The United States Space Forces-Space (S4S) marked its first anniversary in December 2024 by celebrating multiple accomplishments aimed at meeting emerging security challenges in the space domain.
U.S. Space Command (USSPACECOM) established S4S as its Space Force component to normalize the presentation of space forces across combatant commands, supporting defense of the U.S. and its Allies and Partners.
S4S “is the service component that writes tactics, builds CONOPs [concept of operations], and gains and maintains space superiority,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said in a U.S. Space Force news release. “Guardians are warfighters, not simply force providers.”
S4S’s mission is to plan, integrate, conduct and assess global space operations in support of the U.S. combatant commanders, the joint force, and Allies and Partners. The organization also conducts joint space operations for USSPACECOM.
“S4S harnesses the collective expertise of our military, civilians, and contractors to meet our warfighters’ needs, as well as protect U.S. and allied interests,” said Lt. Gen. Douglas Schiess, S4S commander and Combined Joint Force Space Component commander. “We have grown, evolved and achieved remarkable success over the past year because of your efforts.”
Milestones S4S achieved during 2024 included:
• Codifying the component’s inaugural Joint Space Operations Plan (JSOP) to conduct globally integrated operations across domains. “This is our plan for how we will protect against enemy actions and aggression in space, defend critical U.S., allied, partner, and commercial space capabilities, and deliver space capabilities and effects in coordination with national agencies, the Joint Force, Allies and Partners,” Lt. Col. Laurel Jodice, S4S Operational Planning director, said in the news release.
• Expanding Operation Olympic Defender (OOD), a USSPACECOM multinational effort to optimize space operations that historically included Australia, Canada and the U.S., to also include France, Germany and New Zealand. “It’s essential that the OOD Allies and Partners have a shared understanding of the battlespace, to ensure mission impacting decision-making is based on common perceptions of what’s occurring and likely to occur in the area of responsibility,” said Australian Royal Air Force Group Captain Julien Greening, Combined Space Operations Center deputy director.
• Implementing a master plan to facilitate greater integration between the National Space Defense Center, a partnership organization supported by the U.S. Department of Defense and the intelligence community at Schriever Space Force Base, Colorado, and Combined Space Operations Center (CSpOC), which executes operational command and control of space forces and is at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
• Monitored missile activity, which showed a 320% increase in activity with 100% validation for all missile warning events, Schiess said.
• The component’s Commercial Integration Cell (CIC) expanded its network to 15 commercial mission partners supporting space domain awareness. “The Commercial Integration Cell operations team at the CSpOC has reinvigorated efforts to operationalize the CIC capability moving it beyond the experimental concept from which it originated,” Greening said. “This diverse operations team has worked to develop relationships with Commercial Mission Partners through collaborative engagements.”
Gen. Stephen Whiting, USSPACECOM Commander, congratulated the S4S team during a speech at the December 2024 Space Force Association’s Spacepower Conference in Colorado Springs.
“A fight in space is going to be complex, and it’s only gaining in complexity, and so we have to get command and control right now,” Whiting said. “[JSOP] is a real operational plan, informed by intelligence, with our best space tacticians modeling and [simulation] has gone into it, and we have the right elements of the joint force contributing to that plan.”