The U.S. not only wants to dominate the Western Hemisphere, but also cislunar space, that vast region of space between geosynchronous orbit and the Moon itself, or even beyond. Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Shawn Bratton complained a few days ago that the Space Force’s budget, set at $26 billion for 2026 but also including about $15 billion more from Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill of last year, is too small to do that.
The service is in the midst of distilling its future operating needs into an “objective force” that lays out what platforms, support structures, and manpower will be required to maintain space superiority between now and 2040, Air & Space Forces Magazine reported on Jan. 22. Bratton said, during a Jan. 21 event at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C., a plan for cislunar operations needs to be part of that discussion.
“We’re thinking about that a little bit, but we should be thinking about it a lot right now,” he said. “Some of that is capacity; we’re small, and we’re focused on first things first. … But we should be thinking about cislunar.”
ASF notes that the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies argued in a 2024 report, that cislunar space is akin to the first island chain in the Pacific—strategically relevant to securing space for all. “DOD must establish an infrastructure for the cislunar regime, extending the types of services and capabilities currently in operation closer to Earth, such as space domain awareness, high-bandwidth communications, and cislunar navigation technologies,” the report argued.
The ASF report doesn’t say so, but the first island chain analogy implies containment of space activities of other countries, particularly China, but also Russia, too. So much for the principle that space is the domain of all mankind.
