Gen. Chance Saltzman called it his final Space Symposium. He released two documents: a 68-page threat assessment and a 104-page force design. He described the second one as a "North Star" — a 15-year roadmap for what the Space Force needs to become. Then he asked the audience to critique it.
The framing was humility. The timing was not. Saltzman is one of roughly two Joint Chiefs of Staff remaining in their posts after the Pentagon's nearly complete leadership turnover under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, according to SpaceNews. The man writing the Space Force's blueprint for 2040 may not be in office to see the first year of it implemented. The document he released is, in that sense, a letter to whoever comes next.
The documents themselves are notable. The Future Operating Environment 2040 identifies China as the primary pacing challenge and Russia as secondary, and describes future conflict as persistent interference below the threshold of open war: cyberattacks, electronic warfare, spoofing, and disruption across the electromagnetic spectrum, according to SpaceNews. The Objective Force 2040 translates that threat picture into a force design — moving away from a small number of high-value satellites toward layered, proliferated systems, framing warfighting as active rather than passive, and describing the architecture as "hybrid by design," integrating military capabilities with commercial services and allied assets.
The most concrete commitment in the documents is personnel growth. Saltzman said the Space Force needs to expand significantly over the next five to 10 years, adding thousands of guardians along with the infrastructure and training systems to support them, according to SpaceNews. Whether that expansion happens depends partly on budget projections that are themselves contested, and partly on whether the technical talent pipeline can deliver — the same specialized skills in orbital mechanics, signals intelligence, and cyber operations that the Space Force needs are available in a commercial labor market that pays multiples of military salaries.
The documents also formalize what has been building for months: Space Force is integrating cislunar operations — the region between Earth's orbit and the Moon — into its core mission and acquisition frameworks. Thomas Ainsworth, performing the duties of Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition, confirmed at the McAleese Defense Programs Conference in March that the service is actively building out this capability, according to SatNews. The January 2026 Executive Order titled "Ensuring American Space Superiority" mandated that the Defense Department establish capabilities for detecting and countering threats in the cislunar regime, and Space Force is targeting 2028 for deployment of initial cislunar Space Domain Awareness sensors, according to SatNews. Current efforts such as the Air Force Research Laboratory's Oracle program are being used as a blueprint for these future Blue Water space operations, which require tracking objects in complex multi-body gravitational environments.
Also structurally significant: the Objective Force 2040 organizes the future force around mission areas — missile warning and tracking, navigation warfare, satellite communications, space-based sensing and targeting, and space access and launch, according to SpaceNews. That framing treats these not as programs but as enduring warfighting disciplines. The Space Warfighting Analysis Center, which led the Objective Force study, could eventually be elevated to a full command dedicated to future force design, according to SpaceNews' interview with Vice Chief Gen. Shawn Bratton. Bratton also said the 15-year planning horizon means the service needs to be able to command and control spacecraft beyond the Moon — a requirement that would have sounded like science fiction a decade ago.
Saltzman called the Objective Force document a starting point, not a destination. He asked for critique, debate, and feedback. The audience in Colorado Springs — lawmakers, defense contractors, technologists, and allied representatives — was explicitly framed as the feedback loop that would shape how much of the vision becomes real. That message was not incidental. With the Joint Chiefs undergoing near-complete turnover, the institutional continuity of a 15-year roadmap depends less on the document's authors and more on whether the industrial base, Congress, and the next administration decide to fund it.
The North Star is visible. Whether anyone follows it depends on who shows up to the next Space Symposium.
