No future for Space Futures Command, sources say

AUSA 2025 — Space Force’s much-touted plan to create a new Futures Command is on the chopping block, and as of yet there is no formal plan for any replacement organization, according to a handful of sources inside and outside of the Pentagon.

“Futures Command is dead,” one Pentagon official said bluntly.

Another Pentagon source noted that the “collapse of Army Futures Command” was a factor in the Air Force’s rethink about the approach to Space Futures Command, which was meant to assess service needs 10 to 15 years out. The Army on Oct. 2 deactivated Army Futures Command as well as Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), and plans to combine them into a new organization dubbed the Transformation and Training Command.

Asked about the status of Space Futures Command, a Space Force spokesperson told Breaking Defense on Oct. 3 that the Department of the Air Force “is still exploring options and has not made an official decision to stand up Space Futures Command.”

Senior Space Force officials had signaled a Space Futures Command was coming for more than a year, after none other than Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman in February 2024 announced it was in works. At the time he said the Space Force was creating a task force to work out the details and expressing hope that it could begin operations by early 2025.

Space Futures Command, he said, would look holistically at future requirements for “the objective force” — the desired architecture of the Space Force including personnel, kit and operational concepts — taking into account things like “the training infrastructure, the operators, the manpower requirements.”

A month later, the head of that task force, Lt. Gen. Shawn Bratton, deputy chief of space operations, strategy, plans, programs and requirements, explained that Futures Command would be made up of two new subordinate centers — a Concepts and Technologies Center and a Wargaming Center — as well as the existing Space Warfighting and Analysis Center (SWAC).

Those plans shifted, however, with the incoming Trump administration.

In February, several Space Force officials told Breaking Defense that while former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall had signed off on the creation of Space Futures Command and named Maj. Gen. Dennis Bythewood as its head, activation of the command had been halted pending a re-look at the concept of “great power competition” with China.

Bythewood was nominated on Sept. 29 to pin on a third star and command Space Forces Space, the service’s component command providing operational forces to US Space Command.

At a Sept. 22 press conference during the annual Air and Space Forces Association (AFA) conference, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink was peppered with questions about whether previously launched “re-optimization” plans related to great power competition, including Futures Command, were going to move forward. In response, he said he did not believe in making “organizational changes” early into a new managerial job.

“I’ve been in job about four, four-and-a-half months. I wanted to make sure that I had time. … I know we’re getting close to making a number of those decisions, and so in the next couple of months, we’ll be rolling with them,” Meink said.

Should Space Futures Command officially perish, several sources inside and outside the Pentagon told Breaking Defense there has been internal discussion of a new structure to replace it, either a field command or a direct reporting unit, that would oversee SWAC.

SWAC, created in 2020, is responsible for developing future mission area “force designs” — in other words, figuring out how best to configure and acquire satellite and ground-system architectures for each mission, such as satellite communications and missile warning/tracking to meet needs over the next five to 10 years.

The new organization, tentatively dubbed Innovation and Simulation, would in essence be a super-SWAC, the two Pentagon sources said. It would include SWAC, but also, as one industry source put it, some other small organizational “cats and dogs” included.

Further, two sources said there is already hallway chatter that the new organization could be headed by Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, currently Air Force acting assistant secretary for space acquisition and innovation. Purdy is slated to leave his acting position at the latest in January to step back to wearing one hat as military deputy to the office — earlier if the Air Force can put in place a civilian deputy to take over before then, he told reporters at AFA on Sept. 24.

The discussions about a replacement command structure, however, remain in early stages, the sources all stressed and nothing has yet been finalized.

This is “not a good year to expand commands/bureaucracy in the Pentagon,” one industry source noted. “I would say 50/50 if the Space Force moves forward with something or not.”

Of course, even if the Air Force decides to torpedo Space Futures Command, it is always possible that higher ups in the Defense Department could reverse course — a phenomena that has manifested across government agencies since the beginning of the new administration.