COLORADO SPRINGS, July 14 — The United States Space Force, America’s newest military service born from a December 2019 reorganisation, operates the primary global system for tracking what moves in Earth orbit. That system, the Space Surveillance Network, is a worldwide web of radar and optical sensors. It can detect objects as small as 10 centimetres in low Earth orbit and roughly one metre in the much higher geosynchronous belt.
The calculus of space security starts with knowing what is up there, and the SSN is the foundation of that awareness. As of 2024, the network tracks approximately 47,000 objects.
Of those, about 36,500 are classified as debris — the non-functional wreckage of past launches, collisions, and breakups. The strategic problem is that the SSN cannot track the millions of smaller debris fragments that still pack enough kinetic energy to catastrophically destroy an operational satellite. A fleck of paint travelling at orbital velocity can punch through a spacecraft hull.
The broader stakes for American military and commercial satellites are obvious: the environment is getting more congested, and the blind spots are dangerous.
Warnings and the Gap in Coverage
The 18th Space Defense Squadron, based at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, is the unit responsible for issuing conjunction warnings. When the SSN predicts two tracked objects will pass close to one another, the squadron alerts satellite operators so they can manoeuvre. This is a routine but critical function.
What this signals to the strategic community is that the USSF is acutely aware of the gap between what it can see and what it cannot. The service is developing new sensors to close that gap.
The Space Fence, located on Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific, uses S-band radar specifically designed to detect smaller objects than the current network can reliably spot. It represents a generational upgrade in space domain awareness. For the geopolitical chessboard, this is not merely a technical improvement.
It is a hedge against the growing risk that a debris collision — whether accidental or deliberately induced — could degrade U.S. reconnaissance, navigation, and communications at a moment of crisis.
International Coordination
The United States does not operate in a vacuum on this front. International cooperation on space debris runs through the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, or IADC, which was founded in 1993. The IADC brings together space agencies from major spacefaring nations to share data and coordinate mitigation guidelines.
For the USSF, this diplomatic track complements its military mission. Strategically, the calculus is that no single nation can solve the debris problem alone, and the cost of inaction — the potential loss of access to key orbits — is shared by all.
What to watch next is how quickly the Space Fence comes fully online and whether the SSN’s tracking catalogue expands to cover more of the small debris that currently falls below the detection threshold. The USSF’s ability to protect American interests in space will depend on closing that gap. The broader stakes, as the service sees them, are about preserving the orbital domain as a usable environment for the United States and its allies.
On the geopolitical chessboard, space is no longer a sanctuary — it is a contested theatre, and the Space Force is building the awareness to fight in it.
