The United States faces rapidly growing threats to its unlimited use of space and is incapable of increasing its own space military capabilities fast enough to meet and match the potential challenges, Guetlein said on Wednesday.
"We are experiencing a significant increase in the threat," Guetlein told the National Security Infrastructure Building Summit in Washington. "The threat is also coming in the near term, not the far term. This means, I don't have time to go off and build a lot of new capability."
The US military-industrial base lacked the sheer scale and high-tech capabilities and enough qualified workers to produce the additional equipment, systems and hardware that would be needed to match and contain the rapidly expanding forces and capabilities of near peer nations in space, Guerlein emphasized.
"I can't build capability fast enough to get after the near term threat. So that means we're going to have to rely on partnerships with allies and partnerships with commercial companies," Guetlein said.
Republican Senator Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut, agreed that any future great power conflict would involve a major struggle for control of space and would disrupt the military and commercial systems that the United States had come to take for granted.
Such a conflict would have a "real impact" on commercial space as well, Kelly said.