Maj. Gen. Keener: The Layer Between Capability and Combat
There is a version of ready where the hardware works. There is another version where the people, the doctrine, the joint playbooks, and the partner relationships all hold under the pressure of an actual conflict. Building the second one is a full-time job, and almost none of it is visible from the outside. The Space Force organizes, trains, and equips. U.S. Space Command employs. The layer in between, the exercises, the wargames, the training architecture, and the doctrine that tells the joint forceMaj. Gen. "Bull" Keener: Inside Space Command's Exercise and Wargaming Architecturehow to operate together in a contested domain, belongs to the J7. As adversary counterspace capability moves from projection to fielded reality, that layer is where readiness is either proven or exposed. In this episode of the Spacepower Podcast, SFA Founder and host Bill Woolf sits down with Maj. Gen. Samuel "Bull" Keener, Director of Exercises, Training, Wargames, and Experimentation (J7) at U.S. Space Command, to walk through how a combatant command builds itself into a warfighting organization. Why U.S. Space Command's area of responsibility begins at 100 kilometers and has no upper limit, and what that means for who actually provides the forces that operate there The difference between the Space Force and U.S. Space Command in the plainest terms you will hear it, from someone who gets asked constantly Why a combatant command needs a Tier 1 exercise at all, and why standing one up was the first thing Gen. Keener was told to go build Why you cannot replicate a thinking adversary on a white card, and how red cells, red teams, and space aggressors are used to close that gap The modeling and simulation problem nobody has solved: why no single tool can accurately represent the space fight, and why artificial intelligence and machine learning are now part of the answer How the Space Force's Future Operating Environment 2040 and Objective Force 2040 nest with Space Command's Space Warfighting Environment 2040. One defines the environment, one defines the force, and one defines how the joint force fights and wins within it Why satellites in geosynchronous orbit are, in the commander's framing, static targets, and what maneuver has to do with self-defense The 1941 Louisiana Maneuvers analogy, and why an exercise that reorganized the U.S. Army's armored divisions before World War II is the model for what happens on orbit What coalition training requires in a domain where you cannot put allies in a formation and fly a mission together, and why communications and classification remain the hardest problems Why lessons learned measured in weeks or months is no longer fast enough, and the push to find a problem and implement the fix in days Capability delivered is not capability employed. The distance between the two is measured in exercises, in wargames, and in the honesty of the models you train against. That distance is the J7's work, and it is where the Space Force's investment either becomes joint warfighting readiness or does not. Editor's note: this conversation was recorded several months before U.S. Space Command published the Space Warfighting Environment 2040 on July 28, 2026. Hosted by Bill Woolf Produced by Ty Holliday
