How Congress should grade the Space Force doctrine

Earlier this Spring, the leadership of the U.S. Space Force, the country’s newest military branch, announced that it plans to roll out a new doctrine in the near future. But what that doctrine will look like remains to be seen — and Congress, which will be the ultimate arbiter of the document and the vision it contains, needs to ensure that the country gets it right.

In the military, “doctrine” is meant to be an authoritative guidance, a kind of “blessed theory” summarizing what an organization believes to be true about a subject. When it comes to the doctrine of the newly-minted Space Force, the name of the game is space power, and what, exactly, the U.S. should plan to do in this new domain.

Nearly two decades ago, Gen. Simon “Pete” Worden and Maj. John Shaw lamented that in spite of the “pervading influence and compelling importance” of space, there is “little to be found today in the way of coherent space power doctrine and strategy.” Unfortunately, little has changed in the years since, even as the stakes in what has become an emerging economic, military and strategic domain have grown ever higher.