Space operations have gone from the edges to the core of modern American military efforts. (credit: US Air Force)

From advantage to arena: space power 1991–2026

by Bharath Gopalaswamy
Monday, March 30, 2026

On February 28, 2026, Operation Epic Fury opened not with bombers over Tehran but with space and cyber forces blinding Iranian sensors and severing its military communications network before a single aircraft crossed the border. Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine described it plainly: the first movers were US Space Command and US Cyber Command. Space did not support the opening of the campaign. Space was the opening of the campaign. That is a threshold that has no precedent in the history of space enabled warfare, and understanding what produced it requires going back 35 years to a different desert, a different adversary, and a very different relationship between space and conflict.

Desert Storm: The first space war

Desert Storm earned the label of the first space war, but the picture that label conjures is incomplete. GPS in 1991 was improvised, scarce, and only partially operational. The Army owned approximately 500 demonstration receivers at the outset. Of the VII Corps’ 40,000 vehicles in theater, only 3,000 received a GPS unit. Soldiers, reportedly, asked their loved ones to mail them commercial receivers purchased at outdoor stores. And yet it was enough to win! The famous flanking maneuver that swept coalition forces two hundred kilometers through uncharted desert was navigated almost entirely by GPS. The ground war lasted four days.

But space in 1991 operated from the outside. It enabled the fight. It did not participate in it. Iraq had no meaningful space capability of its own and what commercial access it had was severed early. By the end, the only satellite communications transmitter accessible to Iraqi forces was a mobile dish belonging to a CNN reporter. The space domain was entirely asymmetric and constituted an advantage.

General Horner, the architect of the Desert Storm air campaign, said after that war, “Many of us in Desert Storm were ignorant of what space could do.” Thirty-five years later, that ignorance is all but gone. What has replaced it is something far more consequential.

Four main transformations in 35 years

Operation Epic Fury did not create a new space paradigm from nothing. It revealed one that had been building since 1991 and that Ukraine had only partially exposed. Four main structural changes in the role of space converged in this conflict simultaneously, and together they mark a threshold that Horner, or for that matter many of us, could have only imagined.

First, for 35 years after Desert Storm, space capabilities enabled military operations in other domains. They provided navigation, communications, imagery, and missile warning to forces fighting on land, at sea, and in the air. In Epic Fury, space went first. Before a single aircraft crossed into Iranian airspace, space forces had already degraded the adversary’s ability to see, communicate, and respond. The doctrinal role of space in joint operations did not evolve gradually. It crossed a threshold.

Second, GPS became the foundational infrastructure of global commerce, aviation, shipping, and precision warfare more than 35 years. That ubiquity created a vulnerability. In 2026, GPS signals in the theater of operations could not be trusted. Iran jammed and spoofed navigation signals, disrupting over 1,100 commercial vessels on the first day alone, and shifted elements of its military navigation to China’s BeiDou constellation. The signal that won Desert Storm became a contested medium. The navigation monopoly that underwrote the first space war is gone and will not return.

Third, Planet Labs provided the first public confirmation of the Epic Fury strikes before any government had issued a statement, then delayed releasing new imagery for two weeks to prevent Iranian forces from using commercial data for battle damage assessment. A commercial company making active decisions and arguably performing a military intelligence function that has no precedent in the framework under which those companies were licensed. Commercial space is no longer a supplement to military space. It is inseparable from it: operationally, legally, and strategically.

Fourth, more than 1,000 targets were struck in the first 24 hours of Epic Fury. Space-based sensor data now feeds directly into AI-assisted targeting systems operating faster than any human deliberative process can match. The Pentagon’s own chief digital and AI officer confirmed that the Maven targeting platform compressed what previously took hours into minutes. The space layer no longer contributes to the kill chain. At the tempo Epic Fury demonstrated, it is the kill chain.

Each transformation creates not only a defense requirement but, rather, holds profound implications for the industry. The shift to first mover status means space systems must be survivable and reconstitutable under active contest, not merely reliable under peacetime conditions. The end of the navigation monopoly means the market for GPS independent positioning, navigation, and timing is no longer theoretical. More than 1,100 commercial vessels were disrupted on a single day. Every platform operating in a contested electronic environment now has a genuine operational need for multi-constellation receivers and navigation that does not fail silently when spoofed.

The transition of commercial space from observer to participant means the legal and liability frameworks governing satellite operators in conflict zones do not yet exist in coherent form. The companies that help define those frameworks early will be better positioned than those that wait for regulation to follow the next conflict. And the fusion of space-based intelligence into the kill chain means value in the space sector is shifting upstream toward the data pipelines and sensor fusion architectures that turn orbital collection into decision-speed outputs. The satellite is becoming less differentiated. The software and data infrastructure between the satellite and the decision is where the margin is moving. Desert Storm made GPS manufacturers indispensable for a generation. Epic Fury is doing the same for a different set of companies, and the window for early positioning is open now.

Desert Storm took 30 years to translate its space demonstration into the civilian GPS ecosystem and the commercial satellite industry that most people interact with today without knowing it. The Iran conflict is translating faster. The four transformations that accumulated more than 35 years converged in a single operation and produced a record that program offices, investors, and industrial planners will be reading for the next generation.

Bharath Gopalaswamy (PhD) is an aerospace, defence, and emerging-technology executive with extensive experience leading growth, strategy, and advanced programs across the US, Europe, and the Middle East.

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