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.
Suicide rates in the Air Force are starting to drop after back-to-back years of exceptionally high rates as the department enacts new policies to address the problem. There were more than 100 suicides in the Air Force in both 2019 and 2020, causing leaders to order a “tactical pause” to…