Space Force wants to weave AI into everyday operations

WASHINGTON — With artificial intelligence rising on the list of priorities at the Defense Department, the U.S. Space Force is laying out its own strategy to bring AI tools into the daily work of service members.

“My two top priorities for the United States Space Force is accelerating adoption of artificial intelligence and data capabilities, and my second is putting tools and capabilities into the hands of warfighters,” said Chandra Donelson, the service’s chief data and artificial intelligence officer. 

Speaking at the National Defense Industrial Association’s emerging technologies conference last week, Donelson called AI transformation critical for a force that heavily relies on data.

The Space Force in March published its Data and Artificial Intelligence FY 2025 Strategic Action Plan, which sets out a roadmap for becoming more data-driven and AI-enabled. Donelson said the plan will be updated annually and encouraged industry partners to weigh in. “If you see things in here that you can help me get after, call me, come meet with me,” she told attendees.

The service is rolling out initiatives, including a series of “AI Challenges” — hackathon-style competitions where guardians, as Space Force members are known, prototype solutions to operational and acquisition problems. 

The first generative AI challenge, held last year, drew more than 350 participants. The top three teams presented their work at the Spacepower Conference in Orlando. The competition is open to all branches of the military and government, but each team must be led by a guardian. This year’s challenge began registration in June and has already attracted more than 200 entrants, according to Donelson.

Each of the Space Force’s field commands — Space Training and Readiness Command, Space Operations Command, and Space Systems Command — has created boards to coordinate data and AI initiatives. “We’re meeting with those individuals and we talk to our field commands every day,” Donelson said. The aim, she stressed, is to synchronize efforts and ensure guardians at the operational level see tangible benefits from AI.

Pentagon ‘AI first’ approach 

These Space Force’s initiatives mirror a wider Department of Defense strategy to bring artificial intelligence into all aspects of military operations.

Emil Michael, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, told the NDIA conference that DoD must become an “AI first” enterprise. “That means every new thing we do, we have to think about how AI can be brought into it. Should AI be brought into it? How it should be brought into it, and how it will change the nature of what we do,” he said.

In July, the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) awarded contracts worth up to $200 million each to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI. The goal is to bring cutting-edge commercial AI into national security use cases, from logistics to simulation to war gaming.

For the Space Force, the applications are particularly urgent. AI is already used in the commercial and defense space sectors to track orbital objects, detect interference and spoofing against satellites, and process vast streams of intelligence data. Donelson said aligning Space Force’s data and AI strategies is about making those tools operationally relevant and accessible to guardians.

Gillian Bussey, the service’s deputy chief science officer, echoed the need for modernization. Many of the Space Force’s satellite ground systems, she said, still run on technology designed decades ago. “A lot of our space systems, and particularly in our ground control stations, are technologies from 20 or 30 years ago, they haven’t been modernized,” she said. Automating these legacy processes, she argued, would free operators to focus on higher-priority tasks.

The service is also struggling with information overload. “Our battle spaces are getting saturated with information, we’re overloaded with information,” Bussey said. “The important thing from a warfighting perspective is getting the information you need and getting it in a way that you can actually act on it.”

Michael put it more bluntly: the Pentagon sits on a trove of underexploited data. “We gather a lot of data, and that data is an asset. How do we use that asset, interpret it and use it to our advantage?” he asked.