Resolute Space exercise focuses Guardians on countering ‘realistic’ threats to satellites

WASHINGTON — The US Space Force’s largest exercise to date, called Resolute Space 2025, is focusing on “orbital warfare,” and includes live jamming of satellite systems to help Guardians better understand how to fight through enemy attacks, according to service officials.

“We do have space electromagnetic warfare, as well as cyber warfare and orbital warfare, aggressors that are participating in live, virtual and constructive environments that will present challenging scenarios for the Blue Forces to fight through a contested environment throughout the scenario,” Lt. Col. Shawn Green, commander of the Space Force’s 527 Space Aggressor Squadron, told reporters on Tuesday.

“[O]ur goal is to create a relevant, realistic, informed threat replication for Blue to fight through so that we can increase the probability of success in war,” he explained. “[W]hat that looks like is we have a mission planning cell that’s looking at the synchronization of those fires across orbital warfare, cyber warfare and electromagnetic warfare, to have a series of moves and countermoves for our Blue Forces to fight through.”

Resolute Space, which began on July 8, is integrated with a much larger Air Force “Department Level Exercise (DLE)” aimed at exercising conflict scenarios in the Pacific region, which involves four other training events. Some 700 Guardians are participating, based at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii; Peterson, Schriever, and Buckley Space Force Bases; and other areas in the Indo-Pacific theater, according to a Space Force press release.

Col. Jay Steingold, deputy commander of US Space Forces Indo-Pacific and director of the exercise, noted during the Tuesday briefing that Guardians are using operational satellites in the exercise, as well as commercial space assets.

“We have satellites that we are able to utilize to provide training for our US Space Force Guardians, whether that be an understanding how they how they actually, quote, unquote, fly, or in terms of payload capacities and capabilities and just general training on orbit. There are things that we will do from a military perspective; of course, we retain the nation’s secrets from an orbital warfare perspective, but they’re there for our Guardians to train on,” he said.

Steingold stressed that another key goal of Resolute Space is to educate its partners in the Air Force, the Joint Force and allies about the importance of space capabilities across the board — from communications to navigation to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to targeting.

That includes, chimed in Green, the negative effects of losing those capabilities on the ability of the Joint Force to prevail in a fight.

“If the space domain feels pain, the rest of the Joint Force will likely feel that pain as well,” he said.