Space Force’s New War Plan;
Musk, Palantir, Anduril Eye ‘Golden Dome’ Contracts; DOD’s Race for Small Reactors
Lauren C. Williams and Ben Watson / Defense One

(April 17, 2025) — Space warfare gets a formal definition thanks to a new strategic document. The U.S. Space Force released “Space Warfighting: A Framework for Planners,” which outlines possible offensive and defensive actions, respectively, such as destroying an adversary’s satellites or “escorting” satellites to protect them, Defense One’s Audrey Decker reports. The goal is to give officials a clear idea of how the Space Force, which has previously avoided publicly discussing offensive and defensive space operations, would approach conflict.

The document debuts “a common framework, common lexicon that we can use in our training and in our education programs, and really write down things that then guardians can argue about and debate and think about and use as a tool in their planning that really is about fighting in the domain,” said Lt. Gen. Shawn Bratton, Space Frce deputy chief of space operations, strategy, plans, programs, and requirements.

“It’s not just we’re going to fight in space and see who wins the space fight,” he said. “We’re going to fight in space to make sure the aircraft carrier doesn’t get struck and 5,000 sailors don’t go to the bottom of the ocean.” Get the full story here.

New: Elon Musk’s SpaceX along with Palantir and Anduril are alleged “frontrunners” for Trump’s ambitious, sprawling “Golden Dome” missile defense project, Reuters reported Wednesday citing a half dozen people familiar with the talks.

The gist: “The three companies met with top officials in the Trump administration and the Pentagon in recent weeks to pitch their plan, which would build and launch 400 to more than 1,000 satellites circling the globe to sense missiles and track their movement, sources said. A separate fleet of 200 attack satellites armed with missiles or lasers would then bring enemy missiles down,” at least in theory, according to Reuters.

Background: The idea for an elaborate, space-based missile defense system was first publicly floated in the early- to mid-1980s, but scientists and physicists at the time — including former Defense Secretary Ash Carter — collectively determined it was neither technologically nor financially feasible, as Carter himself explained to your D Brief-er back in 2019.

One thing is fairly certain about this “Golden Dome” project: It’s such a network of capabilities — at least as it’s been most recently conceived, insofar as the concepts have been explained publicly — that it has the potential to be an unprecedented cash cow for defense contractors.

Components could include solid rocket motors to power interceptors; it could include satellite buses for detection and tracking payloads; high-powered microwave counter-drone technology could be a component; computing and connectivity firms could require a slice of the financial pie, too, as well as synthetic aperture radar satellites. And that is hardly an exhaustive list. Indeed, more than 180 companies have already reached out to the Pentagon in the hopes of playing at least some part in the project.

It could also be a pay-to-play service available to whomever has the money, Reuters reports: “In an unusual twist, SpaceX has proposed setting up its role in Golden Dome as a ‘subscription service’ in which the government would pay for access to the technology, rather than own the system outright.” The wire service notes, “Such an arrangement would be unusual for such a large and critical defense program.”

In the meantime, skeptics are not hard to find. One source familiar with ongoing talks told Reuters, “It remains to be seen whether SpaceX and these tech companies will be able to pull any of this off. They’ve never had to deliver on an entire system that the nation will need to rely on for its defense.” Read on, here.

Related Reading:
“The Tactics Elon Musk Uses to Manage His ‘Legion’ of Babies — and Their Mothers,” via the Wall Street Journal reporting Tuesday.

\Welcome to this Thursday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Lauren C. Williams. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1961, the U.S. launched its Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, which failed three days later.