What has matured so far is the command’s understanding of how the armed forces should work together to use and defend space assets. The Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Space Force each have a component at SPACECOM that are experts in how the services rely on space, and the Air Force is exploring its options as well. “This traditional way of looking at warfare, where you have these phases that you incrementally ratchet up through and you finally get to, ‘Hey, bullets are flying now,’ that’s really not the way it’s going to play out,” Leonard said. “The timing of that is going to be different across the domains and the dimensions of the conflict or of the competition that you’re in.” A scuffle in space could lead to further aggression on Earth, he added: “We might need to go first in space, we might need to be able to survive and take a punch in space.” Rather than rely on traditional bombing and ground combat campaigns, they’re drawing up new concepts of how to strategically “set the battlespace” to compete for global influence with countries like Russia and China. In their thinking, space and cyber forces should partner with “gray forces,” like undersea or special operations troops, for targeted offense and defense, Leonard said. Successful operations could lead to smaller-scale conflict that stays more in the digital realm than the physical.