EXCLUSIVE – Gen. Saltzman & Jennifer Saltzman: The Partnership Behind the Space Force
When we talk about how a military service gets built, we usually reach for the language of hardware and budgets. Satellites and sensors. Doctrine and org charts. The blueprint of a warfighting force. But sit with Chief of Space Operations General Chance Saltzman and his wife Jennifer for an hour, in the residence where the […]
Nothing Gets Off the Ground Without This Unit – SYD 80
This podcast with Col. Hiserote was recorded prior to the anomaly Blue Origin’s New Glenn vehicle experienced on the 28th of May. The National Security Space Launch program is working closely with their Blue Origin partners to help identify the root cause, implement corrective actions, and continue NSSL certification plan efforts. The satellite had been built. It […]
Before the Conflict, There Has to Be a Rehearsal – Inside SYD 81
In the early days of Red Flag, when the U.S. Air Force finally started training its pilots against a realistic adversary rather than against padded assumptions, something uncomfortable became clear. The first time a pilot faced a thinking enemy, a disorienting number of them lost. Not in actual combat. In practice. That was the entire […]
When Acquisition Becomes a Warfighting Function – Inside SYD 88
For most of the Space Force’s short life, the people who built its capabilities and the people who operated them lived in different organizational worlds. Requirements arrived over a fence. Timelines stretched. By the time a capability was delivered, the threat had sometimes already moved. The system was not designed for speed. It was designed […]
From Longevity to Combat Resilience: The Space Force’s Strategic ShiftÂ
At the 30th Anniversary of the 328th Weapons Squadron, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman outlined a fundamental transformation underway in the U.S. military, one driven by a simple realization: the space domain is no longer benign. When the Space Force was established, it inherited systems designed in the 1990s for longevity, not conflict. The guiding philosophy was efficiency. Build […]
Small Force, Big Mission: Jennifer Saltzman on the People Behind the Space Force
There are only about 10,000 Guardians in the United States Space Force. That’s the entire service. You could fit them all inside a mid-sized college campus. And yet the domain they operate in underpins every GPS navigation route, every satellite weather forecast, every financial transaction, every phone call made today. The Space Force is simultaneously […]
Thirty Years of Building Space Warfighters: Inside the 328th Weapons Squadron
Most people picture a weapons school as the place that takes the best operator of a single machine and makes that operator even better. The fighter community works that way: one squadron trains F-16 pilots, another trains F-35 pilots, and the platform defines the patch. The space weapons school was built to do something harder. […]
Col. Alison Gonzalez: Why the Space Force Created a Dedicated Education Command
Training tells you how to do the job. It doesn’t tell you why the job exists. For most of military history, that distinction didn’t matter much. The mission was clear, the enemy was visible, and the stakes were obvious. But space is different. It’s invisible, contested, and deeply misunderstood, even inside the government agencies that […]
Doubling the Space Force Isn’t a Budget Argument. It’s a War-Fighting Imperative.
When Congress hears “the Space Force needs to double in size,” most assume it’s a budget argument. A bigger number, a bigger ask. But that framing misses the point almost entirely. The case Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John Bentivegna has been making, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, and in this conversation […]
What Congress Knows About China’s Space Threat, and What the Rest of Us Don’t
There is a moment in the conversation that stops you cold. Randy Schriver, who spent years inside the Pentagon tracking China’s military modernization, describes the day he returned to government, got his clearances back, and walked into his first intelligence briefing after a few years away. “My mind exploded,” he says. “I literally thought, how […]
