On October 19, 2026, the Center for Strategic and International Studies published a commentary I co-authored with Kari A. Bingen, “Space Superiority and the Military Tools to Secure It,” as part of CSIS’s Foundations of Space Superiority series. It is the piece I have been waiting to write since before I retired.
For years, the fact that the United States was developing on-orbit space control capabilities was something everyone in the national security space community understood and almost no one said in public. That changed when Air Force Secretary Troy Meink and Chief of Space Operations Gen. Douglas Schiess publicly acknowledged these weapons. That acknowledgment was overdue, and it matters more than most coverage of it has captured.
Why the Quiet Part Had to Be Said Out Loud
Space is no longer a support function sitting quietly behind the fight. It is the fight’s nervous system. Surveillance, communications, navigation, and precision strike all run through satellites, and that dependence is only growing as target tracking itself migrates from aircraft to orbit. Russia is using military and commercial space assets on the battlefield in Ukraine right now. Iran reportedly struck U.S. bases in the Middle East with help from Chinese imagery satellites. These are not hypotheticals in a planning document. They are this year’s headlines.
China has built a reconnaissance and targeting fleet the Pentagon now counts at more than 500 satellites. China and Russia have both tested destructive anti-satellite weapons — China in 2007, Russia in 2021 — and both tests left debris that is still in orbit today, endangering everyone who operates there. In 2022, China’s Shijian-21 grappled an aging satellite and moved it to a disposal orbit. In 2025, Shijian-25 docked with Shijian-21 and completed the first known satellite-to-satellite refueling at that distance. Russian spacecraft have loitered near high-value U.S. satellites for months at a time, occasionally releasing small objects. None of this is subtle. The question was never whether adversaries were building the capability to contest American satellites. The question was whether the United States would say plainly that it has its own tools to respond.
The Third Pillar the Space Force Had Not Yet Built
Kari and I frame space superiority around what we call competitive endurance, and it rests on three pillars. The first is avoiding operational surprise — knowing what is happening in the domain before it happens to you, which is what space domain awareness is for. The second is denying any adversary a first-mover advantage, which is what resilient, proliferated satellite architectures accomplish: if there is no single point of failure, there is no single target worth striking. The Space Force has spent the better part of a decade building toward the first two pillars, and it shows.
The third pillar is responsible counterspace campaigning — the actual capacity to respond when the first two pillars are tested anyway. Just as a ground force needs to hold the high ground rather than simply watch who else is approaching it, a space force has to be able to defend the orbital terrain it depends on, not just observe who is maneuvering toward it. That is what the joint force calls protection, and it is the piece that had been missing in public discussion even as it was being built in practice. Acknowledging these weapons closes that gap. It does not create a new risk. It names one that already existed.
Restraint Is Not Optional Either
Having the tool and using it responsibly are two different disciplines, and the second one is the harder of the two. A weapon that creates a large debris field does not just damage one adversary satellite. It endangers astronauts, allied and commercial satellites, and the global connectivity that depends on an orbital environment that stays usable. Every nation that operates in space has a stake in how these capabilities get employed, including the one that builds and fields them. Demonstrating restraint is not a public-relations exercise. It is how the United States helps establish the norms it wants everyone else — including its adversaries — to be held to later.
What Still Has to Get Built
Acknowledging a capability is not the same as operationalizing it. In the piece, Kari and I lay out what still has to happen before these weapons are something a commander can actually call on with confidence:
- Strengthen the intelligence, targeting, and battle management that has to work in support of any counterspace response.
- Develop real operational concepts and test them through wargames and, where appropriate, on-orbit demonstrations — not just tabletop assumptions.
- Clarify, in advance, who is actually authorized to employ these weapons and under what conditions.
- Build the modeling and simulation tools needed to assess operational effects and debris risk before a decision has to be made under pressure.
- Issue classification guidance that lets these capabilities be discussed at a level that supports real joint planning and allied coordination, instead of staying locked behind compartments that keep partners out of the conversation.
- Build a competitive industrial base — maneuverable spacecraft, on-orbit refueling and servicing, and AI-enabled monitoring — so the capability does not outrun the ability to sustain it.
The Space Force has already stood up Deltas focused on orbital warfare, intelligence, and targeting, and Space Command has published a framework for joint force operations in the domain and is running wargames and exercises on space maneuver now. The architecture is forming. It needs the rest of this list to become real capability rather than a stated intention.
Why This Matters Beyond the Pentagon
The global space economy passed $600 billion in 2025. Every board, every operating company, every piece of financial infrastructure that depends on GPS timing or satellite connectivity has a stake in whether the domain stays usable — whether U.S. space superiority holds. That is the connective tissue between this commentary and the work I do now with boards and senior teams: the organizations that treat space risk as someone else’s problem are the ones that will be least prepared when the risk becomes theirs.
Read the full commentary, co-authored with Kari A. Bingen, on CSIS’s site: “Space Superiority and the Military Tools to Secure It.”
DeAnna Burt
DeAnna Burt is the strategic board member who finds where an organization’s capability is locked and builds the conditions for it to perform at its ceiling. She is the person you call when the room has everything it needs to solve the problem and nobody has figured out how to unlock it yet. At Red Flag, one of the most demanding large force employment exercises in the United States Air Force, she commanded a room of the finest aviators in the world without being able to fly. Her job was not to out-perform them. It was to build the conditions in which they could perform at their ceiling. She did. That is the move she has been running for thirty-three years. She built the operational space infrastructure America depends on, the satellite networks that run GPS and financial transaction timing, the multinational command architecture coordinating allied space operations across 25 nations. She commanded every level. She ran the Space Force’s cyber, nuclear, and operations mission as its Deputy Chief. She did all of this in a domain where the adversary studies your dependencies before you have mapped them, where being wrong is not a bad quarter but an irreversible outcome, and where the question is never “what do I know?” but “what does this team know that we have not yet deployed?” That question is the most valuable thing she brings. Not the record, though the record is there. The specific diagnostic capacity to walk into any organization, find where the capability is locked, and build the conditions for it to perform at its ceiling. In environments where being wrong is not recoverable, that capacity is the difference between the organization that adapts and the one that does not. She now works with boards, C-suites, and senior teams who need someone who has been accountable for that outcome and who can help them find and unlock the capability they already have.
