Today threats in space are significant. Increasingly, U.S. space capabilities are contested, as Russia and China pursue threatening capabilities to challenge what was once U.S. dominance and have become near parity.
Mitchell Insitute for Aerospace Studies
The U.S. should remove the limits it imposes on what targets Ukraine can attack with American weapons, former Air Force generals said, and let Ukraine take the fight to air bases and staging areas inside Russia. Ukraine also needs to dump its Soviet-style doctrine of ...
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy John F. Plumb warned lawmakers that Russia is developing an “indiscriminate” nuclear weapon to go in space, confirming reports from several months ago and describing potentially devastating effects in orbit.
Unlike the race to the Moon between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s, this new space race involves dozens of countries, dynamic geopolitical tensions, and technical capabilities associated with sustained presence.
The Space Force is ramping up its investment in domain awareness to stay ahead in the increasingly contested space environment, and Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman described the effort as essential to his “Competitive Endurance” theory meant to guide the entire service.
Wargames run by the Mitchell Institute show that moderately-priced and moderately-capable autonomous aircraft would be a huge benefit to the Air Force in a Pacific fight, imposing costs on an adversary, and enhancing the effectiveness of crewed combat aircraft.
The Mitchell Institute conducted a wargame and associated studies to assess how a family of uncrewed Collaborative Combat Aircraft could increase the lethality, survivability, and capacity of the Air Force’s air superiority forces for operations in highly contested environments.
As both China and the U.S. push further into space, with plans to explore and conduct research on the moon in the not-so-distant future, the Pentagon and Congress need to take steps now to ensure freedom of operations in cislunar space—the vast expanse between geosynchronous ...
Space Force leaders have become increasingly vocal about the need for responsible counterspace capabilities: weapons and operations that can hold enemies' space assets at risk to deter conflict. And it’s not just words—within the past year, the service has activated several units key to the ...
Military missions in the air, on land, and at sea demand robust, timely weather information. On-orbit space-based environmental monitoring (SBEM) systems are a critical source of this data, but years of underfunding, delayed, curtailed, and canceled modernization programs have left the SBEM enterprise in a ...
Space Force Chief Technology and Innovation Officer Lisa Costa called artificial intelligence a “game-changer” for the service during a recent Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies’ webinar event, highlighting its potential to enhance USSF’s operational capabilities and affect the global space race, while also acknowledging some ...
The 16th Air Force is working on an “information warfare operation center concept” to more effectively counteract the influence of China and Russia, commander Lt. Gen. Kevin B. Kennedy said Nov. 13. The goal of the construct is to provide “unity of effort” across the service, Kennedy ...
