What should be the vision of the next and second U.S. Space Force Chief of Space Operations be for the future of the U.S. military’s newest service branch? U.S. senators on the Senate Armed Services Committee this week asked just that of the nominee for the job, Lt. Gen. Chance “Salty” Saltzman. The only recent and comparable American experience is that of General Hoyt Vandenberg, the second Air Force Chief of Staff since that service branch was formed out of the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1947. Vandenberg’s vision for the U.S. Air Force endures to this day. To discuss the opportunities and the challenges, Laura Winter is joined by M.V. “Coyote” Smith and Brent Ziarnick, both of whom are associate professors of space power at the Air Command and Staff College, at Maxwell Air Force Base; Mir Sadat who is a nonresident senior fellow in the Forward Defense practice of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security; and Stephen Melvin, who has been involved military space operations in a variety of roles inside and outside of the government for years.
