Notably the country aims to put Sfera communications satellites into orbit — an analogue of the American-made Starlink and the British OneWeb constellations. Roscosmos previously sought to launch more than 600 systems into space as part of this project, but budget cuts prevented this. Now the agency is eyeing 360 satellites, although Borisov said the goal ought to be at least 1,200.

The government has agreed to approve 180 billion rubles (U.S. $2 billion) for 162 satellites. However, thus far the state has allocated 95 billion rubles, and a strategy meant to further develop the domestic communications sector up to 2035 calls for the launch of six geostationary satellites.

Sergei Prokhorov, who leads the Sfera project, recently said there is money set aside for four of them.

Is this practical?

While Borisov, who spoke July 3, is aiming for the production of at least 250 satellites per year for various purposes, the country currently makes about 15 annually — despite an existing capacity to manufacture about 40 each year.

Roscosmos’ goal is unrealistic, according to Pavel Luzin, a space policy expert at the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank. He noted the satellites will likely serve several functions, including optical observation, communications, meteorology, radar and television service.

“All the serious satellites that Russia has launched into space since 2022 were produced using imported Western electronics purchased no later than the mid-2010s, before the first sanctions,” Luzin told Defense News, referring to economic restrictions placed on Russia following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“It turns out to be a fundamental contradiction: Russia has a big problem with satellite production, but at the same time Russia declares that in just a couple of years it will be able to produce [250] high-quality satellites for various purposes per year and is already mastering the technologies of their conveyor production,” Luzin said. “This simply does not happen.”

Russia can find components on the world market for the production of several satellites, but not enough to produce hundreds, Luzin added. “The heads of companies report that despite the sanctions, the industry is alive, although in fact they may not know where to get components for hundreds of satellites.”

Indeed, Borisov had said “industry is functioning relatively stably” amid the sanctions.

Amid the war, the state has adjusted its satellite production priorities, focusing heavily on dual-use satellites — that is, ones that provide military and civilian services.

Among its priorities are the optical reconnaissance satellite Razdan; a radar satellite for marine reconnaissance for the Pion-NKS constellation; two radar satellites, dubbed Obzor-R and Kondor; and several Glonass communications satellites.

Denis Banchenko, a former employee of Roscosmos, told Defense News that “a significant part of the planned satellites, and most likely all of them, will be used in the interests of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation for intelligence, surveillance, navigation and communications purposes.”

The Marine Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Squadron (VMU) 3 “Phantoms,” hit the operational milestone June 20 out of Marine Corps Air Station Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, according to a press release.

The event is significant because typically when units do launch and recovery missions, they must run command and control through line-of-sight communications, which severely restricts distances and requires specialized aviators and large transport aircraft.

By using the satellite infrastructure, units can streamline and lengthen operational reach for drones and other assets. But historically the Marine Corps, one of the smaller military branches, has had to rely on the Air Force or Army for such expertise and equipment.

As the Corps pushes to operate more distributed and in smaller teams, especially across the vast Pacific region, it has also sought to expand its drone fleet, drone operator force and the capabilities of those drones.

In 2022 the Marines requested $63 million for rapid prototyping, more than six times what it had requested the previous year. And $20 million of that money was tied to developing payloads for its newly acquired MQ-9 Reaper drone fleet.

The service had leased the drones and used contracted operators since at least 2018, prior to acquiring the first two MQ-9s in 2021. As of earlier in 2024, the Corps had 10 in its fleet with another 10 scheduled for delivery by fiscal year 2025.

By mid-2023 the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Squadron 3 had reached operational status.

The MQ-9A Reaper ― primarily used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance ― can fly 20 hours or more and reach an altitude of up to 25,000 feet, according to the Corps’ 2022 aviation plan.

As the number of drones in the Corps inventory increases, so too does the demand for drone pilots and crews.

Commandant Gen. Eric Smith told Congress during budget testimony in April that the service needs to establish its own MQ-9 school to train crews rather than relying on the Air Force.

As of December 2023, the Corps had 100 MQ-9A drone pilots, Marine Corps Times previously reported.

The MQ-9A focus came after Congress eliminated funding for a future-leaning program dubbed the Marine Air-Ground Task Force Unmanned Expeditionary, Medium-Altitude, High-Endurance, or MUX, aircraft.

The MUX program had sought to rely on a single drone to conduct, coordinate and relay reconnaissance, counter-reconnaissance, communications, electromagnetic attack and conventional strike missions. The platform would have served as a central node, connecting the entire battlefield.

Though the platform lost funding, the Corps has continued working the MUX concept with its existing MQ-9A Reapers through what officials have called a “family of systems” approach that will lean on capabilities within the drone, amphibious ships and ground-based assets.

Shortening vast distances hasn’t been limited to platforms either.

The Marine Corps recently announced that it had landed the first fixed wing aircraft, a KC-130J Super Hercules tanker, on a refurbished airfield on the Pacific island of Peleliu, the site of a historic Marine battle in 1944.

Such bases close distance for aerial assets to key locations such as mainland Japan, Okinawa and the Philippines.

A vehicle equipped to that effect, made by United Arab Emirates-owned and Estonia-based Milrem Robotics, will be unveiled at the company’s during Eurosatory 2024 trade show that begins next week, according to a company statement,

Specifically, a THeMIS variant devoted to cargo transportation will feature the Starlink hookup, a constellation of internet satellites operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Milrem has given more than dozen THeMIS vehicles to Ukrainian forces.

The Estonian company sought out the expertise of the Dutch datalinks firm AEC Skyline for the integration of the vehicles’ latest add-on feature, Milrem said.

“By leveraging satellite connectivity, the THeMIS robotic vehicle, which is currently assisting Ukrainian soldiers in the war with Russia, can seamlessly transmit data, receive commands, and relay vital information in real-time, regardless of its location on the battlefield,” the Milrem statement reads.

Using the Starlink satellite system requires a ground terminal, which SpaceX started shipping to Kyiv only hours after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, according to the BBC. As of June 2023, the British broadcaster reported that there were tens of thousands of terminals in Ukraine, including 500 bought by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Starlink satellites operate in low-Earth orbit at less than 600 kilometers (370 miles) above the earth, according to the company. Being closer to Earth translates into better performance for the system’s intended applications.

Last month, Russian Telegram channels published photos of what they alleged showed a badly damaged, captured model of the combat robot. A Milrem spokesman declined at the time to comment, stating only that the company was aware of the images.

The service operates a fleet of satellites under its Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program. They are about 22,000 miles above Earth and essentially serve in a neighborhood watch function. They also perform rendezvous and proximity operations, drawing close to other satellites to observe and provide data on them.

In March, Space Systems Command asked companies for ideas on how to augment that constellation with smaller, maneuverable spacecraft equipped with different sensors that can be refueled in orbit.

Col. Bryon McClain, the command’s program executive officer for space domain awareness and combat power, said June 5 his office is sorting through the influx of ideas from companies to determine how they might shape future Space Force requirements.

“The team is looking at that, and we’re fundamentally looking at how does that change our future architecture,” he said during the C4ISRNET Conference, held June 5. “How can we take that information, working with our warfighter and the requirements team, to understand the specifics of what we need?”

It will take time for the service to transition to a new satellite architecture, McClain said, adding that he doesn’t expect the shift to the more advanced capabilities to happen until around 2026 or 2027. That’s due largely to budget constraints as well as the demands of the existing mission.

“We have an ongoing mission set for on-orbit space domain awareness, and we need to make sure that’s covered,” he said.

McClain didn’t share specifics on the types of capabilities the service might adopt, but did say the changes are aligned with a push from senior Space Force leaders to build smaller systems that rely on less “exquisite,” military-unique technology and more on commercially available capabilities.

“Those two ideas, those mentalities, really go hand in hand, and we’ve tried to embody that,” he said.

The Space Force has been leveraging commercial space domain awareness capabilities through several initiatives, including its Joint Commercial Operations cell in Colorado Springs. McClain said the next step for the service is to better understand the dynamics of the private sector markets.

As an example, McClain noted that demand for small satellites has fueled significant growth in the commercial spacecraft bus market. The service needs to understand the capabilities of those buses so that it can tap into that existing pool rather than design military-unique requirements; otherwise, it will miss out.

“Now, the push that I have when I’m working with industry, and the request that I always have, is please make sure that I’m not packing in unique requirement sets in [requests for information] or [requests for proposals] that force you to deviate from that commercially available product to start going toward a military-unique product.”

A Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency effort aims to use artificial intelligence to shine a light on those potentially nefarious capabilities.

In 2023, DARPA selected Slingshot Aerospace, a California-based space technology firm, to create an AI system that identifies anomalous satellites within these large constellations. The company unveiled its model, dubbed Agatha, on June 5, announcing that it had demonstrated the ability to detect outlier satellites among operational constellations.

“Identifying malfunctioning or potentially nefarious objects and their objectives within large satellite constellations is a complex challenge that required us to reach beyond traditional approaches and develop a novel and scalable AI algorithm,” Dylan Kesler, Slingshot’s director of data science and AI, said in a statement. “Our Agatha model has also proven its ability to deliver high-quality insights that provide ‘explainability’ or context for why specific objects were flagged.”

The Chinese government has announced plans to launch two megaconstellations in the coming years comprised of tens of thousands of satellites, a bid to rival Elon Musk’s SpaceX, whose network of Starlink communication satellites includes more than 6,000 operational spacecraft.

At the same time, Defense Department officials have confirmed Russia is developing a satellite that could carry a nuclear weapon and last month launched a counterspace weapon designed to follow U.S. spy satellites.

Audrey Schaffer, Slingshot’s vice president of strategy and policy, told C4ISRNET these developments make a tool like Agatha particularly important.

“Agatha is one example of a technology that is designed to help see clearly in that kind of increasingly crowded and congested environment,” she said. “In particular, Agatha really helps you find that needle in the haystack.”

To train Agatha’s algorithm, Slingshot fed more than 60 years of data from simulated megaconstellations created by the firm. Those constellations included outlier satellites, which allowed Agatha to distinguish between types of satellites and flag anomalies.

The system incorporates a method known as inverse reinforcement learning. The technique allows Agatha to not only recognize and track anomalous spacecraft maneuvers or other activity but to assign motivation to those actions.

“Agatha doesn’t just identify that this particular satellite is an outlier,” Schaffer said. “It can also make an assessment of why the satellite is behaving differently than the other satellites in the constellation and what policies or operational directives it might be following that explain the difference in behavior.”

Once it had trained the model, Slingshot set out to test Agatha’s abilities using existing commercial constellations. Schaffer wouldn’t identify which companies’ satellites the system observed, but said it flagged several non-nefarious anomalies, which it then confirmed with the spacecraft owners.

The DARPA-led project wrapped up earlier this year, and Schaffer said the company is now in conversations with potential government and commercial customers who may be interested in Agatha. She noted that the tool could be useful to U.S. Space Command’s National Space Defense Center, which monitors activities in space.

“The amount of traffic in space is only growing,” she said. When you have not just 10,000 satellites that are active but 10,000 satellites in a single constellation, it is very quickly going to be impossible for humans or even teams of humans to sift through all that data and identify potential threats to our national security.”

NATO has made slow, steady progress on space policy for just over a decade. NATO published its first policy-level document related to space in 2012 and focused on space support to operations, but not until 2019 did NATO release a new space policy and declare space an operational domain.

Two years later NATO confirmed that Article 5 applies to space — a timely development that took place a mere four months before Russia’s direct-ascent anti-satellite test. In 2022, the NATO Strategic Concept underlined the vital role of space for NATO’s deterrence and defense posture. Based on the architecture provided by these strategies and documents, NATO has been attempting to operationalize its space enterprise in the past years in its role of harmonizer, enabler and coordinator among space-faring allies.

NATO also exhibited substantive organizational changes that reflected a commitment to its policy. For example, NATO established the Space Center at Allied Air Command in 2020, which has grown modestly and serves as a space focal point by sharing information about potential threats and space activities.

More recently, in 2023, the NATO Space Center of Excellence in Toulouse, France, was accredited. This center will convene more than 15 sponsoring nations to provide knowledge and analysis focused on three operational functions: space domain awareness, operational space support and space domain coordination.

NATO also has introduced two projects to support its efforts: one looking up at space for better situational awareness of objects and events for strategic decision-making, called Strategic Space Situational Awareness System; and one looking down from space to enhance space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, called Alliance Persistent Surveillance from Space.

These developments are a good start, but they are inadequate given the growing threat to space security and the growing importance of space for NATO specifically and society more generally.

Despite the declining state of its space program, Russia has effectively attacked key elements of space infrastructure as part of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russia is routinely jamming positioning, navigation and timing systems, which impacts military operations and increases risks for civilian aviation. Russia is also jamming communications satellites.

Russia has also demonstrated effective cyber capabilities against space-enabled communications. These trends in non-kinetic malicious attacks against space resources will likely increase in frequency and intensity in the future, so allied preparations will be essential in meeting the challenge.

NATO has set some broad, ambitious goals to transform for the future. The NATO Warfighting Capstone Concept, the alliance’s North Star for its military transformation through 2040 opens the door for space to be a significant component of a multidomain operations-enabled alliance.

However, to be successful, NATO needs to identify specific actions that move beyond understanding and appreciating space to fully operationalizing the domain. The following actions are things NATO should undertake and articulate as specific objectives at the 2024 NATO summit.

NATO should enhance its role as a coordinating hub for space-faring allies at the strategic level. NATO is not an autonomous space actor; however, it can play an essential role in harmonizing allied space efforts.

NATO should consider establishing a space committee, modeled after its Resilience Committee, to help set the priorities for space efforts within the alliance, translating NATO allies’ level of ambition for space into concrete actions and guidance. Given the important role of the European Union in space, NATO should create an associated NATO-EU space task force to coordinate with the EU.

Operationally, NATO should enhance allied space domain awareness and build a common allied space domain picture. This could be done by elevating the role of the NATO Space Center through greater information and data sharing, as well as additional personnel with the requisite technical expertise. Greater information sharing through both governments and industry would help fully operationalize the center, which will be important in any future conflict with an adversary that attacks space capabilities.

Related to capabilities, NATO should include space capability requirements in this year’s NATO Defence Planning Process. As a precursor to a focus on capabilities, allies should adopt an interoperable-by-design approach for its space architecture. This effort should focus on identifying key interoperability gaps and codifying standards to address them. Technical discussions about standards and interoperability should draw on best practices from industry and other organizations, such as the EU, rather than starting from scratch.

Finally, NATO needs to think more openly and proactively about space deterrence and defense. Allies need to understand how to operate in space — and especially how Article 5 may apply to allied activities. A scenario-based discussion involving an Article 5 contingency could be particularly helpful in outlining authorities, responses and gaps in allied planning, as well as the threats that may warrant action and the specific contexts in which this may take place.

Russia’s extensive use of electronic warfare and its multiyear effort to develop a space-based nuclear weapon provide clear motivation and use cases to jump-start this important effort.

Ideally, NATO will “throttle up” and undertake all these initiatives as part of a comprehensive package of actions announced at the NATO summit. Adopting just a few would be better than none, but failing to act now in the face of a proactive and capable Russia risks falling short of a mature NATO space enterprise at a time when the geopolitical environment needs it most.

Retired U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Bruce McClintock is a senior policy researcher at the think tank Rand, where he leads its Space Enterprise Initiative. He previously served as a defense attache in Russia from 2014 to 2016. Anca Agachi is a defense policy analyst at Rand and a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council think tank.

Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of U.S. Space Command, recently cautioned that China is “growing its military space and counterspace capabilities at breathtaking pace.” He cited China’s rapid increase in space-based surveillance capabilities in particular, saying it had tripled in number since 2018 to 359 surveillance satellites. Maj. Gen. Greg Gagnon, deputy chief of space operations for intelligence, said that since 2015, China has increased its number of satellites by 550%.

These numbers are understandably alarming, but they don’t tell the whole story.

The figures military leaders cite include more than China’s military and intelligence satellites. As shown in the AEI Space Data Navigator, China has 848 operational satellites as of May 2024, compared to just 129 in 2015 (an increase of just over 550%) — but the vast majority of these are not military satellites.

Of the 848 Chinese satellites operating today, 179 are military and intelligence satellites, 271 are civil (including the Beidou constellation for navigation and timing), 362 are commercial and 36 are academic. To put this in perspective, the United States has a total of 6,975 operational satellites today — eight times as many as China — and since 2015, the total number of U.S. satellites has increased by over 2,100%.

Why are military leaders so concerned? It’s because the lines between Chinese military, civil and commercial satellites are blurred, and in a conflict the United States expects that all Chinese space assets can and will be used by the military. The same is not true for the United States, and the vast majority (94%) of U.S. satellites are commercial.

When the total number of Chinese satellites is compared to only U.S. military and intelligence satellites, the picture is different. The United States has just 300 military and intelligence satellites in operation — roughly a third of China’s total space assets.

While China’s rapid advances in space and counterspace technology is concerning, the United States’ failure to fully leverage the innovation of its own commercial space sector is even more concerning. The creation of the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve (CASR) is a step in the right direction, but it is only a small step because it merely creates the option to use commercial satellites in a crisis. To put this in perspective, the Civil Reserve Air Fleet that served as an inspiration for CASR has only been used three times in the 73 years since it was created.

As I detailed in a recent report, the vibrance and innovation of the U.S. commercial space sector is the envy of the world, and it is rooted in our free market economic system, open society and access to capital — an enduring advantage we have over China. In 2023, the U.S. commercial space sector alone (not including government missions) launched three times as many satellites as the rest of the world combined, and U.S. effective launch capacity in 2023 was four times the rest of the world combined.

China is not ahead of the United States in space by any stretch of the imagination. It’s the U.S. military and intelligence community that are falling behind the commercial space sector and losing ground to China. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Congress and the Biden administration need to unleash the full potential of the Space Force to compete with China, and the best way to do that is to build on what is already working. The Space Development Agency (SDA) has found the right approach to leverage commercial innovation in its proliferated warfighter space architecture. It is using a spiral development approach, with each “tranche” of satellites having progressively better capabilities, and it is leveraging commercial technology and components wherever possible. Right now, it is working on two “layers” of the architecture: the data transport layer and the missile tracking layer.

But the SDA could do more if given the resources. In particular, it should immediately begin work on a tactical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) layer — what it has previously referred to as the “custody” layer.

The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and the Space Force are debating a constellation of satellites for ground moving target indication (GMTI) — a mission that was traditionally the responsibility of the Air Force. Gen. Jay Raymond, the former chief of space operations, announced that the GMTI mission would be moving to the Space Force three years ago, and yet the program has still not reached milestone B — the formal start of an acquisition program.

China is not waiting for the NRO and Space Force to settle their bureaucratic disputes over how the satellites will be controlled. The Biden administration should stop the internal bickering and give the tactical ISR mission (including GMTI and other types of space surveillance) to the Space Development Agency. And if the administration doesn’t settle the issue soon, the Armed Services committees should settle it for them in the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

Building a new tactical ISR layer as part of the Space Development Agency’s overall proliferated architecture is the fastest and most assured way to make meaningful progress. But even this will take several years to begin delivering capabilities to the warfighter. In the interim, the Space Force should begin integrating existing commercial space ISR capabilities to fill the capability gap.

Contracting for commercial space ISR has traditionally been the job of the NRO, and the agency already has large contracts for commercial electro-optical imagery. But the NRO has not moved ahead expeditiously in expanding its use of commercial synthetic aperture radar and radio frequency-sensing satellites, and the NRO’s business model for tasking and processing commercial space ISR data is far too slow to support tactical users (taking days rather than minutes).

Congress should create a commercial space ISR fund in the fiscal 2025 budget and require the Space Force to begin contracting for commercial space ISR capabilities. This would jumpstart the process of integrating commercial capabilities into DOD battle networks and kill chains and give the Space Force an opportunity to refine the requirements for its own tactical ISR satellites.

A limiting factor in all of this is (unsurprisingly) funding, and the budget caps imposed by the Fiscal Responsibility Act are one reason the Space Force was not more forward-leaning in its budget request. While in an ideal world Congress would add new funding for these priorities, if that is not possible, it could instead take money from lower priorities within the Space Force’s budget.

An example of a potential bill payer is the funding line for narrowband satellite communications, intended to extend the life of the current Mobile User Object System (MUOS) constellation of satellites the Space Force inherited from the Navy. A previous estimate showed that it will cost $4.8 billion to buy two more of these satellites — the very definition of big, juicy targets.

Narrowband satellite communications is a mission area that can transition to commercial, where private-sector capacity and performance (e.g., latency, data rates, etc.) are far better than MUOS. Canceling the MUOS life extension would save $280 million in fiscal 2025 alone, and Congress could rescind any unobligated money it appropriated in fiscal 2024 to free up even more funding within the Space Force’s budget. This would be more than enough for SDA to start work on a tactical ISR layer and to create a commercial space ISR fund.

Congress and the executive branch should heed the warnings about China’s space capabilities. The United States enjoys a substantial lead in space technology, but China is moving quickly to copy our technology and counter the advantage it provides. It is time to get serious and to make the hard choices. It is time to unleash the Space Force.

Todd Harrison is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, focused on defense strategy and budgeting, the defense industrial base, and space policy and security.

While it’s unclear exactly why Xi enacted this major reshuffle, analysts suspect both military capability and political control contributed to his decision.

Joel Wuthnow, a Chinese military expert with the Washington-based National Defense University, believes Xi wanted greater oversight of support forces with the People’s Liberation Army.

“PLA observations of the war in Ukraine have made very clear that an effective structure for support forces, including in the logistics and information domains, is essential for modern warfighting. My sense is that the SSF [Strategic Support Force] proved to be an unnecessary management layer that obscured Xi’s visibility into what the PLA was doing in space, cyberspace and other information disciplines,” Wuthnow told Defense News.

China created the SSF on Dec. 31, 2015. Its successor, the Information Support Force, will now handle network information systems and communications support, and possibly network defense.

The new organization operates alongside two other newly announced military arms — the Cyberspace Force and the Aerospace Force — plus the preexisting Joint Logistics Support Force. This leaves the PLA with a structure of four arms and four services, the latter comprising the Army, Navy, Air Force and Rocket Force.

The four arms are directly subordinate to the Central Military Commission, which is the top political party organ that oversees China’s armed forces. This means the commission’s leaders can directly deal with individual support forces rather than having to go through the SSF headquarters.

The latest move came as a surprise to observers, said Brendan Mulvaney, the director of the U.S. Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute.

“Obviously it takes quite a bit of planning and groundwork to create a new force, much less disband another, but it appears the PLA kept these plans pretty well hidden from public view,” Mulvaney told Defense News.

Indeed, China is known for its lack of transparency. Gen. Ju Qiansheng, a former SSF commander, disappeared last year before reappearing briefly in February. Ju’s current status is unclear.

Mulvaney said corruption might have played a part in Xi’s decision. However, the SSF has not experienced corruption scandals at the level of the Rocket Force, whose leadership was detained by the authorities last year.

From an operational standpoint, the new structure is advantageous to China’s military, Wuthnow said, noting the SSF was as powerful as the PLA’s five theater commands, whereas the current four support forces are now one level lower. This means theater commanders can now more easily tap the support forces’ assets without the complication of dealing with higher headquarters.

“This should help break down silos in the PLA and improve the functioning of the joint operations systems,” Wuthnow said. The four support forces “are all functionally specialized and can focus on improving their trade without an unnecessary management layer.”

Overall, disruption to the PLA would “not be massive,” Mulvaney said.

“The new headquarters will take time to get up and running; stake out positions and roles; establish command and control as well as organizational relationships with the other services, forces and theater commands,” he explained. “But it won’t be as big of a shift as the 2015/2016 reforms, and really only affects a pretty small portion of the PLA as a whole.”

The Cyberspace and Aerospace forces will presumably continue as normal from their same locations. The Cyberspace Force succeeds the SSF’s former Network Systems Department, while the Aerospace Force supplants the Space Systems Department. In essence, these departments have been elevated, with their overarching SSF structure removed.

Senior Col. Wu Qian, a Defense Ministry spokesperson, described the Cyberspace Force’s mission as “reinforcing national cyber border defense, promptly detecting and countering network intrusions and maintaining national cyber sovereignty and information security.”

The force is also charged with carrying out offensive cyber operations. The U.S., the U.K. and New Zealand accused China last month of sponsoring malicious cyber activity.

Wu also said the Aerospace Force will “strengthen the capacity to safely enter, exit and openly use space.” Although China emphasizes the peaceful use of space, the Pentagon said in its latest annual report on China’s military that the PLA “views space superiority, the ability to control the space-enabled information sphere and to deny adversaries their own space-based information gathering and communication capabilities, as critical components to conduct modern ‘informatized warfare.’ ”

Xi has said the Information Support Force plays “a crucial role in advancing the Chinese military’s high-quality development and competitiveness in modern warfare.”

While the new structure means the four forces plug into the PLA’s joint operations system more easily because there are now fewer management layers, Mulvaney noted it’s likely a result of Xi wanting “more direct control of the information domain forces — and felt like the SSF wasn’t getting the job done.”

The Strategic Support Force, or SSF, was created on Dec. 31, 2015. It existed for a little more than eight years.

After China dissolved the SSF on April 19, it established an Information Support Force, with President Xi Jinping present at its investiture ceremony in Beijing the same day.

Its first commander is Lt. Gen. Bi Yi, a former deputy commander of the SSF. The Information Support Force is directly subordinate to the Central Military Commission, the top political party organ that oversees China’s armed forces.

Senior Col. Wu Qian, a Defense Ministry spokesperson, said the change is part of “building a strong military, and a strategic step to establish a new system of services and arms and improve the modern military force structure.”

He added that the Information Support Force underpins “coordinated development and application of network information systems.” This suggests it is responsible for command and control, information security, and intelligence dissemination.

He also said the move would have “profound and far-reaching significance” on PLA modernization. However, Brendan Mulvaney, the director of the U.S. Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute, told Defense News it’s unlikely to be “as big of a shift as the 2015-2016 reforms,” which overhauled the PLA.

The military considers the information domain as important as the four traditional air, land, sea and space domains.

The PLA now has three nascent arms — the Information Support Force, Cyberspace Force and Aerospace Force. It appears the latter two were existing SSF departments that China renamed.

After the shakeup, the PLA’s new organization features four services and four arms: the existing PLA Army, Navy, Air Force and Rocket Force services, while the three previously mentioned arms sit alongside a fourth, the incumbent Joint Logistics Support Force.

The Cyberspace Force will subsume the responsibilities of the SSF’s former Network Systems Department, whose mandate was offensive and defensive cyber operations.

Indeed, the Defense Ministry described the Cyberspace Force’s role as “reinforcing national cyber border defense, promptly detecting and countering network intrusions and maintaining national cyber sovereignty and information security”.

The Aerospace Force will take on the charge of the SSF’s Space Systems Department, meaning it will supervise space operations and space launches. Wu said the force will “strengthen the capacity to safely enter, exit and openly use space.”

The ministry said that “as circumstances and tasks evolve, we will continue to refine the modern military force structure.”

Xi has repeatedly urged the PLA to do two things: modernize its readiness structure for high-tech combat, and to loyally follow party diktats.

He has now ordered the Information Support Force to “resolutely obey the party’s command and make sure it stays absolutely loyal, pure and reliable.”

The eight spacecraft, built by SpaceX and L3Harris Technologies and launched in three batches over the last year, make up the agency’s so-called Tranche 0 Tracking Layer. The systems will demonstrate the ability to observe and collect information on missiles launches.

In order to draw data from a test flight, the agency’s satellites must be positioned over the area where the test is taking place — typically Vandenberg Space Force Base in California or another Defense Department site. Derek Tournear, SDA’s director, told reporters April 10 the first tracking satellites have been collecting and transmitting, but their position has yet to align with the timing of a missile launch.

“We’ve been teamed very closely with [the Missile Defense Agency], which has actually been adjusting some of their launch times for some of their testing to make sure we have good overflight of our satellites so we can see their tests,” he told reporters during a briefing at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “We expect that to come up pretty quickly.”

He noted that the satellites are also scanning global “hot spots” for missile activity as they orbit the Earth.

One constraint with the initial demonstration tranche is its limited number of satellites. The agency doesn’t expect to reach global coverage, which will require about 40 spacecraft, for a few years. Four of the eight spacecraft in orbit are sending data — the latest satellites, launched in February, are still moving through their checkout phase — which means SDA can only provide about 10% of that coverage.

Another limiting factor is that the Tranche 0 demonstration satellites are transmitting more data to the ground than the operational spacecraft will. That’s because the agency wants to collect as much information as possible during its demonstration phase, Tournear said. The amount of data being offloaded means the dissemination process takes longer.

“It takes one to two days after we take an image of an event to get all of those data down to then run through the algorithms,” he said. “That’s why these targets of opportunity are unpredictable — because we can’t get the data down to look and then retest it.”

The agency’s missile tracking layer will eventually include at least 100 satellites. Tranche 1 will add 35 spacecraft, and Tranche 2 will include another 54.

Tournear said the agency will set the number of spacecraft for Tranche 3 later this year, a decision determined in part by congressional feedback on its fiscal 2025 funding request, which includes $1.7 billion for the effort.

“The baseline plan has been 54, very similar to the Tranche 2 plans,” he said. “As we go through the budgeting process for this year … we’ll see whether we stick with that 54.”

Tranche 3 satellites will have similar capabilities to earlier satellites, Tournear added, noting that the performance improvement will come from having more capacity in orbit.

“It’s going to be continuing to build out off of Tranche 2 tracking to get towards that number of 100 satellites,” he explained, “adding in more of those missile defense satellites as we go to make sure that we have enough coverage for the missile defense mission by the 2030 time frame.”