Chief Master Sgt. Ron Lerch of the U.S. Space Force sat down in his office in Los Angeles one morning in September to deliver a briefing known as a threat assessment. The current “threats” in space are less sci-fi than you might expect, but there are a surprising number of them: At least 44,500 space objects now circle Earth, including 9,000 active satellites and 19,000 significant pieces of debris.

What’s most concerning isn’t the swarm of satellites but the types. “We know that there are kinetic kill vehicles,” Lerch said — for example, a Russian “nesting doll” satellite, in which a big satellite releases a tiny one and the tiny one releases a mechanism that can strike and damage another satellite. There are machines with the ability to cast nets and extend grappling hooks, too. China, whose presence in space now far outpaces Russia’s, is launching unmanned “space planes” into orbit, testing potentially unbreakable quantum communication links and adding A.I. capabilities to satellites.

An intelligence report, Lerch said, predicted the advent, within the next decade, of satellites with radio-frequency jammers, chemical sprayers and lasers that blind and disable the competition. All this would be in addition to the cyberwarfare tools, electromagnetic instruments and “ASAT” antisatellite missiles that already exist on the ground. In Lerch’s assessment, space looked less like a grand “new ocean” for exploration — phrasing meant to induce wonder that has lingered from the Kennedy administration — and more like a robotic battlefield, where the conflicts raging on Earth would soon extend ever upward.

The Space Force, the sixth and newest branch of the U.S. military, was authorized by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump in December 2019. Its creation was not a partisan endeavor, though Trump has boasted that the idea for the organization was his alone. The initiative had in fact been shaped within the armed forces and Congress over the previous 25 years, based on the premise that as satellite and space technologies evolved, America’s military organizations had to change as well.

At its incarnation, the Space Force was an assemblage of programs and teams that already existed, mainly as entities within the Air Force. “It’s one of the common misperceptions that it cost money to create the Space Force — and it really didn’t, because we already had space forces,” Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told me. “These were just spread throughout the military: the people, the bases, the platforms, the satellites, the ground stations.” What the new directive did accomplish, however, was to group space endeavors under a central chain of command and authorize its leaders to chart a unified future. “One of the things that we were lacking without a Space Force was an organization that would argue for its own destiny,” Douglas Loverro, a former Pentagon official involved in helping start the branch, told me. The concern was that without a dedicated team within the military’s bureaucracy that could push for the specific tools they needed, the United States would be at a disadvantage. Some strategists worried that the nation already was. Loverro pointed out that two decades ago, a Chinese military analyst named Wang Hucheng wrote a paper that presaged an aspect of China’s aerospace strategy: “For countries that can never win a war with the United States by using the method of tanks and planes, attacking the U.S. space system may be an irresistible and most tempting choice.” The argument identified space as the U.S. military’s “soft ribs” and “strategic weakness.”