At next week’s 25th National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo., Air University officials will introduce a new special area of emphasis (SAE) topic called “space as a contested environment” that is being added to US joint military education. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen established this SAE to highlight “the space domain’s emergence as an environment where US superiority has been and will continue to be challenged,” AU said in a release March 19. The Chairman uses SAEs to bring attention to areas of great importance to the joint military community. Air University officials, along with Air Force Space Command and the National Security Space Institute, spent the past year working with military educators and the Joint Staff to develop the space-focused SAE. The fact that space is a contested domain is not new news as senior Air Force officials have been warning of this for some time now.
A three-month continuing resolution that ended in December inflicted less pain on the Department of the Air Force than it had expected, as procurement and construction continue in the new year. The federal government operated under a stopgap spending measure that stretched from the beginning of the fiscal year on…