US-Australian alliance secures a decisive edge in space

Visiting Australia to underscore growing space cooperation with a key ally, Lt. Gen. Gregory Gagnon, commander of the U.S. Space Force Combat Forces Command, issued a stark warning that space has become a contested warfighting domain and said allied integration is essential to deterrence and, if necessary, victory.

“We’re at another dynamic point in the history of warfare where the air is no longer the high ground. Space is the high ground,” Gagnon stated. He said that by combining capabilities and geographic advantages, the United States and Australia can maintain secure communications over vast distances and “see where the adversary is,” a foundation of modern allied operations.

Gagnon cast China’s rapid orbital buildup as the most dramatic shift in the strategic environment. He pointed to an expansion from a few dozen Chinese satellites in 2013 to roughly 1,400 today, with about half focused on remote sensing across the Indo-Pacific. He said the People’s Liberation Army uses that constellation to track U.S. and allied forces in real time and feed data to long-range missile systems. “They are not moving out slowly. They are moving out like a world-class sprinter, and they are making gains,” he said, adding that the PLA’s space force is now roughly three times the size of America’s.

He also highlighted what he described as aggressive counter-space developments by both China and Russia. Beijing has fielded and tested weapons designed to disable or destroy satellites, including ground-based missiles first demonstrated in 2007 and lasers intended to blind orbital sensors, he said. Moscow, meanwhile, has launched prototype systems and maneuvered spacecraft into threatening proximity to U.S. assets, according to Gagnon. “They have built the weapons to attack us in space. They have practiced using those weapons to attack us in space,” he noted. “They didn’t do that just because they had nothing else to do.”

Against that backdrop, Gagnon said deterrence cannot rely on passive defenses alone. He framed space control as essential to prosperity and multi-domain operations and called for deeper allied cooperation led by robust Space Domain Awareness. Australia’s location in the Southern Hemisphere, he said, offers a unique vantage for tracking activity in both low Earth orbit and the geostationary belt. “Here in Australia, there is a high-powered telescope that is used to sense what’s in space, and it’s not used to look at stars. It’s used to look at satellites,” Gagnon remarked.

He described the United States, United Kingdom and Australia as enjoying a geographic spread that enables near-continuous surveillance of on-orbit activity. “Part of the great strength of the United States Space Force is our partnership with Great Britain and Australia, because between the three of us, it gives us a geographic advantage that our adversaries do not enjoy,” he explained.

Gagnon said the allies are tightening technical and operational ties through shared architectures and missions, including joint missile warning operations, the Wideband Global SATCOM system and discussions on proliferated low Earth orbit constellations. Interoperability, he added, extends to personnel exchanges, with Australian, Canadian and British officers embedded inside U.S. Space Force units; he pointed to the service’s combat forces operations officer being a Canadian general as an example of that integration.

If conflict erupts, he said, the alliance must be prepared to dismantle an adversary’s space-enabled “kill web” to protect forces and preserve freedom of action. He closed by stressing collective strength and deterrence through unity. “We are stronger together,” Gagnon concluded. “One thing that gives strength is our ability to collectively defend ourselves, to expand those countries that are willing to defend freedom and protect their homelands together.”