The United States Space Force USSF

The military had operated in space for sixty years before it had a service for it. Satellites for reconnaissance, communications, navigation, and missile warning were scattered across the Air Force, the Navy, the Army, and the intelligence agencies, and critics in Congress argued for two decades that space was treated as a support function rather than a domain where wars could be won or lost. The National Defense Authorization Act signed on December 20, 2019, created the United States Space Force as the sixth armed service and the first new one since the Air Force in 1947.

The Space Force sits inside the Department of the Air Force the way the Marine Corps sits inside the Department of the Navy: a separate service with its own chief, the Chief of Space Operations, who is a member of the Joint Chiefs, but sharing a civilian secretary. Its members are called Guardians. It organizes, trains, and equips forces for U.S. Space Command, the combatant command that actually directs operations in orbit. Its missions include launching and operating military satellites, running the Global Positioning System, detecting missile launches anywhere on earth, tracking the tens of thousands of objects in orbit, and protecting American satellites from interference.

The service is deliberately small. About 9,400 military Guardians and a similar number of civilians make up a force smaller than a single Army division, built on the theory that space operations need technical depth rather than mass. Its budget, roughly 30 billion dollars a year, buys satellites and launches rather than people. Major installations include Vandenberg in California, Cape Canaveral and Patrick in Florida, Peterson and Schriever in Colorado, and Buckley, where missile-warning data arrives. Most of its officers transferred from the Air Force in its first years.

The Space Force was mocked at its creation and has since become a routine part of the defense establishment, as China and Russia test anti-satellite weapons and commercial launch has made orbit crowded and contested. Its open questions are practical: how to buy satellites faster, how far to rely on commercial constellations like Starlink, whether it needs its own reserve component, and where its headquarters belongs. The decision to place U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs rather than Huntsville, Alabama, was reversed and re-reversed across two administrations.