Beyond Government Satellites: How the U.S. Space Force Is Building a Hybrid Military Space Architecture for Great Power Competition

Introduction: From Space Support to Space Warfighting Space has undergone one of the most profound strategic transformations of the twenty-first century. Once viewed primarily as an enabling domain that provided communications, navigation, weather forecasting, and intelligence support for terrestrial military operations, space has become an active warfighting environment where military superiority increasingly depends on resilient…