.

That’s where SPAFORGEN comes in—our Space Force Generation model. The whole point of SPAFORGEN is to carve out dedicated periods for procedural currency, advanced training, and—when ready—Combatant Command operations. We’ve been working to implement SPAFORGEN for a few years now, but I gave Lt Gen Miller direction to get this done this year.

It was a huge lift, and I know it put a tremendous strain on the crews in the field. But General Miller and the SpOC team at every echelon have delivered. As of July 1st, they are executing the new model and collecting lessons learned that will continue to improve overall readiness with each force generation cycle.

Each cycle will give Guardians the time they need to train. You need the reps; you need the sets… the muscle memory to carry you through when everything around you is going haywire.

Hopefully, we can deter war… but we don’t have the final say on that. And, when called upon, Guardians will be ready because you have invested the time and the energy into your readiness.

So, we’re designing an objective force… developing an effective workforce… generating combat credible force elements… so what’s left?

For the Space Force, Force Employment is all about normalizing spacepower and effectively integrating it into the Joint Force.

The mechanism for doing that is Component Field Commands—Service organizations that integrate into Combatant Commands to deliver timely, relevant space effects in support of joint operations.

For example, we stood up Space Forces – Space last January to better manage our contribution to U.S. SPACE COMMAND.

Just a month ago, we elevated SPACEFOREUR-AF to a one-star command, reaffirming our commitment to support two critical AORs. Likewise, we’ve elevated Space Forces – Korea to an O-6 command, and we’re considering how to further expand our support to the Indo-Pacific.

But we’re not stopping there. In May, I gave direction to finalize a plan to resource our existing Service Components and activate new ones at every Combatant Command. Mission Area Teams are already working hard, and I expect to see a comprehensive plan within the next 12 months.

The end result will be that, in our Service, we are better postured to present Combatant Commanders with the forces they need to deter conflict and win a war, if it comes to that.

If you want a good example of effective Force Employment in action, let’s talk about the work with SPACEFOREUR-AF and the TacSRT initiative.

Last February, I told you that we were kicking off a pilot program for Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance, and Tracking, or TacSRT. This $40 million effort was intended to support AFRICOM requirements by leveraging commercial analytics and data fusion.

The goal was to complement the exquisite work done by the Intelligence Community with unclassified operational planning products delivered on tactically relevant timelines.

It was a pathfinder, with the idea being that we could expand the program if it proved to be value-added. And that’s exactly what it did.

To date, through SPACEFOREUR-AF, the TacSRT program has provided over 50 operational planning products to AFRICOM. It delivered timely analysis of suspicious activities by violent extremists along the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It offered visual insights to the U.S. Defense Attache Office in Kenya to support humanitarian assistance and disaster relief during major flooding in May.

But the thing that stands out most, to me, was that SPACEFOREUR-AF used TacSRT to support U.S. forces as they completed their withdrawal from Air Base 201 in Niger last August. Throughout the withdrawal, the team maintained overwatch of everything within 5 kilometers of the base. On average, the timeline from collection on orbit to delivery into the hands of security forces was about 3.5 hours… but the team got it down to as little as 1.5 hours from collection to the security forces by the end of the event.

This is proof positive that space makes the Joint Force better, and it’s the Space Force’s job to fully exploit it for the security and benefit of warfighters in harm’s way, each and every day.

What we just walked through was a handful of the initiatives we are pursuing—the culmination of thousands of hours of work to make the change we need. I know this change is hard, but it is vital because the domain is changing around us so quickly.

Our choices are either to keep moving or get left behind, and I don’t imagine there’s anyone in this room who prefers Option B.

If we’re going to see this transformation through, it will be because of you… because of the Guardian spirit we all share.

I see it every day. The character to not just do things right but to do the right things. The commitment to overcome challenges and see our work through to its end. The connection to build partnerships and grow our coalitions. And the courage to ask the hard questions, especially when we might not like the answers… or even the question.

Our efforts will succeed because of your drive… your desire… your dedication to complete our transformation and to execute our mission.

I’d like to wrap up here today by expressing my gratitude to all of you. We have asked our Guardians to shoulder a heavy burden, and it’s not going to get any lighter in the years ahead. What I can tell you is that your efforts will build – and are building – the foundation of tomorrow’s Joint Force.

Space is only going to become more important, and the pace of competition will increase along with it. What you do… matters. Maybe it’s not always obvious, maybe it’s not always fun… but it absolutely matters.

And I know you don’t have to be here. You chose to raise your hand and swear an oath, and I thank you for it… and for continuing to show up, day after day, because what we do… matters. One step at a time, we are transforming the Space Force into what our Nation needs.

In doing so, we uphold the legacy of change and growth inspired by our Constitution, signed 237 years ago today. And we ensure that our own sun is always on the rise, never setting on the future of the Space Force.

Today, as we approach our fifth birthday, we, too, are making history. Thank you again, and Semper Supra!

This "Remarks by CSO Gen. Chance Saltzman at the 2024 Air & Space Forces Association's Air, Space and Cyber Conference" was originally found on https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/