Japan's parliament voted in late June to rename the Air Self-Defense Force the "Air and Space Self-Defense Force" before the close of the current fiscal year in March 2027. The change formalizes something Tokyo has been building toward for more than a decade: treating orbital operations as a core military mission rather than a side project.
The symbolism matters, but so does the substance. Satellite reconnaissance, missile guidance, and early warning against ballistic threats all now depend on space-based systems, a reality that has already reshaped how major powers fight. The United States carved its Space Force out of the Air Force in late 2019, making it the sixth branch of the U.S. military. That branch played a documented role in this year's operations against Venezuela and Iran.
For Taiwan, sitting on the front line of the first island chain, the question is no longer theoretical. Retired Major General Chang Szu-wei, chairman of Cosmic Aerospace and a former director of joint air defense operations at Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense, argues the island needs to start building its own space workforce now, in close coordination with the Taiwan Space Agency (TASA).
Why the Region Is Racing Toward Orbit
Chang has tracked how neighboring militaries have industrialized their space efforts. The U.S. Space Force, he noted, absorbed the former Air Force Space Command and now runs three main commands: Space Operations, Space Systems, and Training, with a headcount above 9,000. Its mandate covers freedom of action in, into, and from space; conducting space operations; and protecting American interests there.
South Korea has moved on a similar timeline, standing up a space squadron under its air force in 2022 with plans to expand it into a larger group by 2030. Its stated missions are managing space operations, monitoring orbital objects in peacetime and wartime, and countering space-based threats.
Tokyo's Decade-Long Buildup Reaches a New Milestone
Japan's own path stretches back further than the recent name change suggests. Iwasaki Shigeru, a former Air Self-Defense Force chief of staff and joint chief of staff who now advises Taiwan's Executive Yuan, began pushing for dedicated space talent within the service more than ten years ago. That groundwork let Japan stand up a 20-person Space Operations Squadron in 2020. The unit has grown every year since, and Chang expects it to surpass 800 personnel in the current fiscal year after being upgraded to a full Space Operations Group in March.
The squadron's original mandate at launch, according to Chang, spanned space surveillance and warning, satellite-based intelligence integration, satellite navigation, and satellite communications.
At the SPACETIDE 2026 conference in Tokyo last week, Takahashi Sugio, a strategic planning official at Japan's Ministry of Defense, outlined the four pillars of the country's space defense doctrine, first published in July 2025: space domain awareness, including tracking adversary hypersonic glide vehicles; satellite communications, with priority investment in optical links; mission assurance, including this year's planned launch of a space domain awareness satellite; and counter-space capability, details of which remain classified. Takahashi also said the ministry plans to create a dedicated space division to merge policy and budget authority, and he framed uncrewed systems and AI-linked satellite communications as increasingly central to maritime operations. Japan's defense minister, Koizumi Shinjiro, has separately warned that even small pieces of space debris, along with Chinese and Russian anti-satellite programs, pose a daily threat to the satellites Japan now depends on.
What Taiwan's Satellites Still Cannot See
Chang laid out five gaps he believes Taiwan must close before it can claim meaningful space reconnaissance capability. Formosat-8, the optical-imaging constellation planned by TASA, will offer one-meter resolution, enough to identify a bus but not a passenger car; commercial providers in the U.S. and France already reach 0.3-meter resolution. Revisit rate is another constraint: Formosat-8 can only reimage a given location once every two days, while military users typically need multiple passes per day on a priority target. Taiwan also lacks synthetic aperture radar satellites, which can see through cloud cover and darkness in ways optical sensors cannot.
Beyond hardware, Chang pointed to the unresolved question of fusing Formosat imagery with purchased commercial imagery into a single monitoring picture, and to the reliability risk of depending on foreign commercial providers, whose satellites are booked by other governments, including the U.S. military itself. Without dedicated reconnaissance satellites of its own, he argued, Taiwan's ability to control its own intelligence priorities will stay limited. He added that in the AI era, the sheer volume of imagery a functioning constellation would produce cannot be reviewed by human analysts alone, making an in-house automated image-recognition system a necessity Taiwan cannot simply purchase off the shelf.
A Retired General's Case for Starting With People
Chang's central recommendation is less about satellites than about personnel. He wants Taiwan's military academies to begin teaching space-operations coursework, pointing to the U.S. Space Force's first commissioned class: 86 cadets who graduated from the Air Force Academy in 2020 and were commissioned directly into the new branch.
He also stressed that Taiwan's military will need tighter coordination with TASA, since Taiwan's space budget, like that of many small and mid-sized countries, sits with the civilian space agency rather than the armed forces. Iwasaki, during a visit to Taiwan, described how Japan handled the same structural challenge: JAXA controls the bulk of Japan's space technology budget, and it was Iwasaki himself, while serving as Air Self-Defense Force chief of staff in 2011, who began defining the military's space-operations requirements and handing them to JAXA for execution.
With Chinese conventional missile forces still expanding and Beijing testing hypersonic weapons, Chang said, Taiwan's security case for building independent space capability, one that can track developments around the strait in real time, is only getting stronger. （Related： 14 Nations Say Sea Ruling Stands. Beijing Calls It 'Waste Paper.' ｜ Latest ）
