The following is the April 2025 U.S. Space Force document, SPACE WARFIGHTING: A Framework for Planners.
From the report
Access to and the ability to operate freely in space are vital to U.S. national interests. This framework presents the United States Space Force (USSF) current body of knowledge pertaining to space warfighting. It provides the Guardian’s perspective on the best way to approach warfare in the space domain throughout the competition continuum.
This framework is informed by Chief of Space Operations Notes, USSF doctrine, joint doctrine, and USSF Commercial Space Strategy (2024).
Space superiority is a joint force priority.This is especially important whenever the enemy is capable of threatening friendly forces in the space domain or inhibiting a Joint Force Commander’s (JFC’s) ability to conduct operations. Whether directly in the space domain, or through advances in space superiority capabilities, peer and near-peer competitors are capable of challenging or denying control of the space domain. These capabilities, supported by cyberspace and space advancements, present growing challenges to the Joint Force’s ability to exercise space superiority. Not only are space operations global, they are also multi-domain. A successful attack against the terrestrial, link, or orbital segment can neutralize a space capability; therefore, space domain access, maneuver, and utilization require deliberate and synchronized offensive and defensive operations across all segments.
Space superiority may shift from defense to offense and be conducted within the vicinity of enemy, friendly, and commercial spacecraft, or along shared lines of communication in both space and cyberspace. Space superiority may involve seeking out and destroying an enemy’s spacecraft, systems, and networks through measures designed to minimize the effectiveness of those systems, or countering enemy efforts in the other warfighting domains (land, maritime, air, and cyberspace).
Because warfare serves political aims, warfare is fundamentally a human activity. The same holds true for space warfare. Credible-combat space forces support U.S. deterrence efforts, which seek to affect the decision calculus of would-be aggressors. The USSF organizes, trains, equips forces, and is ready to conduct the operations that provide offensive and defensive actions that deny, degrade, or disrupt an adversary’s decision-making cycle and ability to observe, orient, decide, and act.
While space warfare—like all warfare—is a human activity, the character of warfare in the space domain features highly automated systems that filter or reduce human decision making. These systems are necessary for space vehicles to operate in the domain featuring high speeds, long distances, and congested orbital regimes. Detailed analysis must help us characterize how and when humans interact with these systems.
Space Superiority
Space superiority allows military forces in all domains to operate at a time and place of their choosing without prohibitive interference from space or counterspace threats, while also denying the same to an adversary. Space superiority extends beyond protecting friendly space capabilities from attack, it also encompasses protection of friendly forces in all domains from space-enabled attack. Adversary exploitation of the space domain enables adversaries to communicate and to find, engage, and conduct post-attack assessments against joint forces and partners; space superiority enables the denial of these key adversary advantages. The ability to establish space superiority at the time and place of our choosing enables joint lethality in all domains.
Figure 1 highlights space superiority options for the United States against a potential adversary. The condition where both have full capability is undesirable and results in prohibitive interference to the Joint Force during conflict. The condition where neither have full capability is undesirable because the Joint Force relies heavily on space to achieve joint effects. The desired condition is to maximize U.S. advantage while minimizing that of a potential adversary. Importantly, actions taken to achieve space superiority should not completely jeopardize the long-term safety, security, stability, or sustainability of the space domain.
In some situations, an actor may not be able to control the domain by operating how it wishes but may have the power to deny use of the domain to others. This is known as a denial. A situation of mutual denial may exist as shown in the bottom left corner of Figure 1. The most striking example of this would be a region of debris that denies any use of an orbital regime, but denial could also be achieved with reversible, temporary effects. Denial, like other aspects of space superiority, may be bounded in temporal and spatial dimensions.
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