While this select article/ official statement (Policy) might seem old having come out in September of 2023 I still thought it relevant to post about. In hopes that the publication and this post will help enlighten my fellow classmates as it did me. The link below is to a official policy notification on the US Space Forces website. It was published by the Secretary of Air Force Public affairs and describes something of the upmost importance to the US Space Force… their mission statement. For those of you who are not familiar with a mission statement, in military units much like that of civilian corporations it is intended to provide direction for the organization. Direction that influence all other aspects: purpose, goals, policies, procedural operation, culture, definition of success and failure, etc.
Before I talk about why I found the mission statement interesting, what I like that the USSF did was that they leveraged their service members to decide the mission statement. Infact, the article particularly calls attention to this by saying they did not hire out resources or pool senior leaders; they leveraged their service members to decide and then used a smaller group to narrow it down. This act alone will help to ensure that the men and women who make up the USSF have some sort of “Buy in” to the mission that helps them internalize it.
So the actual mission statement is “secure our Nation’s interests in, from, and to space”. In my honest opinion, short sweet and too the point, which is yet another good thing the USSF did. This helps other remember it, rather than some long drawn out stringing of words that no one can recall without practice. Having started this class I have been paying special attention to words like “secure” when talking about space or things that go into space, so I found it interesting that they defined the act of securing into three different aspects in the form of “in”, “from”, and “to”. The article does a fairly good job describing the intricacies of each of the three. But I especially liked how they defined “secure” as “to contest, and when directed to control”. I took this to mean that it is both defensive and offensive. Our very first class for this course we discussed exactly that. How cybersecurity can be in some ways both defensive and offensive actions.
I would encourage the class to follow the link, read the short article/ policy announcement and then take five minutes to poke around the rest of the website and see if there is anything else of interest.
Respectfully Eric A.
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