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The United States military must rapidly transform its forces to fight and win across an unprecedented range of battle space, stretching from the ocean floor to the region of space influenced by the Moon's gravity, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Wednesday.
Gen. Dan Caine, addressing the Air, Space and Cyber Conference in Maryland, said the armed forces face a narrowing window to prepare for conflicts that will unfold in domains far beyond traditional battlefields.
"Our task, my friends, is to adapt right now, so the Joint Force is prepared to fight, endure and win in global contested environments, from the seabed to cislunar space," Caine told the gathering.
Caine said the nature of modern warfare has fundamentally shifted, warning that "today's modern battlefield operates from the seabed to cislunar space."
He said future conflicts will erode long-standing assumptions that forces could count on uncontested supply lines, protected staging areas or secure resupply routes.
Frontline units, he said, must now operate under the assumption that they will be "hunted by autonomous systems, jammed across the spectrum and tracked in real time."
Caine argued that battlefield advantage will increasingly hinge on speed of perception and decision-making rather than raw firepower alone.
"In the future fight, advantage will go to the side who can see first, who can understand first, decide first and act first," he said, calling on the joint force to field a flexible, "high-low mix of combat capabilities" capable of delivering concentrated firepower.
Caine's remarks came two days after Air Force Secretary Troy Meink publicly confirmed that the Space Force maintains on-orbit "space control weapons" designed to protect joint forces from hostile action by adversaries.
The disclosure came as the first formal US acknowledgment of armed platforms operating in orbit, arriving as orbital competition with China and Russia intensifies and as the Pentagon develops its "Golden Dome" missile defense network.
China criticized the disclosure, saying it opposes efforts to turn outer space into a "war zone" and calling on Washington to halt its military buildup in orbit.
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the foundational international agreement governing space activity, bars the placement of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit but does not explicitly prohibit conventional weapons systems there, leaving a legal gray area that has shaped the current standoff.
Caine identified artificial intelligence and advancing cyber capabilities as the single most transformative force reshaping modern combat, describing it as outpacing every other area of military technology.
"No factor is accelerating change as fast as artificial intelligence and advancing cyber capabilities," he said, adding that "AI is here now, and it's already changing the way militaries see, sense, decide and act."
To underscore the point, Caine pointed to an incident in June off the coast of Oman, in which an AI-guided autonomous vessel recovered two US soldiers after their Apache attack helicopter crashed.
He linked that episode to broader shifts observed on the battlefield in Ukraine, saying the two cases together illustrate how fast warfare itself is evolving. "Taken together, these examples from the Strait of Hormuz to the front lines in Ukraine show how quickly technology is changing the character of war," he said.
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