This story was updated March 19. A previous version said the wargame would include 25 commercial firms. A U.S. Space Command spokesperson in an update said about 50 commercial firms are expected to participate. .
WASHINGTON — U.S. Space Command officials and representatives from nearly 50 commercial space companies are scheduled to participate in a classified wargame next week in Colorado Springs.
“We will look at hard problems, threats that we face, how we protect and defend the domain in partnership with commercial entities,” Maj. Gen. Samuel Keener, director of U.S. Space Command’s Joint Forces Development and Training, said March 18 at a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies event.
The exercise, scheduled for March 23 at The Aerospace Corporation, is the first in a planned series of quarterly wargames in 2026 that will include commercial participants. Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of U.S. Space Command, revealed the initiative in January as part of a broader effort to bring industry more directly into classified planning.
Keener said the decision to classify the wargame will allow for a level of intelligence sharing that has not previously been extended to commercial partners. “We’ll be able to share things with them that ordinarily we haven’t,” he said. “It’s a tremendous opportunity for us and for our commercial partners.”
The move reflects a changing space environment in which military and commercial systems are increasingly intertwined. High-end national security capabilities such as missile warning and protected communications have historically been government-owned and tightly controlled. Today, however, the architecture the military relies on includes commercially operated communications constellations, remote sensing networks, data transport layers and elements of space domain awareness.
In a crisis, those systems would be used alongside government assets and could be targeted in the same way. From a planning standpoint, excluding the companies that build and operate them risks producing an incomplete view of how a conflict in space would unfold.
The military has traditionally limited access to sensitive operational concepts to avoid exposing vulnerabilities or tactics. Officials now acknowledge that restricting that access can hinder realistic planning when key capabilities sit outside government control.
The shift also reflects lessons from recent conflicts, where commercial space services such as satellite communications and imagery have played a visible operational role. Those experiences have underscored that commercial providers are not just suppliers but participants in the space domain during conflict.
The March exercise will focus on the threat of weapons of mass destruction in space, a scenario that planners say requires coordination across government and industry.
A weapon of mass destruction in space typically refers to a nuclear device detonated in orbit. Defense officials are concerned about a high-altitude nuclear explosion that could generate radiation and electromagnetic effects capable of disabling or destroying large numbers of satellites across wide areas of low Earth orbit.
Unlike conventional anti-satellite weapons that target individual spacecraft, such an event would be indiscriminate. It could affect civilian, commercial and military satellites from multiple countries at once, disrupting communications, navigation, weather forecasting and military command-and-control systems.
Keener said the broader goal of the wargame series is to more closely align military and commercial planning. The exercises, he said, will help Space Command “better understand commercial challenges, requirements, and how we can better work together.”
Sandra Erwin writes about military space programs, policy, technology and the industry that supports this sector. She has covered the military, the Pentagon, Congress and the defense industry for nearly two decades as editor of NDIA’s National Defense…
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