M. V. SMITH
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
—Attributed to Yogi Berra
Yogi Berra, the famous Yankee catcher and later manager, probably never read Clausewitz’s immortal treatise On War.1 Yet the epigraph above sums up one of the more complex concepts that Clausewitz wrestles with over several pages: Why is there a difference between planning and execution, or between book learning and experience? Why is it that on paper “everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult?”2 The great Prussian master cited “friction” as the cause. He explained it this way: “Countless minor incidents—the kind you can never really foresee—combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls short of the intended goal . . . that more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper.”3 More succinctly, the Hall of Famer quoted above elsewhere explained the phenomenon as only he could: “If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.”
Presenting the wisdom of a war theorist and a baseball manager side by side might seem to be comparing apples and oranges, but it is not. Both men were strategists in their own fields, and as Professor Colin Gray points out, “There is an essential unity to all strategic experience in all periods of history because nothing vital to the nature and function of [competition] and strategy changes.”4 While Berra and Clausewitz had their own specialties and grammars, they shared the same logic as they went about devising their strategies, which Everett Dolman defines as the crafting of “a plan for attaining continuous advantage” over an opponent.5
A strategist from any discipline can take some relief in being on the same “strategic playground” regarding spacepower as any other competitive endeavor. As Professor Gray points out, “[Competition] has a grammar, but not a policy logic, of its own. [Competition] in space has its own distinctive [context] that policy must know and respect, but such [competition] has meaning only for the purpose of policy.”6 This means that a person versed in general strategic theory has many skills transferable to the art of crafting and assessing strategies, including for spacepower.
There is a difference between theory and practice, as the previous discussion points out. Theory teaches the rules, whereas experience teaches the exceptions. The exceptions are rooted in the unique context of the environment. It is as simple as the differences among land, sea, air, space, and cyber.7 This chapter is about the context of spacepower and its employment for strategic effect, which is defined here as doing something in space in the pursuit of the aims of policy. If the policy is properly harmonized with strategy, spacepower will be employed in a manner that seeks continuous advantage in the never-ending competition with other actors. What constitutes an advantage varies. Its pursuit may require space activities for a negative aim of preserving a status quo or for a positive aim of establishing a new order of things.
As interactive servants of policy, strategists, by the way they conceptualize space and spacepower, have great bearing on the crafting of strategies to exploit the space environment. This chapter places spacepower in its supporting role with respect to activities occurring within the terrestrial confines. Spacepower strategy must therefore be embedded in strategies of operations not only in other operating environments but across the panoply of human activities. For example, a commercial telecommunications company must include its space activities in its overall strategic planning as a subset of its enterprise.
It is fair for strategists in the opening years of the twenty-first century to conceptualize space as a place where certain capabilities are based in order to collect and route information. Some may find it useful to think of most of today’s space systems as a subset of cyberpower. After all, satellites are merely a set of sensors, receivers, and transmitters connected to computers that route information to terrestrial users via very long wireless connections. While this perspective might be useful to support operations in other operating environments, it fails to take into account all of the activities necessary to assure access to space-derived services while denying the same to an adversary.
The spacepower strategist must therefore work independently to secure space. At the same time, the spacepower strategist must work hand in hand with strategists of other forms of power and commerce to maximize the return on investment in space capabilities. This chapter lays out several considerations that weigh on the minds of spacepower strategists as they go about securing space in ways that allow them to perform their overarching function of providing capabilities to terrestrial users.
WHY IS SPACEPOWER IMPORTANT?
In a nutshell, a relatively small number of satellites in fixed and predictable orbits have become a huge center of gravity. The effect of these satellites cuts across all other sectors and centers of gravity in the modern state. As Clausewitz tells us, the center of gravity is “the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends.”8 He claims it is “always found where the mass is concentrated most densely.”9 The value of satellites is very high in terms of their pervasiveness and the growing reliance on their services across the fabric of everyday life and critical sectors of the modern state. As such, their target value is disproportionately high for state or nonstate actors who want to strike very heavy and far-reaching blows to modernized state opponents.10 At present, there is great concern that modern states have become too reliant on space for their security and economic well-being and that they have not taken sufficient precautions to protect and defend their satellites in space.11
Spacepower is a vital element of a state’s military instrument of power, but spacepower is also a vital element contributing to each instrument of a state’s power: diplomacy, information, military, economic, and culture (DIME-C). It is through the use of these instruments that states exercise their ability to influence the world around them in their never-ending pursuit of security, prestige, and wealth. To study spacepower only for its military contribution is to ignore the fact that spacefaring activities are a set of tools that confer far more than merely warfighting capabilities to the state. The tools of spacepower are engines that enable, enhance, and expand the opportunities for success as a state engages its geopolitical surroundings. A word of caution is immediately warranted: the fact that spacepower expands a state’s national power makes the spacefaring assets used by a state an attractive center of gravity, one that belligerent adversaries will attempt to counter. They cannot afford to do otherwise.
The strategist must contemplate spacepower in both war and peace. Because space-based assets provide global services, it must be kept in mind that space-based systems provide support to areas at war and other areas at peace simultaneously. Fortunately, the majority of the Earth is peaceful and preoccupied with commerce. However, there are always a few wars of various size and technical sophistication under way across the globe at any one time.
Presented here is a discussion of spacepower in the more theoretical terms of the nexus between policy and strategy, with a focus on the security community. As pointed out above, the spacepower strategist orchestrates systems that engage the entire globe and the space environment itself all at once. At the operational and tactical levels, satellite-based capabilities are apportioned to provide services to practically every form of human endeavor. The onus is on the strategist to learn from others and to gain personal experience with spacepower.
SPACEPOWER IN PEACE
The Primary Value of Spacepower: War Prevention
Spacepower provides different tools with which to manage security concerns. Spacepower provides a matchless opportunity to employ a relatively few satellites to gain global access and global presence. This allows space assets to deliver nearly ubiquitous capabilities from the spaceborne vantage point, which creates some unique opportunities for situational awareness, treaty verification, and interconnectivity for collective security arrangements. Spacepower is ideally suited to assist in war prevention—securing the peace—as a matter of day-to-day statecraft. To restate this in clearer terms, “The primary value of space power is not support to warfighters; rather it is that space capabilities are the primary means of war prevention.”12
Spacepower provides both direct and indirect methods to achieve war prevention. Direct methods involve the use of force or threats of force. Indirect methods involve cooperative interstate behavior to reduce security concerns without the use or threat of force. Spacepower lends itself more toward indirect methods, such as providing transparency into human activities and expanding broad international partnerships. Direct methods are more hard-power-centric and include capabilities that deliver assurance and dissuasive and deterrent effects, matched with careful diplomacy, in a cost/benefit calculus.
Indirect Methods
TRANSPARENCY. Space-based reconnaissance and surveillance platforms, because of their global and ubiquitous nature, contribute directly to reducing security concerns by providing insight into observable human activities around the globe. Insight into human activity in space is every bit as important as observation of terrestrial activities. When considered together, such insights can alleviate unfounded fears and prevent miscalculations. They also help to detect activities that serve as warnings and indications of activities of genuine concern. This was obvious right from the opening of the space age, during the Cold War, when reconnaissance satellites provided the critical imagery necessary to prove to the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration that there was no missile gap with the Soviet Union and that there was no need to expand defense programs. Spacepower assets alleviated international tensions.13
While it is extremely beneficial for any state to have transparency into the actions of another, the other is left at a distinct disadvantage if it has no such reciprocal transparency and hence may experience elevated security concern. Seen thought the realist’s lens of international relations, as presented by James Forsyth in chapter 3, self-interest and survival concerns can certainly plant the seeds of war. An alternative view, however, is that given the rising economic interdependency between states in this age of globalization, it is in most states’ interests to reduce security concerns among all states and thereby reduce the risk of war. This suggests that the best course of action is to share space-derived surveillance and reconnaissance widely, to reduce everyone’s security concerns. States will find this easiest among traditional allies and most difficult with traditional adversaries, but doing so serves to establish the facts with greater certainty, removing much of the ambiguity and enabling a better interplay of diplomacy among all parties. In this way, space-derived transparency does its part in preventing wars. Predictably, transnational actors will find this approach particularly appealing.
Only space-based systems can provide transparency into certain observable human activities everywhere on the globe. This is due largely to the right of overflight in space, as first expressed in National Security Council (memorandum) 5520 and the subsequent Eisenhower space policy—later enshrined in the Outer Space Treaty. Spacepower provides transparency that reduces the “fog” during peacetime (and wartime), increases the certainty of information, and allows contemplation of matters with a better approximation of the facts.14 This alleviates some of the chance, or uncertainty and risk, found in Clausewitz’s formulation of the trinity of war. But it is not perfect transparency, and spacepower cannot peer into the minds of people to determine their intentions.
LIMITATIONS OF TRANSPARENCY. Some states will undoubtedly feel an increased security concern if satellite-derived information about their observable affairs is distributed widely. China voiced this concern shortly after the release of Google Earth, but accommodations were made to degrade the quality of images of areas sensitive to the Chinese government.15 Such concerns must be addressed and dealt with directly, but such accommodations can often be made. Many states will undoubtedly change the way they conduct military and other affairs in ways that are not observable by satellites. India, for example, avoided detection of their efforts to test a nuclear device in 1998. They did so by scheduling activities around the overhead-pass times of U.S. imagery satellites and conducting them during times when sandstorms and intense heat could disrupt surveillance sensors.16 Such nefarious work-arounds can be eliminated by fielding a large constellation of several dozen reconnaissance and surveillance satellites owned and operated by transnational or state actors and using multispectral technology. If only a limited number of reconnaissance assets are available, stealthy techniques to overfly states of interest at unpredictable and unannounced times could be used. The point is that every inch of the earth can be imaged several times a day using various techniques that can counter concealment efforts.
Perhaps the greatest limitation of transparency is that sharing information about one’s own state of affairs gives potential adversaries insight into one’s strengths and weaknesses. The adversaries may choose to exploit this information later. This creates an incentive to withhold the most sensitive information or to give misleading or deceptive information. States must not provide transparency naively to those who would prey upon them. Nevertheless, there are many examples of the benefits of transparency as a war-prevention measure. Global transparency efforts are big undertakings and relatively expensive. To be most effective, such efforts require a high degree of international partnering. There will be rogues, so due caution is advisable.
PARTNERING. Another opportunity that spacepower provides for managing security concerns is capitalizing on the opportunity to grow collaborative international-security space arrangements. Multinational partnerships could be formed to provide space situational awareness, space traffic management, and space weather warnings, to name just a few. Such partnerships should not be limited to security-related functions but should cross into civil and commercial endeavors, such as space-based solar power, human missions to the Moon and Mars, space stations, space-based astronomy, etc. In fact, the lack of security classification barriers makes civil and commercial partnerships much easier than military arrangements. The goal is not only to accomplish something meaningful in space but also to use such opportunities as confidence-building measures to build mutual understanding and rapport among the participating states.
Conditions are favorable for increased partnering among states on space projects. Excitement about space remains high among most states, and despite fifty years of spacefaring activities, sending machines and humans to space remains highly complex, requiring a plethora of technologies, as well as exotic materials. As a result, cooperation among states is already required for going to space, if only to acquire the raw resources to fabricate space systems and to achieve the necessary exchange of ideas to advance the art of spacefaring. The goal is to expand the list of partners and the number and types of projects being worked on in cooperation with various states. This has particular ramifications for the strategist, who must weigh the costs and benefits of cooperation versus securitized isolation.
Naturally, it is easier for states to remain inside their comfort zones by building partnerships with their traditional allies, but it is important to broaden the network of space-related cooperative ventures to nontraditional partners, especially developing states that can be brought more fully into the international community through such efforts. Most important of all, however, is the need for cooperation on space activities between potential adversaries. In the past, joint ventures on space initiatives have proven successful as confidence-building measures. This is a modern equivalent of the medieval custom of having the prince or princess live as a guest in the capital of an enemy kingdom as a means of averting war.
The American and Soviet joint venture on the Apollo-Soyuz mission in the mid-1970s is an example. Although the tangible scientific benefits of such efforts are debatable, that instance demonstrated to both participants and to the international community that cooperation on a very challenging task is possible—even between the two Cold War antagonists with widely divergent strategic cultures. This civil spacepower effort became a point of departure for other confidence-building gestures between the two and contributed to the easing of tensions in their homelands and in the rest of the world as well. This reduced security concerns. It must be noted that Apollo-Soyuz was undertaken against the backdrop of detente already under way. The space effort was a continuation of such policies, but it stands out as one of the clearest examples of confidence building between former competitors.
Partnering on spacefaring projects brings together more brilliant minds and resources to solve problems and advance the art. It not only increases the likelihood of success of those programs but over time reduces friction during peacetime between states, decreases the potential for cultural misunderstandings, increases the opportunities for alliances, integrates aspects of each state’s economic and industrial bases, and fosters working relationships between governments.17 This alleviates some of the hatred and enmity found in Clausewitz’s trinity of war.
LIMITATIONS OF PARTNERING. Partnering is not always easy, as the members belonging to the International Space Station will attest and as the mostly European states belonging to the Galileo Consortium will point out. In fact, it can be frustrating, if not maddening. It may even result in worse relations between states. Disparate economic strengths, differing distribution of resources, and unequal talent pools give states different values as potential partners. States that are rich in some areas will be highly sought as partners. Poorer states will not. A concerted effort will be needed to draw the developing states into various spacefaring partnerships. All are valuable as prospective partners, as parts of a collaborative international security arrangement.
COMMENTARY ON INDIRECT METHODS OF WAR PREVENTION. The opportunities that spacepower offers spacefaring and nonspacefaring states alike in the forms of global transparency and international partnering as means to prevent wars are not fundamentally different from opportunities resident in other operating environments. What is unique about spacepower, however, is the global vantage point that it provides, as well as how it involves some of the highest technology of any state. The majority of states—especially weaker or developing ones that are not yet spacefaring—will find the indirect methods highly attractive and accrue “soft power” to the leaders of such efforts.18 These approaches may be sufficient for most states’ space-related security needs, while reducing their security concerns inside the terrestrial confines.
Direct Methods
Many states will not feel comfortable resting their security solely on such idealistic constructs as indirect methods. Some states, especially those with more security-minded strategic cultures, will likely acquire or expand space weaponry (overtly or covertly) to alleviate their security concerns, in the form of defensive systems to protect their space assets from attack and offensive systems to deny foes the opportunity to exploit space against them.
In this section the focus is on hard power and space weapons, weapons that create their effects in space against the space segment, regardless of where the weapons themselves are based. This section will not look at spacepower’s long history of support to terrestrial forces that are continuously engaged in dissuasion and deterrence strategies or open warfare. The use of space systems to cue and connect nuclear and conventional deterrent forces is well documented elsewhere and will not be addressed here.
Many factors contribute to space-related security concerns faced by states and directly correlate to their likely drives for space weaponry. Each state will perform its own threat-risk calculus and respond accordingly. There are some elements of the threat-risk calculus that must be kept in mind. For example, more advanced spacefaring states have the most at risk in space and therefore greater incentives to field defensive space weaponry. Less advanced states have greater incentives to build offensive space weapons, as asymmetric means of countering the power of space-reliant potential adversaries. Proliferation of space weapons will drive the need for greater space defensive measures. Finally, every state is a user of space services, whether it is spacefaring or not, and therefore all states are space actors and must consider their space threat-risk calculi.
Acquiring space weapons is not a sufficient precursor to war, and as the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War illustrated, massive nuclear arsenals mated to launch-ready delivery systems are not automatic triggers for war. War has political roots. In fact, the possession of hard-power capabilities managed in a responsible and constrained manner enables the war-preventive strategies of dissuasion and deterrence, as were used to avert hostilities in the Cold War. An important point must be made here: states must openly acknowledge their possession of space weapons if those weapons are to be useful tools in hard-power dissuasion and deterrence. There is no war-prevention benefit in keeping space weapons secret, other than avoiding a space arms race—which may be desirable but may also fail to serve the cause of preserving peace. A potential adversary must clearly perceive a credible space weapons capability if dissuasion and deterrence strategies are to work.
ASSURANCES. The concept of “assurances” is borrowed directly from nuclear-related literature. It involves guarantees between stronger and weaker states made for the purpose of preventing proliferation of war and weapons of mass destruction. There are negative and positive security assurances. These concepts can be related to space weapons and warfare. Negative assurances would be guarantees by space-weapons states not to use or threaten the use of such weapons against states that have formally renounced them. Positive assurances would be the agreement between a space-weapons state and a nonspace-weapons state that assistance would be given to the nonspace-weapons state if attacked or threatened by a state that uses space weapons against it. This could include defending the satellites of the nonspace-weapons state, sharing space-derived data with it, and striking its adversary’s counterspace systems.
Presently there are no known assurances between space-weapons states and nonspace-weapons states in the international community. This is a wide-open area, awaiting diplomatic engagement. Presumably the threat posed by space weapons has not yet raised the level of security concerns among the international community to the point of stimulating assurance-making among states.
LIMITATIONS OF ASSURANCES. As we have seen in the nuclear community, some states will give public assurances not to proliferate while working covertly to acquire weapons. There is always the risk of being hoodwinked, which highlights the need for greater transparency and other soft power–related means of securing the aims of policy. Many states possess devices that can interfere with satellites, and many have done so. Nevertheless, the term “space weapon” remains hotly debated. Many well-meaning people contend that space is a sanctuary and refuse to concede that space weapons exist, are proliferating, and have been used in warfare against satellite services several times in recent years. Iranian jamming of European satellite signals to prevent foreign news from entering Iran typifies the current state of space warfare.19 It is not heroic, nor does it meet the Clausewitzian concept of violence, in the sense of bloodshed.20 But it does meet the Clausewitzian definition of war in the sense of a form of engagement used for a political purpose against the will of another state or states.21 Ironically, and perhaps paradoxically, wishful thinking and denial of the fact that space warfare is already upon us are not helping to bolster the war-preventive abilities of spacepower.22
DISSUASION. Dissuasion, like soft-power methods, rests on the ability to shape the preferences of others so they behave in a certain desired manner. But unlike soft power, where you induce others to choose courses of action you would like them to pursue simply because they find them attractive, dissuasion is really about persuading an actor who may pose a threat before that actor acquires the capability actually to pose a danger.23 Dissuasion is a discussion or negotiation of sorts, where one party talks the other out of developing a system or systems that the former would consider threatening. It typically includes rewards and incentives for good behavior but usually also threats of escalating punishment for noncompliance. Such punishments may span from economic sanctions to preemptive military strikes. The goal is to cut a deal to preserve the peace by removing potential security dilemmas. Like deterrence, which will be discussed below, practitioners of dissuasion must be credible and capable. The dissuaded must rationally decide to comply because they deem the costs of noncompliance to outweigh the benefits of acquiring the new capability.
In its most familiar form, dissuasion is a method attempted by powerful, long-established nuclear states to persuade nonnuclear states not to proliferate. They approach states who pose threats before they do proliferate and directly attempt to dissuade them from going any further with their programs. Often economic incentives, such as the lifting of sanctions, trade deals, and foreign aid, are offered. Threats of the use of force are seldom emphasized in the media by the negotiating states, but sometimes “red lines” are established that clearly identify unacceptable behaviors that could elicit military responses. The goal is for the state to decide on its own that joining in the nuclear competition is not in its interest.
As applied to spacepower, a state that demonstrates a robust defensive and offensive capability may tacitly dissuade others from attempting to compete against that state not only in space but also in arenas that require space support.24 Conversely, a state whose overall power, especially military power, appears directly tied to its space-based assets—a center of gravity—but has no visible means for defending them or denying other states from exploiting space for military gain, almost baits potential adversaries into fielding space weaponry.
LIMITATIONS OF DISSUASION. The evidence shows mixed results for dissuasion. This is most evident regarding nuclear proliferation. Since the mid-1990s Pakistan and North Korea have acquired nuclear weapons, and Iran appears to be well on its way, in spite of often very intense dissuasive efforts by the international community. Libya may be a success story. After lengthy discussions with international diplomats, Libya’s leaders made a cost-benefit analysis that resulted in terminating their nuclear program by 2010. However, once Libya had met all United Nations’ demands for eliminating its nuclear weapons program it found itself embroiled in a foreign-supported civil war that overthrew its government. In other cases, some states may have been dissuaded from proliferating nuclear weapons, but the evidence is not clear.
There is an important note to add regarding spacepower. A state that has overwhelming spacepower may successfully dissuade another actor from competing militarily in space or in other space-supported venues. However, if the former lacks the ability to negate space systems nonlethally (with respect to people) and in ways that could assist in achieving its aims, its options might be limited to pursuing asymmetric and potentially more violent means. In other words, space weapons poised against uninhabited satellites constitute nonlethal force “in being.” Using such weapons in lieu of lethal means is in keeping with the spirit and intent of the law of armed conflict, which seeks to minimize human suffering in war. Here again, the good intentions of the arms-control community, which seeks to ban space weapons and all attacks on space systems or their signals, may otherwise actually lead to increased casualties and human suffering in war. Irony and paradox are visited once more.
DETERRENCE. When soft power and dissuasion fail, spacepower has a central role in deterrence strategies to prevent war. Deterrence is the prevention of war based on coercion whereby one actor threatens to impose unacceptable damage on an adversary if that adversary uses already existing capabilities against the former’s interests.25 Threats must be credible and deemed sufficient of inflicting unacceptable damage. This describes the standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
During the arms race of the Cold War, U.S. and Soviet space systems became thoroughly integrated into their respective states’ nuclear-attack warning systems, command and control, assessment, targeting, planning, and most every aspect of finding, targeting, and potentially destroying each other’s assets. The end of the Cold War and the reduction of security concerns that followed allowed the focus of space systems to evolve rapidly from strictly nuclear-force support to support for all warfighting activities, including conventional and covert operations. It remains clear, however, that spacepower assets, as deeply integrated as they are in all aspects of the military operations of advanced spacefaring states, will continue to be an interconnecting glue making terrestrial deterrence possible.
It may be possible to deter an advanced spacefaring adversary who is heavily reliant on space systems but who has taken few or no precautions to defend them. In this case, possession of a credible set of offensive space weapons may cow the adversary into avoiding confrontation. Sensing this prospect, however, the adversary may initiate a crash program to acquire space weapons of its own.
LIMITATIONS OF DETERRENCE. Unfortunately, deterrence is based on the abstraction that there is no limit to the violence that can be threatened in retaliation. As Clausewitz noted, “Each side, therefore, compels its opponent to follow suit; a reciprocal action is started which must lead, in theory, to extremes.”26 This tendency can easily lead to arms racing.
COMMENTARY ON DIRECT METHODS OF WAR PREVENTION. Dissuasion and deterrence come with risks. They presuppose that both sides of a potential confrontation are equally rational, have an equal understanding of the stakes, and are using the same or similar rational calculi to establish policy in an interactive fashion.27 Given differences in strategic cultures, these presumptions can never be the case in reality.28 As a result, there are margins of error associated with every calculation. A state that builds offensive space weapons overtly for the purpose of enabling dissuasive and deterrent strategies for war prevention may be misunderstood as having hostile intentions that trigger security dilemmas for other states. The same is true for a state that builds what it considers to be a defensive system but has an apparent dual application as an offensive system. China’s test of a direct ascent antisatellite (ASAT) weapon in January of 2007 may be a case in point.29 A state may do its best to tailor its forces to support dissuasive and deterrent strategies and focus them at whatever they suspect the enemy holds dear, only to discover that the enemy reacts quite differently than expected. There are no guarantees.30 A way to reduce the margins of error and the risk associated with direct hard-power war-prevention strategies is to include them within the policy-driven context of both indirect strategies suggested above—within the framework of global transparency and within broad international partnerships.
The use of declaratory policies may be a useful way to blend indirect and direct means of war prevention strategies involving spacepower. This could take the form of announcing the possession of space weapons but explaining to the international community exactly under what circumstances they would be used and how. This could stimulate a constructive international debate while at the same time drawing clear lines in the sand between potential belligerents.
As shown above, a strategist can employ spacepower in a structural manner to ameliorate and mitigate mistrust, misdeeds, misperceptions, and miscalculations on the world stage. This creates a more peaceful, predictable, and secure environment for commerce and other human activities. However, war remains a part of the human condition, and while most of the world is at peace, there are always, as we have noted, wars under way. Sometimes the spacepower strategist will be an observer to others’ wars. Sometimes the spacepower strategist’s own nation will be engaged in war, and space warfare may be a part of it.
SPACEPOWER IN WAR
When War Prevention Fails
The primary mission of security spacepower at all times is war prevention. To that end, constabulary and martial means must assure freedom of access to space and freedom of action in space for all lawful and nonhostile spacefaring activities. Martial space forces are those that work to provide space security when it is contested. When war is waged in space, the goal is to limit the effects only to belligerents while allowing the rest of international commerce and other activities in space to continue unimpeded. Space control with respect to hostile space forces will likely be required in order to achieve this.31
We are well within the age of space warfare, wherein satellite services are engaged and negated for political purposes. In the words of Colin Gray:
It is a rule in strategy, one derived empirically from the evidence of two and a half millennia, that anything of great strategic importance to one belligerent, for that reason has to be worth attacking by others. And the greater the importance, the greater has to be the incentive to damage, disable, capture, or destroy it. In the bluntest of statements: space warfare is a certainty in the future because the use of space in war has become vital. . . . Regardless of public sentimental or environmentally shaped attitudes toward space as the pristine final frontier, space warfare is coming.32
What Does Spacepower Bring to Warfare?
Spacepower provides an exponential advance in cutting the fog and friction of war on a global scale. Today’s most prolific spacepower, the United States, uses its wide variety of space systems as the key components of a global reconnaissance-strike complex.33 This complex allows commanders to integrate rapid and synchronized attacks from air, land, sea, and cyber forces anywhere on the globe to maneuver and to provide “fires” (that is, strikes of various kinds) across the depth of an enemy’s homeland with a rapidity, precision, and tempo that can overwhelm an adversary. Space assets form a ubiquitous global infrastructure—a communications and information backbone—into which friendly forces stationed or deployed anywhere in the world can plug to receive services that increase situational awareness, improve precision engagement, and expedite command and control.34 The mechanism is the same as German blitzkrieg at the outset of World War II—reduce friendly fog and friction while expediting rapid and synchronized maneuvers and fires to increase the fog and friction experienced by the enemy.35 With today’s spacepower it could be called astrokrieg.
The Chinese have described the contributions of spacepower as the informatization of warfare and believe it will be the single greatest contributor to warfare in the coming century.36 There is little doubt that the ability to collect and route information during wartime is critical. This is consistent with John Boyd’s “OODA-loop” theory, wherein space-derived information is used by commanders to observe situations, orient their understanding of them, decide what to do about them, and act on their decisions.37
Offense and Defense
It is often said that defense is the stronger form of warfare.38 This is not true in space—today. Defending satellites and their data links is a difficult proposition at best. Satellites are delicate, fragile devices that can easily fall prey to any number of space weapons that currently exist, such as lasers, radio-frequency jamming, and brute-force directed-energy weapons, as well as surface-to-space missiles with kinetic-kill vehicles—many of which are relatively small and highly mobile or transportable systems. While satellites in low earth orbit are the most vulnerable to lasers and lofted kinetic-kill vehicles, satellites all the way out in the geostationary belt and in highly elliptical orbits share a universal vulnerability to radio-frequency jamming and electromagnetic brute-force attacks.
Satellites need not be physically destroyed to be rendered ineffective. Satellites are tasked (as applicable) and provide their services to ground stations and users via the electromagnetic spectrum. Hence there is a rule: no spectrum means no spacepower. The rapid proliferation of counterspace jammers and electronic intrusion devices around the world in recent years is a testament to the general recognition of this rule.
It must be noted at this point that negating satellites via temporary and reversible means, such as brute-force jamming or laser dazzling, requires that such weapons engage their targets continuously. This makes such systems detectable and targetable by weapons resident in the operating environment, wherever they are located. For example, a jammer in Cuba that is negating an American satellite can be geolocated and countered by diplomatic moves or by air or land attacks. It is apparent that a country with a policy of achieving space superiority or space control against a prolific user of space systems via temporary and reversible means necessarily must have a large number of such counterspace weapons, a number commensurate with the number of space systems in use by the adversary. In addition, it must have a robust intelligence community that can identify, characterize, and prioritize such targets. It must also have sufficient defenses to protect such weapons, because their very use makes them vulnerable to attack.
Conversely, a state may configure its counterspace forces to conduct a cyberstyle attack against a satellite’s internal programming or strike with permanent effects to degrade or destroy adversary satellites. This configuration approach may satisfy the requirement for continuous engagement, thereby improving the survivability of one’s counterspace weapons and obviating the need for defending them with other forces. In addition, it means that one weapon can be used successively to negate multiple satellites permanently. It seems, then, that permanent negation becomes both a cost- and resource-saving option. However, resorting to only one form of attack seriously curtails strategic options, which can be highly problematic. For example, during wartime, modern militaries employ commercial and third-party satellites to provide war-essential services. Using permanent methods of negation against commercial and third-party satellites could dramatically expand the conflict and the list of belligerents faced by the attacker. In contrast, using discrete, limited-duration temporary and reversible methods of negation against such targets will not likely expand the conflict, as evidenced by the fact that hostilities have not been caused by the numerous episodes of satellite jamming that have already occurred.
Efforts to defend space systems have been paltry at best. An adversary with robust counterspace weapons may be able to negate all friendly space systems in a matter of hours; therefore, it is imperative for spacepowers to acquire the ability to find, fix, track, target, and destroy an adversary’s space weapons very quickly. Such hostile systems may reside on land, at sea, in the air, or in space. It will require close coordination with terrestrial forces to engage space weapons wherever they reside at the behest of the space commander.
The many examples of satellite jamming, lasing, and signal piracy indicate that we are well into the age of space warfare. Like war in all other realms, it is a contest of political wills using specific means to achieve the ends of policy. We know what space warfare looks like. It has appeared in several different forms—most being nonlethal, temporary, and reversible. As indicated in preceding paragraphs, we know enough about space warfare to anticipate how it will manifest itself in other, more destructive forms.
Ironically, the law of armed conflict may drive actors toward space warfare. It is quickly noted that engaging targets in space creates effects on Earth in ways that do not kill people (at least not directly). The law of armed conflict requires belligerents to behave in ways that minimize human suffering. Therefore, it is incumbent on belligerents to consider negating satellites in ways that obviate the need to resort to lethal force inside terrestrial confines. In other words, jamming a communications signal on board a satellite would be far more consistent with the law of armed conflict than bombing transmission or reception towers in populated areas. A case in point occurred during Operation Allied Force.39 The Serbians were using a satellite to distribute command-and-control communications to their army in Kosovo, which was engaged in dehousing the ethnic Albanians living in the area. NATO used lethal force against transmission stations in Belgrade; if instead it had discreetly jammed the Serbian signals, it would not have had to do so, and civilian deaths and other collateral damage would have been avoided.
There is a drawback to temporary levels of negation: it is exceptionally difficult to determine if the application of a nondestructive weapon is achieving the desired effect. Permanent levels of negation may produce more easily observable confirmation of results. This is somewhat analogous to the problems in assessing tank kills in operation Desert Storm. Some commanders considered a tank killed if its unit had been attacked and the tank was no longer moving. Others did not. But all agreed that a tank with its turret blown off had been killed.
It must be kept in mind that a small number of very powerful directed-energy space weapons used in quick succession can permanently negate dozens of satellites. On the other hand, it would take several dozen space weapons that, like jammers, only cause temporary effects to sustain negation effects on the constellations of the larger spacefaring states. Since noise jammers are only effective when broadcasting and broadcasting jammers are relatively easy to find and target, there are incentives to develop space weapons that cause permanent effects—but do not create additional space debris.
Temporary and reversible methods of attack have proven the most popular. Space debris created by destructive engagements in space creates long-term hazards for all spacefaring parties—including the attacker. To preserve one’s own freedom of action in space, the creation of space debris must be mitigated, especially during wartime, when access to space-derived services is most critical.
Space Control
Space control is not only provided for military purposes. Space control allows civil, commercial, and other space activities to continue uninterruptedly around the globe. It provides the benign environment that is a necessary precondition for most spacefaring activities. The importance of ensuring uninterrupted space commerce cannot be understated. All states are increasingly reliant on space systems for matters critical to their economic well-being.
Space control efforts must minimize disruptions to the flow of the global economy. During war every effort should be made to limit the effects to the belligerents only. This minimizes the risk of war expansion caused by the drawing in of other states seeking to protect their own interests by force. Space control also requires preventing the creation of space debris, because, as noted, it becomes a hazard to spacefaring activities and denies freedom of action in space to all actors in the vicinity of debris fields. Such are the negative aims of space control.
Achieving the negative aims of space control requires the passive or active defense of space systems under attack. This may require attacks to suppress or destroy the adversary’s offensive space weapons, which may be based in the air, on land, at sea, in space, or within the cyber medium. It may be necessary to drive a foe all the way to the point of offensive culmination (that is, its maximum effort, all reserves committed, after which its assault wanes) of its counterspace forces to arrive at the security required to assure free passage of commerce and other activities. The policy, strategy, and situation will dictate the degree of offensive space control that is used. Factors to consider will be the time and place where space superiority must be gained, how rapidly it is needed, what parts of the adversary space systems are vulnerable, how to mitigate collateral damage, how quickly space control can be achieved (if it is even possible), how long space control must be sustained, and the desired level of negation (e.g., destruction, degradation, denial, disruption, deception, deterrence, or dissuasion) to achieve the ends of policy. Space control does not need to be permanent to be effective. In fact, attempting to impose total space control over an adversary, dominating all decisive points, including the equatorial choke point would be counterproductive, as preparations to do so would drain the budget and be highly wasteful.40
Space superiority and space control efforts also have a positive aim. The positive aim is to sustain the requisite degree of freedom of action to enable friendly space forces to engage the missions of direct space support to friendly forces, space denial of adversary space services (if required), space logistics to sustain friendly operations in orbit, and someday perhaps space strike (striking adversary targets in the terrestrial environment from space). Each of these missions will have priorities dictated by the policies and strategies they support.
Space situational awareness is a vital component of spacefaring. Freedom of access to space and freedom of action in space require timely and reliable information about what is actually happening in orbit. It includes what could be called “space traffic management” and debris avoidance, in addition to characterization of threats, anomaly detection and attribution, and attack assessment. The ability to characterize accurately what is happening in space becomes more critical as the world becomes more space reliant, as the number and frequency of spacefaring activities increase, and as space weapons proliferate.
Competition for space superiority and space control is not limited to warfare. Such competition also occurs during peacetime negotiations of treaties, international law, and codes of conduct. Many of these instruments seek to curtail the freedom of access to space or freedom of action in space in certain ways. This is why some countries are very cautious about entering into such negotiations. The long-term implications of various forms of agreements are difficult to anticipate. There is little doubt, however, that additional treaties, laws, and codes of conduct are warranted to codify the appropriate and inappropriate behaviors of spacefaring actors. This will soon be critical as it becomes necessary to accommodate a rapidly increasing number of satellites in orbit, space tourism, space hotels, and lunar as well as asteroid resource development.
DIRECT SPACE SUPPORT. Direct space support to terrestrial forces includes all of the space force enhancements and information services to which modern militaries have become accustomed. The negative aim of direct space support includes providing all of the space services associated with what is coming to be called the surveillance-strike complex. The surveillance-strike complex includes all those sensors, communications links, and other space capabilities that allow terrestrial forces to operate day to day and to defend friendly interests. It includes such things as warnings, tip-offs, indications, cross-sensor cues, and assessments of attack by air, land, sea, cyber, or space forces. It includes all space systems used in any way to integrate passive and active defensive measures. One example involves the satellites associated with the Defense Support Program and the Space-Based Infrared System, which form parts of the missile-warning network of the United States. That network uses satellites to detect and characterize missile launches, routes the data into the fire-control systems of missile defense batteries, and connects the batteries with commanders via communications satellites.
The positive aim of direct space support to terrestrial forces mentioned above includes providing all the space services associated with the reconnaissance-strike complex (as distinct from the “surveillance-strike complex” mentioned above). The reconnaissance-strike complex includes all space sensors, communications links, and other space capabilities that allow terrestrial forces to attack the enemy. It includes the entire space-enabled ability to find, fix, track, target, engage, and negate enemy targets and then to assess the results. An example is a reconnaissance satellite finding an enemy tank, routing this data to a strike aircraft via communications satellite, and guiding aircraft munitions to the target via the Global Positioning System, while observing battle-damage indications from other satellites in space.
The surveillance- and reconnaissance-strike complexes of most actors have many space-related elements in common. The Global Positioning System, for example, provides data that is typically critical to both complexes. Of particular note is the blending of commercial assets, such as communications satellites, into the strike complexes of states and nonstate actors. Commercial space systems used by the enemy to advance its war effort, including satellites in orbit, become valid military targets. Their likelihood of being attacked is directly related to the intensity of the war aims of the belligerents and their ability to strike relevant commercial systems.
SPACE DENIAL. Denial of adversary space forces is as important as space control. Its essence is the use of space weapons to negate services provided by adversary space systems. Its negative aim is to defend friendly interests by negating the enemy’s space systems associated with its reconnaissance-strike complex, thereby increasing the fog and friction inherent to the enemy’s offensive efforts and to hasten their offensive culmination.
There are two positive aims for which space denial can be used. The first includes space denial attacks against an adversary’s space systems associated with its surveillance-strike complex to facilitate subsequent attacks against enemy forces and to hasten their defensive culmination. The second positive aim of space denial has received little attention. It involves negating adversary space systems simply to raise its costs in the war effort, in an attempt to coerce it into accepting terms. This can be done as part of an overall punishment strategy or risk strategy of imposing costs on the enemy with the promise of imposing even greater costs in the future.41 An interesting twist to this strategy might be limiting strikes to satellites in orbit. Nobody dies, but tangible costs are imposed. It might be possible to coerce a state that is heavily reliant on space services into accepting modest terms by negating only its satellites in orbit. Such prospects heighten the need for effective space defenses for highly reliant states. States that do not find themselves heavily reliant on space have far less need for space defenses and may become concerned when others merely discuss defensive systems, since the line between offense and defense is so easily blurred.
It is important to remember that an adversary’s satellites are global assets. It may be politically untenable for a number of reasons to damage an adversary’s satellite permanently. For example, while an imagery satellite may threaten to disclose friendly troop movements in one region, that same satellite might perform treaty verification on the opposite side of the globe or other missions for which there are friendly interests in preserving. In many scenarios, space denial might best be limited to very localized and temporary effects.
Space-denial efforts will be complicated if an adversary is using third-party launch facilities, satellites, or ground-control systems provided by commercial vendors, international consortia, or allies. Diplomatic efforts will likely be required to eliminate third-party support to adversaries, but if the political factors demand, friendly forces must be ready to expand the conflict by striking suppliers of space support to adversaries. If diplomatic efforts fail and policy does not allow expansion of the conflict to strike third-party targets, the adversary has a sanctuary that will undoubtedly be exploited.
SPACE LOGISTICS. The next mission to consider is space logistics. Space logistics are those activities undertaken to sustain satellites and their capabilities in orbit. It includes launching satellites to orbit, checking out on orbit, maintaining, refueling, and repairing, inter alia. With regard to wartime space logistics it is imperative for spacefaring states to repair or replace lost satellite capabilities in orbit for which they have insufficient terrestrial redundancy. The goal is to restore capabilities rapidly before their loss affects political, economic, or combat operations. Activating on-orbit spares, leasing commercial satellite services, launching new satellites to replace those lost through attrition, or gaining access to an ally’s satellite services may do this.42 It is also essential to repair or replace lost satellite ground-control systems. Methods for doing this may include transferring ground-control responsibility to another location (fixed or mobile), leasing commercial support, or obtaining ground support from an allied state.
A word of caution is warranted regarding the launch of new satellites to replace those lost to enemy attack. Unless there is complete certainty that the adversary is culminated offensively and that all adversary space weapons have been accounted for and successfully negated, launching a satellite of the same design into the same orbit will be like throwing skeet in front of a shooter. In practice there is no way to be absolutely certain that the threat is completely removed.
SPACE STRIKE. Space strike, meaning striking terrestrial targets from weapons based in space, is the last mission area to be discussed. It is possible that state or nonstate actors will put in orbit weapons that can strike terrestrial targets in the air, land, sea, or cyber operating environments. Space strike could have a negative aim of striking an adversary’s advancing forces or offensive systems as a matter of defending friendly interests and hastening the offensive culmination of an adversary. Space strike could also have two positive aims. The first could be striking adversary forces or their defensive systems to expedite their defensive culmination. The next could be attacking their centers of gravity directly as part of the war-winning effort.
There are many good reasons for not putting space-strike weapons in orbit around the Earth. Among them is the enormous expense and their vulnerability once there. But a paradoxical logic of warfare increases the likelihood of someone’s actually doing it. It works like this: there are many good reasons not to put terrestrial strike weapons in space; putting such weapons in space makes no sense; no one is expecting such weapons in space; therefore one achieves the element of surprise by putting such weapons in space!
THE COMBINED-ARMS APPROACH. During times of peace, spacepower assets monitor the globe, helping to identify and characterize potential threats. When a threat emerges, political and military leaders may opt to send terrestrially based surveillance and reconnaissance sensors into the area of interest to get a closer look. Should hostilities break out, space forces must secure whatever degree of space control is required and contribute whatever they can to help friendly forces in-theater in terms of space support to the surveillance- and reconnaissance-strike complexes. But space forces must still watch the rest of the world, in every other theater, looking for tip-offs, warnings, and indications of other threats.
No claim is made that spacepower by itself can be decisive in general conventional warfare, but in certain circumstances it may help set the conditions for continued success by friendly forces. Conversely, the defeat of one’s spacepower capabilities may turn the tide of the war against friendly forces and contribute to overall defeat. There may be certain forms of limited warfare wherein the information gleaned from space or strikes into or from space, kinetic or otherwise, may achieve the political and military aims of an operation. On such occasions it would be proper to say that spacepower has been decisive.
CONCLUSION
Modern strategists find themselves having to integrate a far broader set of tools in many different operating environments than did their predecessors. Nevertheless, the nature of strategy and competition remain the same. As in ancient times, the outcomes of events on land matter most, because it is on land that people live, work, and conduct politics from which policies are devised. The advent of spacepower has changed nothing in this classic dynamic, other than opening a new operating medium where tools of high strategic value are placed. This warrants the defense of these tools and their use to drive the desired outcomes of policy.
It must be remembered that the primary value of spacepower is war prevention, not support to warfighters. It prevents war by providing transparency into certain observable human activities around the globe and in space itself. This removes many uncertainties and may alleviate security concerns or allow them to be addressed by politicians with a better approximation of the facts. Spacepower enables and enhances all of the instruments of power: diplomacy, information, military, economic, and culture. This makes space assets a center of gravity for developed states that use space-derived services prolifically. Spacepower also provides opportunities for cooperative ventures on spacefaring activities across all sectors. These ventures can become the framework of better international relationships and confidence building between potential adversaries. Powerful spacefaring states may be able to use martial spacepower in ways that prevent wars by providing assurances, as well as employing dissuasive and deterrent strategies. The use of declaratory policies by states can take much of the uncertainty out of the system and create a basis for much-needed international dialog.
Sometimes war cannot be avoided. We are currently living, and forever will be, in the age of space warfare. War has already spilled into space, not because space warfare is an end in itself—it is not—but because assuring friendly access to space services while denying the same to adversaries is of growing importance in the prosecution of war. When war breaks out, the first priority of space forces is gaining relative space superiority and, in some remote cases, total space control over adversaries—while not interfering with other lawful and nonhostile users. The second priority of space forces in war is support to terrestrial warfighters. The overarching concern throughout space warfare is keeping the international lines of commerce and communications open and minimizing the impact to others. Space debris must be avoided in all but the most extreme circumstances, and when created, it should be promptly cleaned up, although methods for doing so remain on drawing boards.
Because spacepower offers nonlethal means of negating satellites that are critical to some adversaries’ reconnaissance- and surveillance-strike complexes, there is a moral requirement expressed in the law of armed conflict to consider striking key satellites in lieu of using lethal force on Earth to achieve desired effects. This means air, land, sea, and cyber target lists should be studied closely by space forces and that in cases where the desired effect can be achieved; counterspace strikes should be used instead of lethal force in the terrestrial environment.
The international arms control community would do well to “give up the ghost” of space as a sanctuary.43 Banning interference with satellites during warfare will escalate the use of lethal force against humans and property in the terrestrial confines. In their zeal to ban space weaponry, arms controllers have not taken into account that such bans—if followed—would be a death sentence for countless humans. The irony of this point invokes an ancient saying: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Space is heavily militarized, with powerful spacefaring states attempting to enable their surveillance- and reconnaissance-strike complexes in ways that accelerate the scale, timing, and tempo of combat operations far beyond the ability of nonspacefaring actors to cope. It enables astrokrieg, which has all the shock-and-awe components of blitzkrieg but on the scale of global reach. Weak actors are likely to employ space weapons in attempts to counter the advantage that spacepower confers on powerful states. The most dangerous situation, however, occurs if two powerful spacefaring states go to war with each other. If the motives are powerful, it is likely that the belligerents will be forced to counter each other’s space systems in the very early stages. At present there are inadequate defenses for space systems, but defense is possible, even required, if only to secure space systems from criminal activity, up to and including advanced methods of attack. Space-denial strategies will evolve wherein a belligerent attacks an adversary’s space systems to inflict costs or to inflict strategic paralysis on the enemy before offering terms. Finally, space is very much a part of the military mix of all actors—state and nonstate. It must be recognized that military spacepower is not a replacement for terrestrial forces but an additional set of tools that deliver unique capabilities.44 “[T]here is nothing special about space, strategically speaking.”45 It is just another venue for normal human activity, which must include the constabulary and the martial means of enforcing the rule of law and securing the peace.
Spacepower is of growing importance to the strategist and therefore requires continuous study. It provides a unique set of tools that must be considered in the formulation of strategies for war and peace—two conditions that coexist in the minds of space professionals in commanding their global spacepower assets. War prevention is the primary role of spacepower, but sometimes war is unavoidable. At such times, it is best to keep in mind another Berra quote, “The other teams could make trouble for us if they win.”46 Keep the strategic advantage.
NOTES
1. The author apologizes to fellow members of the Red Sox Nation for beginning this chapter with a quote, if perhaps apocryphal, from an archrival team member (recently departed).
2. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 119.
3. Ibid., 119.
4. Colin S. Gray, Modern Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1. The word “competition” has been substituted for “war,” which appears in the original text. The author intends to show in this chapter that spacepower provides benefits beyond the scope of war.
5. Everett C. Dolman, Pure Strategy: Power and Principle in the Space and Information Age (New York: Frank Cass, 2005), 6.
6. Gray, Modern Strategy, 256–57. “Competition” is substituted for “war,” and “context” for “characteristics.”
7. The operating media are presented here in the order in which human strategic experience expanded into them.
8. Clausewitz, On War, 595.
9. Ibid., 485.
10. This point is made by Colin Gray as a “rule of strategy, . . . that anything of great strategic importance to one belligerent, for that reason has to be worth attacking by others.” He states, “[S]pace warfare is a certainty in the future because the use of space in war has become vital.” Colin S. Gray, Another Bloody Century (London: Phoenix, 2006), 307.
11. This point is raised in several sources, for example, Report of the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization (Washington, D.C., 11 January 2001), i.
12. The claim that the proper primary mission for spacepower is to prevent war was first made to the author of this chapter by Dr. S. Pete Worden, Brig. Gen., USAF (Ret.), in the fall of 2005. He expands this to claim that spacepower is the primary means that states can use to prevent wars. S. Pete Worden, “Future Strategy and Professional Development: A Roadmap” (paper submitted to the National Defense University Space Power Theory Team, 2006), 1.
13. The security concern faced by the Eisenhower administration with regard to a Soviet missile attack was so great that the president and congressional funders accepted twelve successive failures of Corona systems before the thirteenth actually delivered usable imagery. Described in William E. Burrows, This New Ocean (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 217, 232–33.
14. Clausewitz, On War, 140. In describing what he calls the “uncertainty of all information,” Clausewitz describes the quality of information in war as affected by a kind of fog, which he claims “tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.”
15. Google Earth is an Internet-based imagery database set in an easy-to-use imagery-manipulation program that is expanding to show relatively high-quality images of the entire Earth. “Google Earth” is a licensed trade mark of Google Incorporated of Mountain View California.
16. Tara Shankar Sahay, “Pakistan Feels Let Down by US Spy Satellites,” Rediff on the Net, 13 May 1998, http://www.rediff.com/news/1998/may/13spy.htm; Krishnan Gurswamy, “India Tricks US Satellites,” Associated Press, 19 May 1998, http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/India980519_nukes.html.
17. Clausewitz, On War, 119–21.
18. “Soft power” is defined in Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004), 5.
19. Christoph Seidler, “How Iran Silences Unwanted News,” ABC News/International, 1 April 2010, http://abcnews.go.com/International/iran-jamming-satellite-signals-carrying-foreign-media/story?id=10258000 (accessed 12 Oct 2010).
20. The author thanks Professor Harold Winton and Dr. James Kiras of the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies for sharing their thoughts on this matter. Professor Winton asserts his belief that violence in the sense of bloodshed is what Clausewitz had in mind in defining “war,” although Professor Winton also accepts that “war” in the sense used by the author is an acceptably “elastic term.” Dr. Kiras points out that while Clausewitz’s logic is sound, his conception of war and warfare is dated and electronic warfare is warfare nonetheless. Both interviewed by the author at Maxwell Air Force Base, 2 September 2010.
21. Clausewitz, On War, 75.
22. As Edward Luttwak points out, the realm of strategy is often punctuated by irony and paradox. See Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2003), xii.
23. Glen M. Segall, “Thoughts on Dissuasion,” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 10, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 1, http://www.jmss.org/jmss/index.php/jmss/article/viewFile/73/83.
24. This is part of the central thesis found in Everett C. Dolman, Astropolitik: Classical Geopolitics in the Space Age (London: Frank Cass, 2002).
25. Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966), 3.
26. Clausewitz, On War, 77.
27. Michael Krepon, PhD, interview by author, Washington D.C., 10 May 2007.
28. “Strategic culture” comprises a state’s or nonstate actor’s shared beliefs and modes of behavior, derived from common experiences and narratives and that shape ends and means for achieving national security objectives. See “Glossary of Key Terms,” National Strategy Information Center, n.d., http://www.strategycenter.org/programs/adapting-americas-security-paradigm-and-security-agenda/glossary-of-key-terms/.
29. Earlier ASAT tests by the United States and the Soviet Union from the early 1960s through the 1980s may also be examples of this phenomenon. It is by no means limited to the Chinese. See description of U.S. and Soviet ASAT tests in Clayton S. Chung, Defending Space: US Anti-Satellite Warfare and Space Weaponry (New York: Osprey, 2006), 32–37.
30. Jeffrey Lewis, PhD, interview by author, Washington, D.C., 27 May 2007.
31. “Space control” is not an absolute term, nor does it imply destruction, damage, or debris creation. It merely refers to stopping the hostile or unlawful use of a capability provided by a satellite. There is no need to “wipe the sky” of the adversary’s satellites and no need to engage an entire satellite. The use of various cyber techniques to negate a small subset of very discrete satellite signals in temporary, nondestructive, and reversible ways is preferred. To date, such activity has not been defined as “warfare” in the classic sense under international law. The term also refers to preserving one’s freedom of action to operate in the space environment.
32. Gray, Another Bloody Century, 307.
33. The “global strike complex” includes those satellites whose sensors and data links are integrated into the architecture used to find, fix, track, target, strike, and assess targets for attack.
34. See M. V. Smith, Ten Propositions Regarding Spacepower (Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala.: Air University Press, 2002), 70.
35. Michael Lee Lanning, The Military 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Military Leaders of All Time (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1996), 276–79.
36. Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress: Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, 2006 (Washington, D.C., 2006), 13–14, 17.
37. John Boyd’s OODA loop, as described in Robert Corum, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (New York: Back Bay Books, 2002), 327–44.
38. Clausewitz, On War, 84. See also Warfighting: The Marine Corps Book of Strategy (New York: Currency-Doubleday, 1994), 30.
39. The author served at the Combined Air Operations Center in the Strategy, Guidance, Apportionment, and Targeting Cell during the war and was involved in many discussions contemplating the benefits of the use of counterspace methods instead of lethal force. Lt. Gen. Michael Hamel, USAF (Ret.), was also involved in these discussions.
40. This point was brought out by Mahan with regard to command of the sea: total control is not necessary. This point is developed in relation to spacefaring activities in Dolman, Astropolitik, 34. The equator is a choke point for all satellites in earth orbit, as every satellite must cross the equator twice in each orbital rotation.
41. A good description of these strategies is found in Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 20.
42. “On orbit” is an industry term that means more than merely “in” orbit. It implies that the satellite is within the desired orbital parameters.
43. Space as a sanctuary is asserted by many, but one of the most vociferous advocates of the concept is Washington, D.C.–based Michael Krepon of the Stimson Center. See Michael Krepon and Samuel Black, Space Security or Anti-Satellite Weapons? (Washington, D.C.: Stimson Center, 2010), 4.
44. See Smith, Ten Propositions Regarding Spacepower, 104–6.
45. John B. Sheldon, Marshall Institute Fellow (comments as panel discussant at “National Security Space: Policy and Program Developments,” Marshall Institute, Washington, D.C., 6 October 2010).
46. The author apologizes once again to fellow members of the Red Sox Nation for drawing this work to a close with a quote (this one apparently authentic!) from an archrival team member. The author must point out that during a 1986 interview with a Long Island journalist, Berra admitted, “I really didn’t say everything I said.” Nevertheless, his brilliance as a strategist in the game of baseball is beyond question.