When Gen. Chance Saltzman described the Space Force's combat role last week, he used a word that used to mean something quieter. "Creating disruption for an adversary" — degrading or denying an opponent's use of space-enabled communications, navigation, and surveillance, without blowing up any satellites — is how the nation's newest military service explained its contribution to recent operations in Venezuela, Nigeria, and Iran. What Saltzman was describing, in deliberately restrained language, was electronic warfare. From space. In anger.
The public accounting of Space Force's operational role has historically tracked published doctrine: protect assets, provide data, support the fight. What Saltzman did at the Space Force Association's Interspace Defense Forum last week was describe something more central. Space Force units are sitting at the center of recent U.S. military campaigns, including operations under U.S. Central Command, with personnel positioned at Tampa, Florida and Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, according to SpaceNews. That's not a support function. That's a kill-chain seat.
The Iran strikes in late February made the operational details unavoidable. Gen. Dan Caine, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, said U.S. Space Command and U.S. Cyber Command were the first movers in layering non-kinetic effects — continuously disrupting, disorienting, and blinding Iran's ability to see, communicate, and respond, according to SpaceNews. The characterization of both commands as first movers in that conflict is a significant public acknowledgment of capabilities that typically stay classified.
Operation Epic Fury — the opening phase of the strikes — gives the abstract a price tag. The operation is currently estimated to cost $891 million per day, according to SatNews. More than 100 aircraft launched in a synchronized wave, striking more than 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours. The figure is jarring not because $891M is unreasonable for a major military operation — it's roughly what the U.S. spent in the opening days of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, adjusted for inflation — but because it reflects how heavily the opening phase depended on coordination across domains before a single aircraft crossed into Iranian airspace.
The technical architecture behind that coordination is now partially visible. When Iran launched retaliatory ballistic missiles against U.S. installations across the Middle East, the 5th Space Warning Squadron out of Buckley Space Force Base, Colorado became the frontline of defense. The squadron uses the Joint Tactical Ground Station (JTAGS), monitoring Overhead Persistent Infrared (OPIR) satellites to detect heat signatures within milliseconds of ignition, SatNews reported. The early warning data fed directly into the intercept chain. Without it, the Patriots and Iron Domes of the region would have been shooting blind.
The electronic warfare piece is where Space Force gets interesting. Lt. Gen. Gregory Gagnon, deputy commander of U.S. Space Command, used an unglamorous analogy to explain why space effects are baked into every operation: "If you love cookies and you love brownies, we are actually the flour," he said at an Air & Space Forces Association event. "You don't see us, but you need us." Quoted by Air & Space Forces Magazine. The flour metaphor is honest about the service's self-image — essential but invisible — and about why the public doesn't generally see Space Force in the operational footage.
The specific hardware behind that flour is now being described in unclassified settings. Mission Delta 3, the Space Force unit responsible for electronic warfare, has several known systems at its disposal, including the Remote Modular Terminal — a small, deployable jammer developed by the Space Rapid Capabilities Office, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine. The unit is headquartered at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado and has eight subordinate squadrons, per the official Space Force fact sheet. Space Force is planning to field 11 initial Remote Modular Terminal systems, with funding in place for 160 and an expected total requirement of 200, Task & Purpose reported. Eleven terminals deployed, 200 planned. The gap between current inventory and stated requirement tells you something about where the capability is on the deployment curve.
The 90 percent figure is the one worth sitting with. Ballistic missile effectiveness was reduced by 90 percent due to Space Force early warning and localized electronic warfare, SatNews reported. The number comes from an operation, not a test. Nine out of ten incoming missiles either missed, hit wrong coordinates, or failed to function as designed because of what Guardians did from Colorado and from orbit. Whether that reduction reflects degraded guidance, jammed communications, spoofed targeting data, or some combination is not specified in the available reporting — and the U.S. government is not going to say. The ambiguity is the point.
What is clear is that the Space Force of the recruitment posters — satellite operators, launch crews, the clean end of aerospace — is only part of the institution that exists now. The part that matters operationally is the part that operates below the threshold of public attention and well below the threshold of physical destruction. The satellites are still up there. The electronics that talk to them are not working as designed. That's the disruption. It's non-kinetic, deniable by design, and according to Saltzman's description, now routine.
The 200 Remote Modular Terminals the service says it needs are the budget line that explains what "routine" costs. Eleven are deployed. The rest are a procurement story with a defined endpoint and a number attached — the kind of story that tends to get told in budget hearings and defense contractor earnings calls, not in public forums where the chief of space operations chooses his words carefully.
