WASHINGTON — The Space Force is ready to ingest a large expected budget boost for fiscal 2027, with plans to expand current capabilities and move faster to field capabilities currently under development, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said today.
“[T]he leadership in the Department of War, the leadership in OMB [Office of Management and Budget], certainly the leadership [in] the White House, and the president agree with us, agree with our advocacy, that space capabilities need to grow, that the Space Forces capacity needs to grow, ” he told the Mitchell Institute today.
“And I think the budget is going to reflect that agreement. So that’s exciting. … We’re going to get resources to enhance those capabilities that everybody’s come to expect,” Saltzman added.
He stressed that this is the first time there has been widespread agreement that the Space Force needs not just to grow, but to “accelerate” its growth to meet the threats.
The service “can’t wait five, six, seven years to do what we need to do. We need to be there in two years, three years. And it looks like the resourcing is going to now match those aspirations,” Saltzman said.
Further, he said, the service already has a strategy for spending the expected budget boost.
“Our strategy for making sure we can effectively spend those additional resources is going to focus on just adding more. And I know that sounds simple, but we’ve done so much of the foundational work to put in place the concepts, to do the force design work. We know the systems that are required,” Saltzman said. “We know the kinds of resiliency that’s needed. We know the training capacity that we have to add, and we’ve worked hard. The acquisition workforce in particular, has worked hard to put on contract the starting point for all of these capabilities. So now, hopefully, with just the new resources, it’s just more money onto existing programs to more rapidly expand those capacities.”
While there are baseline capabilities the service simply needs to expand, he explained there are also missions for which capabilities are still lacking — primarily those related to establishing “space superiority in a contested domain” — and that the Space Force already knows what gaps need to be filled rapidly.
“That’s what I mean when we say we built the force design: We understand what systems are going to be required to protect our assets on orbit and deny an adversary space enabled targeting against us. We know the systems that are needed.”
