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Before a single bomb fell on February 28, 2026, U.S. Space Force Guardians were already fighting. Working from ground-based electronic warfare terminals, they blinded Iranian radar networks, severed satellite communication links used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and created what the service calls "silence zones" — electromagnetic dead air that allowed B-2 stealth bombers to fly undetected into Iranian airspace. Iran couldn't see the attack coming, couldn't coordinate a response, and couldn't communicate across much of its military network for the hours that mattered most. That's what "spectrum dominance" means in practice — and Lt. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon, commander of U.S. Space Force Combat Forces Command, confirmed it in the clearest public terms yet during a July 17 Mitchell Institute virtual event.
"What you are seeing in Central Command today, and in U.S. joint operations, is a return to U.S. spectrum dominance," Gagnon told retired Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, who moderated the Schriever Spacepower Series session. The Space Force, he argued, has matured from a backstage support utility into an active participant in the joint kill chain — and its electromagnetic warfare role is now among the most operationally consequential the service has ever played.
The remarks came with a budget number attached: the Trump administration has proposed $71.24 billion for the Space Force in fiscal year 2027, more than double the $31.86 billion the service received in fiscal year 2026, according to the Space Force Association's analysis of the Presidential Budget Request. That money isn't just a reward for Iran performance. It's an admission that the adversary waiting in the next conflict — China, Russia, or both — hasn't shown its hand yet. Iran was the easy test.
Guardians Were First Movers — Before the Bombs
The operational picture Gagnon described on July 17 aligned with what senior commanders had been signaling since March. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine identified space forces as among the "first movers" in Operation Epic Fury during a Pentagon briefing on March 2, describing how U.S. Space Command and Cyber Command led by "layering non-kinetic effects, disrupting and degrading and blinding Iran's ability to see, communicate, and respond." U.S. Central Command boss Adm. Brad Cooper said the U.S. had achieved "space superiority" — a term the Space Force's own warfighting doctrine defines as the ability to operate at a time and place of one's choosing without prohibitive interference, while denying that same freedom to an adversary.
Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, who delivered what turned out to be his final public speech as CSO on July 15, put flesh on the operational contribution at the Space Foundation's Space Symposium in April. "On day one of Operation Epic Fury," Saltzman said, "one of these specialists led the planning and execution of high-tempo space electronic warfare fires for U.S. Central Command." In another instance, a Guardian oversaw the rapid relocation of an EW system across multiple combatant command areas of responsibility — something the Space Force had never done before in a live campaign. Some Guardians, Saltzman noted, carried out their work under enemy fire.
During Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025 — the earlier B-2 strike that first targeted Iranian nuclear facilities — Space Force EW teams had already rehearsed the mission: creating a silence zone over Iranian communications that allowed stealth bombers to fly their 36-hour round trip from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri undetected, the Washington Times reported. By February 28, the capability was operationally mature.
How the Silence Zones Work: Meadowlands, RMT, and Mission Delta 3
The electromagnetic warfare capabilities Guardians deployed in Iran are not classified concepts — they are fielded hardware operated by a specific unit at a specific location, and the Space Force has publicly described how they function.
Mission Delta 3, headquartered at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado, is the Space Force's electromagnetic warfare operational unit. It trains and deploys the specialists who control three primary systems, as Breaking Defense documented in March 2026:
The Counter Communications System (CCS) and its upgraded successor, Meadowlands — both built by L3Harris Technologies — are trailer-mounted, ground-based satellite jammers designed to be loaded aboard a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft and deployed to forward austere environments. The Meadowlands, which the Space Force accepted for formal operational use on June 8, 2026, uses multi-band, dual-polarization satellite communication antennas paired with advanced low-noise amplifiers and power amplifiers to overwhelm or disrupt signals being transmitted to or from adversary satellites. The effects are reversible — Meadowlands jams and degrades, rather than permanently destroying, adversary satellite links. One operator can simultaneously control 300% more jamming targets than was possible with the legacy CCS Block 10.2 system it replaces, and the total fleet is expected to reach 32 units.
The Remote Modular Terminal (RMT), developed by Northstrat with CACI for the Space Rapid Capabilities Office, is a smaller, more deployable jammer designed specifically to block adversary kill chains and targeting links — not just communications, Breaking Defense reported. The RMT intercepts data moving from an adversary's battlefield sensors up through a satellite and back down to a battle management node. Block that signal, and the adversary's targeting pipeline stops functioning. As of December 2024, 24 RMTs had been delivered and 160 had been funded. At least some of them were operational during Epic Fury.
The Bounty Hunter system, maintained by COLSA since 2011, functions as a space-based electromagnetic intelligence platform: it detects, characterizes, and geolocates sources of RF interference, and has been deployed to both CENTCOM and INDOPACOM.
Together, these systems gave Mission Delta 3 the tools to do what Gagnon described: operate continuously inside contested, jammed electromagnetic bands and win.
"What I am seeing in this conflict is the space forces are delivering not just on the need for space superiority, because they have checked that block," Gagnon said. "They are also delivering effects inside the joint formation, in a contested electromagnetic environment."
SATCOM Is Now a Weapons Control Infrastructure
One of Gagnon's most significant disclosures was the role SATCOM played in enabling the drone warfare dimension of Operation Epic Fury — including novel one-way aerial attack drones and, as later confirmed, autonomous naval strike vessels.
"If you have a drone that needs controlling and it goes beyond line of sight, it obviously uses SATCOM," Gagnon said. "If you're using SATCOM to change the way warfare is today, you're using the United States Space Force."
The implication is more than logistical. SATCOM is no longer simply a communications channel — it is an active weapons control infrastructure. Every beyond-line-of-sight drone that transmitted targeting data, received updated strike coordinates, or relayed sensor feeds was doing so through Space Force satellite links. Disrupt those links, and the drone campaign stops. That makes Space Force SATCOM a high-value target in any future conflict.
Iran understood this at least partially. Brig. Gen. Christopher Fernengel, the Space Force's director of plans and programs, disclosed at the State of Space Industrial Base conference on May 28 that Iranian forces kinetically attacked U.S. Space Force assets during Epic Fury — the first time in the service's history, Breaking Defense reported. "We've seen in Operation Epic Fury for the first time that our space capabilities have been targeted and destroyed," Fernengel said. "We expect that to happen more."
What Iran Didn't Test — and Why the Budget Is Really About China
Here is the military caveat that the victory-lap framing tends to elide: Iran is not a serious counterspace power.
There is no public evidence that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps attempted to dazzle, jam, or otherwise degrade U.S. military satellites in any sustained way during Operation Epic Fury, as defense analysts noted at the time. The IRGC's counterspace toolkit is largely confined to terrestrial GPS jamming and targeting of ground terminals — the kind of capability that Space Force EW is well-designed to handle. Iran launched no direct-ascent anti-satellite missiles. It deployed no co-orbital proximity vehicles. It had no nuclear anti-satellite capability. It could not, in short, threaten the satellites that underpin the EW capabilities that were neutralizing it.
China and Russia are structurally different. As of early 2026, U.S. defense assessments document that China possesses at least one operational direct-ascent ASAT system capable of reaching low Earth orbit, demonstrated co-orbital rendezvous capabilities, ground-based laser systems, and a broad electronic warfare infrastructure, per the CSIS 2025 Space Threat Assessment. Russia has tested the Nudol direct-ascent ASAT, is developing a satellite-borne nuclear ASAT system, has deployed Peresvet laser weapons to five strategic missile divisions, and regularly attacks U.S. satellite systems with reversible non-kinetic effects, including lasers, RF jammers, and cyberattacks, according to the National Security Space Association's nuclear ASAT analysis.
"The United States no longer has the luxury of viewing space as a permissive environment," said Lt. Gen. Douglas Schiess, nominated in July to become the next Chief of Space Operations, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on July 16. "China and Russia have made clear that they see space as a critical warfighting domain."
There is already evidence that Iran itself was adapting. Iran equipped its Zolfaghar short-range ballistic missiles with guidance from China's BeiDou-3 encrypted satellite navigation system — rendering U.S. GPS jamming ineffective against those munitions, which continued striking U.S. bases in Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan with alarming accuracy despite American EW operations, as TechTimes documented in its July 12 analysis. Spectrum dominance against one layer of the adversary's communications did not translate to spectrum dominance against a different layer backed by a peer-state satellite system.
What the $71 Billion Is Actually Buying
Against that backdrop, the FY27 budget request becomes readable as a strategic document rather than a political one.
The Space Force has requested $71.24 billion in baseline and reconciliation funding for fiscal year 2027, a 124% increase over the $31.86 billion it received in fiscal year 2026, and approximately 450% larger than the service's initial FY2020 budget, per the Space Force Association's Presidential Budget Request analysis. The breakdown: roughly $40 billion for research, development, testing, and evaluation; $19 billion for procurement; and a classified research and development budget that more than doubles, from $6.56 billion to $17.33 billion — a figure that encompasses programs the Pentagon has declined to describe publicly, the Space Force Association reported.
Several specific investments address vulnerabilities that Iran exposed:
Resilient constellations: The FY27 request more than doubles the budget for resilient MEO missile warning to $3.56 billion, per the Space Force Association's budget review. Iran's ability to strike Space Force ground infrastructure — not to disable satellites directly — revealed that even a non-peer adversary can threaten the ground architecture that makes space operations possible. The solution is distributing what is currently concentrated.
Spare satellites: Gagnon disclosed that the Space Force is now purchasing reserve satellites to be held in storage, ready for launch if operational satellites are lost in combat — a practice routine for aircraft but historically absent in space acquisition, as he told the Mitchell Institute audience. "I assume losses, because that's war," Gagnon said. "We do it with everything except space. So we're fixing that."
Four distributed space operations centers: The FY27 military construction budget includes approximately $1 billion for four new Space Force facilities, each allocated roughly $250 million, the Colorado Springs Gazette reported. The four sites are Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, Schriever Space Force Base in Colorado, and Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota. The rationale is architectural: a single centralized operations center is a single point of failure. These facilities will support space control, space-based sensing and targeting, and data transport. The Space Force eventually aims to build as many as 10 such centers.
Space electromagnetic warfare tactical operations centers (SEWTOCs): Currently only one SEWTOC exists, run by Mission Delta 3 at Peterson Space Force Base. The FY27 budget includes funding for five additional centers, both domestic and abroad, designed to take the EW mission that proved decisive in Iran and make it survivable in a conflict where an adversary can target the center itself, Air & Space Forces Magazine reported.
Gagnon noted that the resiliency argument, once a hard sell internally, no longer requires advocacy. "That type of thinking about adding resiliency into core capabilities the joint force needs — that was an uphill argument four years ago," he said. "We don't have to make that argument anymore. Everyone's like, you tell them the bill, and then they say, 'Is that resilient?' You're like, 'Yes, we designed that'" — per his July 17 Mitchell Institute remarks.
Is This 'Spectrum Dominance' Real — or a Relative Claim?
Defense analysts who followed the Iran campaign are careful to place the Space Force's performance in context. The term "space superiority" has a built-in asterisk: it is defined as control sufficient to operate without "prohibitive interference" — and that bar is calibrated to the adversary's capabilities.
Against Iran, which mounted no orbital threats and whose terrestrial EW was limited primarily to GPS jamming and ground-based attack drones, the bar was relatively low. Against a peer adversary with direct-ascent ASAT missiles, laser dazzling systems, co-orbital proximity weapons, and nuclear anti-satellite capabilities in development, the same constellation of Guardians, Meadowlands units, and RMTs would face threats for which they have not yet been tested under fire.
The Space Force's own budget request acknowledges this directly. The $17.33 billion classified R&D line — which nearly triples from FY26 — almost certainly funds capabilities designed for that harder scenario rather than a repeat of Iran, per the Space Force Association's budget analysis. Fernengel's warning that "we expect that to happen more" — referring to Space Force assets being targeted and destroyed — is not a description of the Iran environment. It is a projection about what comes next.
Gagnon framed the historical parallel accurately: the Cold War drove spectrum dominance as a core competency because the adversary demanded it. The long counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan let that capability atrophy. The Iran conflict has forced its revival. But the revival is happening at a pace calibrated to an adversary that, unlike China or Russia, cannot reach into orbit to take out the things making it work.
"We're baked in everything," Gagnon told the AFA Warfare Symposium in February. "You don't see us, but you need us."
The question now is whether the Space Force can bake in enough resiliency — in its satellite constellations, its ground infrastructure, its EW systems, and its spare-hardware reserves — to remain indispensable in a fight where the adversary can see exactly where the flour is kept.
Frequently Asked Questions
What exactly did Space Force do before the first strikes in Operation Epic Fury?
Space Force electromagnetic warfare units, operating through Mission Delta 3 at Peterson Space Force Base, used ground-based jamming systems — specifically the Counter Communications System and Remote Modular Terminal jammers — to disrupt Iranian satellite communications and sensor networks before kinetic operations began on February 28, 2026, as Breaking Defense documented. The effect was to create "silence zones" that prevented Iranian commanders from coordinating a coherent response and allowed U.S. stealth bombers to operate undetected during the opening strikes.
How does Space Force electronic warfare actually work — is this about attacking satellites in orbit?
No. Space Force EW is primarily ground-based: trailer-mounted jammers like Meadowlands (built by L3Harris) and the Remote Modular Terminal emit high-powered radio frequency signals that overwhelm, disrupt, or block the satellite communications links an adversary relies on — from either the ground terminal side or the satellite transmission side, as New Atlas explained in its coverage of the Meadowlands' operational acceptance. The effects are reversible; the satellites themselves are not destroyed. What gets disrupted is the signal flowing through them. This means Space Force EW can silence an adversary's communications network without creating orbital debris or triggering the legal and strategic complications that come with destroying a satellite outright.
Does the "spectrum dominance" in Iran mean Space Force is ready for China or Russia?
Not in the same way, and senior Space Force leaders are explicit about this. Iran posed no orbital threats — it did not attempt to disable or destroy U.S. satellites. China's counterspace arsenal includes direct-ascent anti-satellite missiles, co-orbital proximity systems capable of physically engaging or disabling satellites, laser dazzling weapons, and an extensive ground-based jamming infrastructure, according to the CSIS 2025 Space Threat Assessment. Russia is developing a satellite-borne nuclear anti-satellite system, per the National Security Space Association's 2024 analysis of that threat. The Space Force's $71.24 billion FY27 budget request — particularly the $17.33 billion classified R&D component — is explicitly aimed at building the resilient, distributed, and survivable architecture needed to operate against those peer threats. Iran proved the EW capability is real. It did not prove the capability is survivable against a peer adversary with the tools to attack the satellites that enable it.
What does the Space Force's budget growth mean for U.S. taxpayers?
The proposed FY27 budget of $71.24 billion — pending Congressional authorization as of July 2026 — would represent a 124% increase over the $31.86 billion the service received in FY26, and is roughly 450% larger than the Space Force's initial FY2020 budget, according to the Space Force Association's Presidential Budget Request analysis. The four new distributed space operations centers ($1 billion) and the expanded electromagnetic warfare tactical operations centers would add permanent infrastructure at bases in New Mexico, Alabama, Colorado, and North Dakota. The spare satellite program — buying reserve spacecraft for rapid-launch replacement — introduces a cost model the service previously avoided. The rationale, in Gagnon's words, is straightforward: "I assume losses, because that's war."
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