Space Force creates SF/S9 to take on future force planning
The U.S. Space Force is establishing a new headquarters staff organization intended to handle the long-range planning and force-design work once expected to sit within a separate Space Futures Command. According to a March 31 memo cited in the supplied source text, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman has signed off on creation of the SF/S9 Force Design and Analysis staff group, with an April 21 start date.
The move is significant because it gives the service a formal mechanism for coordinating future operating concepts, doctrine, science-and-technology priorities and long-horizon capability design without standing up the previously planned command structure.
What SF/S9 is supposed to do
The memo says SF/S9 will support Saltzman in his statutory role as “Force Design Architect for Space for the Armed Forces.” Its listed responsibilities include forecasting the future operating environment, developing and validating operational concepts and doctrine, maintaining force design, and prioritizing science and technology efforts.
One of its most important functions will be developing the Space Force’s rolling “Objective Force” plan, which sets force-structure and capability requirements 15 years into the future. That places SF/S9 at the center of how the service translates strategic assumptions into concrete investment and organizational choices.
Why this matters institutionally
The Space Force is still a young military service, and one of its recurring challenges has been how to build a planning apparatus that is forward-looking enough to keep pace with rapid changes in military space operations. The source text makes clear that SF/S9 is intended to provide that connective tissue.
Rather than replacing existing organizations, the new office will coordinate them. The memo says it will work across bodies including the Space Warfighting and Analysis Center, the Space Security and Defense Program, Task Force Future personnel, Space Delta 10 for doctrine and wargaming, part of Space Systems Command’s System Delta 89 innovation and prototyping unit, the current SF/S9 Analysis Directorate and the Chief Science Officer.
That coordination role suggests the service is trying to centralize strategic design without dismantling the specialist organizations already doing pieces of the work.
A substitute for Futures Command
The source text explicitly describes SF/S9 as effectively taking the place of the previously planned Space Futures Command. That is notable because creating a full new command can be politically and bureaucratically difficult. Building a headquarters staff group may offer a faster, more administratively practical route while still concentrating responsibility for future-force planning.
Clayton Swope of the Center for Strategic and International Studies is quoted in the source as saying the functions of the proposed command will now sit within S9 and arguing there is a critical need for out-of-the-box thinking in military space power. That assessment captures the central rationale for the change: the service wants a home for strategy and force design that is distinct from day-to-day operations and acquisition pressures.
The broader strategic context
Space has become a more contested military domain, with growing concern about resilience, space control, missile warning, commercial integration and the vulnerability of orbital systems. A service built to operate in that environment needs an internal mechanism to test concepts, examine future threats and define what its force should look like well before hardware is procured.
SF/S9 is being built to fill that role. The supplied source text does not provide budget details or final Air Force approval status beyond noting that the broader change had not yet been approved by the Department of the Air Force. That means the administrative story is not fully closed. But the memo itself shows the direction Saltzman wants to take.
What to watch next
The near-term question is how much authority and resourcing SF/S9 will actually receive once established. Planning offices matter only to the extent that their analysis shapes budgets, doctrine and acquisition priorities. The second question is whether this staff-group model proves durable or becomes a stepping stone toward a larger command later.
For now, the Space Force has chosen an organizationally modest but strategically important step: create a headquarters node with explicit responsibility for designing the future force, and do it quickly enough to influence the service’s next generation of decisions.
This article is based on reporting by Breaking Defense. Read the original article.
