Somewhere in geostationary orbit, a satellite is shadowing an American one. Somewhere closer to the ground, a navigation signal is being jammed. Neither act is unambiguously an attack, and that ambiguity has become the heart of the problem. A new report from the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies warns that the United States still has no agreed framework for telling routine competition in orbit apart from the opening moves of a conflict — and that adversaries are steadily normalizing hostile behavior in space while staying just below the threshold that would trigger an armed response.
The findings, drawn from a two-day January workshop of more than 50 experts from the military, government, industry, allied nations and academia, conclude that space is no longer a peaceful domain. According to SpaceNews coverage of the report, participants agreed the United States is already engaged in sustained gray-zone competition with China — but could not agree on where that competition ends and conflict begins.
That disagreement, among people whose job is to think about exactly this question, is the central problem.
The gray zone problem
Jamming. Cyber intrusions. Directed-energy interference. Close-proximity satellite maneuvers that shadow American assets in geostationary orbit. Each of these activities sits in an ambiguous space between routine signaling and outright attack, and each has become more common.
The report, released this month and available in full from the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, frames the difficulty plainly: hostile acts in space are hard to identify, escalation is hard to assess, and the right response is hard to choose. Air & Space Forces Magazine reported that the 40-page report, co-authored by retired colonels Charles Galbreath, Jennifer Reeves and Kyle Pumroy, distills six findings and seven recommendations from the workshop.
The challenge has two layers. One is policy. The United States has not written down, in any binding way, what counts as a hostile act in orbit. The other is the physical nature of the domain itself. Attribution is hard. A satellite that drifts close to another may be conducting surveillance, rehearsing an attack, or simply maneuvering for orbital reasons. A communications blackout could be jamming, a solar event, or equipment failure.
Without a shared vocabulary for those distinctions, decision-makers are left improvising under time pressure — exactly the conditions that produce miscalculation.
China’s long horizon
Charles Galbreath, a Mitchell Institute senior fellow and one of the report’s authors, argued that Beijing has been working this problem far longer than Washington has.
By Galbreath’s account, China has been developing counterspace capabilities since the 1990s — investing in a range of weapons, from direct-ascent interceptors to jammers, cyber tools and co-orbital systems — for far longer than the United States has treated space as a warfighting domain.
That asymmetry of attention matters. The U.S. Space Force only stood up in December 2019. China’s counterspace program predates it by decades.
The report describes a pattern in which Chinese activity — jamming, cyber operations, directed-energy attacks — goes largely unanswered, allowing Beijing to incrementally reset the line of what counts as acceptable behavior in orbit. Each unchallenged action becomes a new baseline.
A service in transition
The Space Force is trying to reorient itself around this reality. Its early years emphasized operating satellite systems — the boring, essential work of running constellations that provide GPS, missile warning, secure communications and reconnaissance. The new posture demands something different: preparing to fight in orbit, not just operate there.
That shift is visible in budget priorities. Early Space Force budgets, as Defense One reported in its analysis of the service’s spending patterns, leaned heavily on operations, maintenance and procurement of launch services. The fiscal 2024 request came in around $30 billion, with major investment in proliferated low-Earth-orbit constellations modeled partly on lessons from Ukraine, where commercial systems like Starlink have played a significant operational role.
The proposed fiscal 2027 budget would more than double that figure. The administration’s request would lift Space Force funding from roughly $31 billion in the current fiscal year to about $71 billion, Defense One reported — a dramatic proportional jump for the military’s smallest and youngest service. Department of the Air Force leaders have spent recent weeks defending the increase before Congress.
Galbreath was careful not to treat the budget jump as a solution.
The growth is a step in the right direction, he said, but unlikely to be the end state; what the service needs is a continuous trajectory of increasing capability, capacity and size to handle a wide range of threat vectors. Workshop participants agreed that funding has to be consistent and on a sustained growth path.
The deeper point: doctrine and policy lag hardware. A larger Space Force with better weapons and more resilient constellations still has to answer the question the workshop could not resolve — when is the United States allowed to shoot back, and at what?
Scenarios that test the seams
To probe that question, the workshop ran a series of hypothetical scenarios. They included a Chinese anti-satellite attack, Russian interference with satellite navigation systems, an Iranian attack enabled by space capabilities, and — most provocatively — an unattributed nuclear detonation in low-Earth orbit that disabled satellites indiscriminately.
That last scenario is worth pausing on. A nuclear detonation in LEO would create an electromagnetic pulse and a radiation environment that would degrade or destroy satellites indiscriminately, including those of neutral and allied nations. If no one claimed responsibility, who would the United States retaliate against, and on what evidence?
The scenarios were designed to test response options across the spectrum of conflict. That experienced experts could not agree on appropriate responses underscores the gap the report is trying to highlight.
Space conflict does not stay in space. Satellites enable terrestrial military operations — precision strike, ISR, navigation, command and control. Degrading them is a way of degrading everything that depends on them, including the kind of operations now playing out across the Middle East.
Recent days have offered a reminder of how quickly conflicts can scale. CNN reported a second consecutive day of strikes between U.S. and Iranian forces across the region, with the IRGC firing ballistic missiles at U.S. bases in Jordan, Bahrain and Kuwait in response to American strikes inside Iran. Space-enabled targeting and missile warning are integral to both sides of that exchange.
The report’s scenario involving an Iranian attack enabled by space capabilities is not abstract. It is a near-term operational concern.
What deterrence requires
The report’s recommendations cluster around four themes: broader military response options, clearer rules of engagement, sustained funding growth, and allied cooperation.
Each is harder than it sounds. Broader response options require offensive capabilities the United States has historically been reluctant to discuss publicly, partly because doing so risks legitimizing similar capabilities in adversaries. Clearer rules of engagement require political consensus on red lines that successive administrations have preferred to keep ambiguous. Sustained funding requires Congress to break its habit of continuing resolutions and short-term appropriations. Allied cooperation requires partners to accept doctrines and risks they have not yet agreed to.
Coverage from SpaceNews on the current NDAA debate suggests Congress is still litigating basic organizational questions about how Space Force acquisition should be structured — an indication of how much institutional work remains before doctrine catches up to threat.
The deeper question
Galbreath’s closing argument is that military success in space will likely depend on establishing credible deterrence in orbit before conflict spreads to other domains. Deterrence requires the other side to believe two things: that you can respond, and that you will.
The first is a capability problem, addressable with money and engineering. The second is a credibility problem, which requires a framework — written, rehearsed, and signaled — for when and how the United States will act.
That framework does not exist yet. The Mitchell report’s central contribution is to say so plainly, and to argue that building it cannot wait until a crisis forces the decision under conditions no one would choose.
