Space Intelligence: The Foundation of Space Superiority

Sun Tzu observed that “if you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.” That principle has held for all domains humans have entered: land, sea, air, and now space. Survival and advantage have always depended on a comprehensive understanding of environment and adversary together, not either in isolation.

The stakes of getting this wrong in space are recognized and codified at the national level. Executive Order 14369, Section 2(b)(ii), directs that U.S. space policy will focus on “ensuring the ability to detect, characterize, and counter threats to United States space interests from very low-Earth orbit and through cislunar space, including any placement of nuclear weapons in space.” That is a mandate to know the environment and know the adversary across an enormously expanded battle space, one where surprise is costly and awareness is the precondition for everything else.

Space intelligence is that comprehensive understanding of the environment, and it includes both battlespace awareness and space domain awareness (SDA). Space intelligence is the modern expression of the same instinct that allowed humans to expand across every prior domain. As with land, sea, and air, moving into the non-native domain of space reveals unfamiliar types and sources of information to suddenly be essential for understanding what is out there, how it behaves, and who intends what with it. China’s continued growth in space capabilities, and the continued development of counterspace capabilities by both China and Russia, highlight the need for comprehensive space intelligence capabilities for the United States and its allies.

The U.S. Space Force Future Operating Environment 2040 study frames having the right intelligence capabilities, or battlespace awareness in a degraded environment, as the top challenge to enabling space superiority. Without the intelligence sources to provide that awareness, space superiority—the freedom to operate in space while denying the same to an adversary—has no foundation for the conduct of operations. Effective implementation of the executive order through its space security strategy will also be highly dependent on intelligence.

Intelligence informs and provides decision advantage for executives in policy, acquisition, and operations. For example, to support negotiations between the executive branch and Congress in early 2019, the Defense Intelligence Agency produced Challenges to Security in Space. This unclassified report was used to highlight the growing threats to space from our adversaries, mainly China and Russia. This document supplemented classified discussions at an unclassified level, making foreign space threat information available to a broader body of decisionmakers in Congress who would be central to approval of the National Defense Authorization Act that stood up the Space Force. The report likewise informed our allies and the public. Additionally, in recent years, commercial SDA capabilities have proven to provide valuable insight on space activities. These have been used by government leaders to monitor adversary activities and call out bad behavior on orbit. Last December at Spacepower 2025, Chief Master Sergeant Ron Lerch, senior enlisted advisor to the deputy chief of space operations for intelligence, highlighted the value of commercial SDA capabilities for monitoring capabilities and activities, including the recent launch of Chinese Shiyan-24 satellites and Russian Mozhayets into a medium Earth orbit.

Intelligence is also essential for acquisition executives who are developing space capabilities that will ensure that the United States maintains its space superiority and can persevere through multiple phases of conflict. Understanding adversary capabilities, vulnerabilities, and employment doctrine is foundational to developing resilient U.S. capabilities. This intelligence is not limited to capabilities the United States develops for space but also extends to those capabilities that rely on space, such as GPS.

Operationally, intelligence informs all phases of the targeting cycle, from initial target development and intelligence preparation of the environment, to informing weaponeering options and engagement, to post-operation battle damage assessment. Characterizing a space object’s capabilities, developing their patterns of life, and understanding adversary order of battle are essential intelligence functions that inform the entire targeting cycle. Having a comprehensive intelligence baseline is also necessary for detecting meaningful changes in adversary activities that may be indications of impending actions in space or other domains. These intelligence capabilities will be as important for space superiority as they are for all other domains of warfare.

In many ways, the space domain resembles other domains of warfare, but it also has unique qualities, including the sheer volume of the battle space and the speed of space objects. The recent proliferation of space objects by U.S. adversaries and demonstrations of their ability to maneuver rapidly in space—for example, China’s 2022 SJ-21 movement of BeiDou-2—are challenges to the United States’ ability to maintain awareness of the space domain. Persistence and speed of collection, along with the ability to make sense of multiple data sources to provide rapid response options, will be essential to space superiority. Data security and shared data standards across the U.S. government, industry, and international partners are equally necessary, particularly as machine-to-machine exchange and AI-enabled processing become the norm.

Maintaining a comprehensive, dynamically updated intelligence baseline is essential to move from a reactive to responsive to predictive posture, which will be a necessity to keep up with the speed of mission in the space domain. The goal is not just detecting threats after the fact but anticipating them before they materialize. This will mean leveraging all sources of data that impact the domain, not only data collected from space. That information could include nontraditional sources, such as indications of radio frequency or cyber interference from industry owner-operators, as well as financial and economic data indicating where adversaries are investing in technologies now and in the future.

Speaking at the Satellite 2020 conference, shortly after the Space Force was established, General DT Thompson, then the service’s first vice chief of space operations, argued that the Space Force fundamentally requires a focused, robust space intelligence pipeline to function as a true war fighting domain. Intelligence is not a supporting function to space superiority. It is the “know the enemy” Sun Tzu described, applied to the newest domain. It is a top challenge to enabling space superiority and the precondition Executive Order 14369 assumes when it directs detection and characterization across the full extent of near-Earth through cislunar space.

John F. Huth is a career intelligence officer with over four decades of military, civil service, and industry experience in space and intelligence collection and analysis.