The outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said U.S. troops must prepare for the possibility of armed conflict beyond Earth — including on the moon — warning that the military needs to adapt as rival nations expand their space ambitions, according to Breitbart News.
The comments, reported Thursday, add fresh urgency to a debate that has been building inside the Pentagon for years: whether space is simply a domain to be defended or a potential battlefield where American forces could one day be called to fight.
In his remarks, the chairman framed lunar and cislunar operations not as science fiction but as a real planning problem for the U.S. military, pointing to the rapid growth of other countries’ space programs. The moon and the region around it, he suggested, are no longer the exclusive province of scientists and explorers.
A new domain for old rivalries
The moon has moved toward the center of great-power competition in recent years. China has announced plans for a crewed lunar landing before the end of the decade, while the United States is pursuing its own Artemis program to return astronauts to the surface. Both countries have also launched missions to map lunar resources, particularly water ice that could be used for fuel and life support.
Russia, meanwhile, has continued to test and deploy counterspace capabilities, and India has accelerated its own lunar exploration efforts. For military planners, those developments raise uncomfortable questions about what happens if two nuclear-armed powers both claim territory or resources on the moon — or if a conflict on Earth extends into orbit, potentially disrupting the satellites that underpin everything from navigation to missile warning.
The chairman’s remarks are notable because U.S. officials have historically been cautious about using language that sounds like a battle plan for space, preferring instead to describe American activities as defensive and focused on protecting satellites and the ground networks that depend on them. Saying troops must prepare for lunar warfare pushes that framing into more explicit territory.
The Space Force and the mission it inherited
The U.S. Space Force, established in 2019, is the youngest branch of the armed services and was designed in part to consolidate the military’s scattered space responsibilities. Its public messaging has emphasized protecting U.S. and allied access to space, tracking debris and hostile activity, and ensuring that the services can rely on satellite communications in a crisis.
But the Space Force has also begun to talk more openly about “orbital warfare” and the need for the ability to operate in a contested environment. A growing body of military doctrine now assumes that U.S. adversaries would try to blind or disable American spacecraft in the early hours of any major conflict, making space a first-strike domain rather than a sanctuary.
Against that backdrop, the chairman’s push for lunar readiness fits into a broader effort to prepare for contingencies that once seemed far-fetched — from jamming and cyberattacks in orbit to the possibility of physical confrontations on the lunar surface. That last scenario remains deeply speculative: no nation has ever placed a weapon on the moon, and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits putting weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies.
Treaties and the limits of current law
The Outer Space Treaty, signed by the United States, Russia, China and more than a hundred other countries, also bars national appropriation of the moon or other celestial bodies. It does not, however, prohibit military personnel from operating in space, nor does it ban conventional weapons outside the specific limits it sets. Those gaps have left space-law experts arguing for years about how existing rules would apply to a future lunar conflict.
The treaty framework was written for an era when only two superpowers could reach the moon and neither had any interest in claiming it. Today, with multiple countries and a growing number of private companies capable of landing on or operating near the lunar surface, the legal architecture looks increasingly strained.
The chairman’s comments are likely to add momentum to congressional efforts to fund new space capabilities. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have pressed for faster development of satellite defenses, reusable launch systems and new sensors capable of tracking objects in cislunar space — the vast volume between Earth and the moon that current tracking networks only partly cover.
How far the military should go in preparing for lunar combat is a question that carries real costs. Every dollar and every engineering team devoted to space is a dollar and a team not devoted to more conventional priorities. The chairman’s argument appears to be that the country cannot afford to wait until a crisis forces the issue.
The Pentagon has not released a detailed budget plan tied specifically to lunar operations, and any major expansion of that kind would face scrutiny in Congress, where competing defense priorities already jostle for limited funds. Still, the fact that the top military officer is speaking in these terms suggests the debate has moved from think tanks to the top of the chain of command.
Breitbart News reported the chairman’s remarks on Thursday. The article did not include verbatim quotations from the chairman, leaving the precise scope of his recommendations unclear. What is clear is that the U.S. military is increasingly treating space — and the moon itself — as a domain where it may one day have to fight, not just watch.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2026/09/17/joint-chief-chairman-says-u-s-troops-must-prepare-for-lunar-warfare/