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across the DoD to inform the development of the Space Force’s first acquisition doctrine. The survey’s 580 narrative responses were evaluated against a series of existing Space Force best practice documents: the Space Acquisition Tenets, the Essential PM Skills for Government Space Acquisition Professionals, and the 2023 Defense Business Board’s A Review of Space Acquisition report. The analysis leveraged two AI tools (ChatGPT and Claude 3 Opus), NVivo, and a manual data review to corroborate and build credibility for the findings and enhance the quality of the proposed recommendations. It evaluated alignment through inductive and deductive analysis and assessed response alignment to various best practice documents, response sentiment, and coding themes across the various qualitative analysis tools. The findings indicated moderate to strong alignment among the survey results and best practice documents. If alignment was moderate, it was strengthened through manual analysis and the proposal of beneficial “best practice” additions. Finally, a blueprint was proposed for the Space Force’s first-ever acquisition doctrine document. The blueprint leveraged the survey data and many of the best practices offered from the documents reviewed in this research study. The recommendations started with the introduction of acquisition as a new Cornerstone level of the doctrine hierarchy, not as a point of departure from Joint doctrine culture but as a methodology for viewing acquisition differently. Chapters 1–3 of the proposed acquisition doctrine offered a basic outline of traditional content found throughout Space Force doctrine documents, including introducing acquisition as an integral part of spacepower. Then, Chapters 4 and 5 detailed specific
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Defense ARJ, Summer 2025, Vol. 32 No. 2: 132—193
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