WASHINGTON — US troops need to prepare for combat not only in Earth’s orbit but around the moon, Donald Trump’s top military adviser said on Wednesday, looking ahead to a new frontier in warfare after the country revealed for the first time that it has deployed weapons in space.Gen Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told service members and industry figures at the Air, Space and Cyber Conference outside Washington that the US military should adapt now so it “is prepared to fight, endure and win … from the seabed to cislunar space”.”Our task, my friends, is to adapt right now, so the Joint Force is prepared to fight, endure and win in global contested environments, from the seabed to cislunar space,” Caine said at the Air, Space and Cyber Conference in the US state of Maryland.Reiterating that “today’s modern battlefield operates from the seabed to cislunar space,” Caine said future conflicts will dismantle long-held assumptions of uncontested logistics, secure sanctuary areas, or safe resupply routes. He warned that frontline formations must assume they will be “hunted by autonomous systems, jammed across the spectrum and tracked in real time.””In the future fight, advantage will go to the side who can see first, who can understand first, decide first and act first,” he said, urging the joint force to deliver massed lethality using an agile, optimized “high-low mix of combat capabilities.”The Space Force, the newest military service, which was created by Trump in 2019, is preparing to fight in space and around the moon because “humanity is advancing deeper into space – the Space Force’s job is to help be prepared to defend US interests”, Lt Gen Gregory Gagnon, head of the force’s Combat Forces Command, told reporters separately.The announcement that the US military is ready to fight in the area between high Earth orbit and the moon itself comes days after air force secretary Troy Meink revealed at the same conference that the US has fielded “on-orbit space control weapons”.The announcement marked the first formal public acknowledgment of armed US platforms in orbit amid intensifying orbital competition with China and Russia and the development of the “Golden Dome” missile defense network.The spate of announcements about space weaponry from military officials over recent days flies in the face of long-standing conventions and international understandings that have held outer space as only to be used for peaceful purposes and remain non-militarized.China denounced the US deployment, saying that Beijing opposes turning outer space into a “war zone” and urging Washington to halt its orbital military buildup.While the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits placing nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction in orbit, it does not explicitly ban conventional weapons in spaceCaine identified digital autonomy as the primary catalyst transforming modern combat dynamics, outpacing all other military technologies.”No factor is accelerating change as fast as artificial intelligence and advancing cyber capabilities,” he said, adding “AI is here now, and it’s already changing the way militaries see, sense, decide and act.”To illustrate how algorithmic integration is redefining military operations, he highlighted an incident in June near the coast of Oman, where an autonomous vessel guided by AI recovered two US soldiers after their Apache attack helicopter went down.”Taken together, these examples from the Strait of Hormuz to the front lines in Ukraine show how quickly technology is changing the character of war,” he said.
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