Disruptive By Design: The Commercial Warfighting Advantage in Space

A new space age is underway with a key emerging actor: the private sector. The growth of the commercial space industry is fundamentally shifting the U.S. Department of Defense’s and the intelligence community’s approach to space operations, a domain that has been traditionally defined by government-led programs for scientific, national security and defense initiatives. However, the 2020 Defense Space Strategy’s lines of effort focus on building “comprehensive military spacepower” to maintain U.S. space superiority by leveraging opportunities across the joint, interagency, multinational and commercial environment. This strategic approach encompasses enhanced cooperation with commercial entities to modernize technological advancement and the acquisitions process. This new era of commercial involvement offers significant advantages in defense innovation, while challenging current security and policy frameworks. As adversarial space powers continue to rapidly develop and demonstrate space-based capabilities that pose a threat to U.S. national security objectives, the speed, cost-effectiveness and scalability of commercial space offer a new hybrid architecture that reframes current modernization, procurement and integration strategies for a more resilient, unified defense approach. 

The development of SpaceX’s reusable rocket, Falcon 9, highlights a new economic opportunity that has quadrupled launch rates since 2021, reducing the average cost of a single space launch from $7,000 per kilogram to less than $1,000 per kilogram. This proliferation is not limited to one company, as launch providers like Blue Origin and Rocket Lab continue to create market competition, further driving down costs.

Additionally, the deployment of satellite mega-constellations and nanosatellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO)—from space technology companies such as Starlink and Spire Global, and private corporations like Deloitte and Amazon Web Services’ Project Kuiper—offers a robust architecture that increases the effectiveness of mission planning and mitigation strategies for operations in a denied, degraded and disrupted environment. This new economic freedom of rapid launch vehicle and satellite development further enables both redundancy and operations at scale to provide critical infrastructure and capabilities that reinforce multidomain operations and integrated deterrence.

In addition to cheaper and more frequent access to orbit, the federal government finds itself in a consumer role with a menu of commercial capabilities to choose from and integrate into its hybrid architecture, accelerating the United States’ competitive advantage and threat pacing. This new procurement and interoperability model is exemplified in the establishment of the Space Development Agency—the organization responsible for the iterative development, fielding and operation of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture. The defense and intelligence community’s operational reliance on commercial electro-optical imagery, synthetic aperture radar and LEO satellite communications in addition to the growing need for alternative positioning, navigation and timing architecture is further highlighted in the contested environment of the Russia-Ukraine crisis, underscoring the commercial integration imperative for enabling all seven joint functions: command and control, information, intelligence, fires, movement and maneuver, protection and sustainment. 

The increased investment and accelerated innovation of capabilities spur this hybrid approach of interconnected government and commercial space-based assets. Operationalizing this architecture necessitates a dramatic shift in defense acquisitions, policymaking and cybersecurity processes to ensure that the United States can effectively leverage commercial space solutions to project power while still upholding national security objectives. From adopting agile development methods to clarifying data rights to ensuring data integrity, maintaining a strategic advantage on Earth and in orbit hinges on seamless space enterprise integration that simultaneously strengthens commercial innovation and enhances mission lethality and assurance.