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In 2018, Vice President and National Space Council Chair Mike Pence heralded a new era of “American dominance in space,” which would be led by a new U.S. Space Force. The service, eventually established in late 2019, would be a manifestation of the U.S. government’s heightened awareness that space was a domain of “national security significance,” as opposed to simply scientific exploration. This development acknowledged that the old, decentralized way of doing things—dispersing space professionals across the existing services—was no longer sufficient. Advocates argued that consolidating forces within a single service, led by empowered Pentagon leadership, was necessary to effectively recruit and organize, train, and equip personnel to meet the adversary space threats of a new day.
Enter 2025, and discussions are actively underway among U.S. experts about the need for a U.S. Cyber Force to own force generation for offensive, defensive, and cyber intelligence personnel. Advocates argue that a standalone Cyber Force, like the Space Force, would address acute challenges today in “recruiting, training, and retaining personnel for key cyber work roles and missions.” Skeptics question whether a new bureaucratic structure will resolve them. They argue that cyberspace operations are unique to each service and existing forces should remain integrated.
Today, the United States is debating taking another step toward a significant force design transformation to tackle twenty-first-century multi-domain challenges. Yet, China has been making moves of its own since 2015 to shape the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) for modern warfare. The Pentagon’s 2016 annual report on Chinese military power first mentioned these changes: In late 2015, a then-new Strategic Support Force (SSF) was established under the Central Military Commission (CMC). Importantly, the SSF included space systems, network systems, and information warfare departments, which demonstrated the PLA’s desire for a single command structure dedicated to multi-domain warfare. The network systems department served as the hub for cyber forces pulled together from previously disparate parts of the PLA. Then, in April 2024, less than nine years after it began, the PLA abruptly dissolved the SSF. With the SSF structure eliminated, the newly renamed Aerospace (ASF), Cyberspace (CSF), and Information Support Forces (ISF) were shifted directly under the CMC.
Among Western PLA watchers, these developments immediately raised big questions. Had the less-than-a-decade-old SSF experiment failed? Had its leadership fallen out of favor? Was the SSF merely intended as a transient ‘incubator” for nascent space and cyber command structures that successfully achieved maturity in 2024? Was it some combination of these factors? Amid active debate regarding a prospective Cyber Force,
U.S. experts would benefit from learning the lessons of China’s experiences to inform debates surrounding our own military evolution.
As part of a broader PLA overhaul in 2015, the SSF was initially established to bring space, cyber, and information warfare strategic capabilities under a single organizational umbrella. China’s 2015 Military Strategy stated it would “expedite the development of a cyber force and enhance its capabilities of cyberspace situation[al] awareness, cyber defense, [and] support for the country’s endeavors in cyberspace.” In January 2016, the Ministry of National Defense heralded the SSF as an entity “conducive for optimizing the military’s force structure and improving integrated support capabilities,” emphasizing the growing understanding within China (and globally among great powers) that integrating space, cyber, and the broader information domains is essential to modern victories.
When, in 2024, the previously centralized command structure dissolved into three new forces, the Pentagon opined that the development raised suspicions about operational effectiveness and leadership issues among SSF top leadership, including likely corruption. Alternatively, some U.S. PLA watchers believed the new structure showed the CMC’s interest in directly controlling the most critical strategic capabilities, while also exposing that the aerospace and cyberspace divisions had still operated relatively independently even under the SSF structure. These same analysts believe the original intent could have been for the SSF to serve as a temporary “incubator” for the previously immature and incohesive strategic forces until they reached the maturity required of independent joint forces.
Time may reveal the SSF’s lasting legacy following realignment of its component space, cyberspace, and information warfare forces under the CMC. However, with the benefit of some hindsight, the United States can learn lessons from the PLA’s significant strategic changes over the past decade for our own efforts to adapt force structures to the realities of modern, multi-domain warfare.
Lesson 1: Establishing a Strategic Support Force Was Revolutionary in and of Itself
The standup of the SSF represented a sea-change—a “great refocusing”—in China’s military strategy. It demonstrated the PLA’s keen understanding that strategic forces are central to modern warfare and the new organization would “accelerate the integrated development of new-type combat forces, so as to build a strong and modernized strategic support force.” If some analysts’ perspectives prove accurate over time, ultimately, the SSF structure provided a temporary holding ground to help shape previously separate divisions into cohesive operational forces that could then be shifted under centralized CMC authority.
Today, the United States similarly acknowledges the strategic importance of space and cyberspace as critical differentiators in conflict. Cyberattacks (including those attributed to China-linked cyber actors Volt and Salt Typhoon) continue to threaten U.S. critical infrastructure and sensitive data. Space systems are essential not only to modern military operations but also to civilian life. However, they are uniquely vulnerable to cross-domain threats, including cyberattacks. National Reconnaissance Office Director Chris Scolese recently identified cyber as his “number one concern” in space. These intrusions can target satellites to manipulate the public information space, for example, by broadcasting political messages, as Ukrainian citizens experienced earlier this year. Such real-world dynamics underscore the urgent need to understand and strategically integrate space, cyber, and information domains in conflict.
The former SSF has now taken a different shape in China; however, the PLA’s initial decision to interconnect these capabilities offers a valuable insight for the United States. Staying ahead of our adversaries depends on U.S. policy and military leadership appreciating and organizing forces around cross-domain interdependencies.
Lesson 2: A Standalone Force Does Not Automatically Mean Better Integration
While establishing the SSF reflected foresight about the need for integrated strategic capabilities, it did not automatically foster operational connectivity between the space, cyber, and information warfare divisions. One key theory behind the 2024 SSF shakeup is the lack of cohesion across them. The PLA’s eventual restructuring reveals a deliberate effort to identify the right bureaucratic home for its strategic forces.
As the United States considers creating a Cyber Force, decisionmakers should weigh the pros and cons of different bureaucratic models. One option they may follow is the Space Force model—which sits alongside the Air Force within the Department of the Air Force—and houses a Cyber Force under a military department like the Army. Leaders could also develop a completely different model altogether. Regardless of where a Cyber Force sits structurally, China’s experience highlights that getting after cross-domain threats requires clear connective mechanisms across domain-specific services.
A newly-established Cyber Force would need to mature quickly alongside six services with long-established practices and cultures. Given the unique cross-domain challenges, it would need to coordinate especially closely with a six-year-old Space Force still finding its own bureaucratic identity.
The SSF’s trajectory demonstrates that military structure can be transitional by design. It also demonstrates that change takes time, especially when that change requires building a new Service structure and developing a culture. Ultimately, the SSF restructuring emphasizes that selecting and implementing a new force design alone is not enough and is just the beginning of the process. True, effective integration takes time and requires sustained, deliberate effort to ensure strategic capabilities are interoperable across domains.
Lesson 3: The United States May Not Need to Get It Right the First Time
A final lesson from the SSF experience is to embrace an evolving force design—especially when it comes to warfighting domains where cutting-edge technology is advancing by the day. At its height, the former SSF was an objectively large organization, likely numbering between 200 and 250 thousand service members according to U.S. estimates. Whether in China or in the United States, effecting change in a bureaucracy of that size is a daunting task. In this context, the PLA’s apparent trial period for the SSF is especially instructive.
In considering the most effective force design to tackle today’s and tomorrow’s cyber and space threats, the U.S. military must welcome trial and error, as well as refinement, if a chosen approach is not effective. This is not a foreign concept for the United States. The United States Air Force provides just one of many examples from military history. From the dawn of the aviation age to the standup of a separate service decades later in 1947, the form and function of military bureaucracy have changed along with advances in technology—a fact today’s Department of the Air Force notes with pride.
The United States has already shaken up its force design in recent years with the Space Force. Today, cyberspace operations are conducted through a unified U.S. Cyber Command. Therefore, establishing a U.S. Cyber Force would be the most significant development to date to address current challenges in fielding the best-trained and equipped cyber warriors. However, as the PLA example demonstrates, the greatest mistake may be a lack of willingness to periodically assess how well a chosen solution is addressing the very challenges it was designed to fix. Rather than rigidity, agility and adaptation in the face of ever-changing threats should be the essential ingredients in military force design.
U.S. policymakers, military officers, and expert analysts should be actively asking critical questions to shape the Armed Forces for cross-domain challenges in the twenty-first century and beyond. The PLA Strategic Support Forces experience lends to several important questions for U.S. experts as they determine how to best address entrenched bureaucratic challenges facing U.S. cyber operators today:
Lauryn Williams is the deputy director and senior fellow in the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.
