Published: Dec 09, 2024 5:48 PM EST Save Article If another great power conflict erupts, it will be fought in the strategic domain of space. That’s because the U.S. disproportionately relies upon access to space for its most basic military and civilian operations. Destroy or disrupt those satellite linkages, and America’s adversaries—most notably China and Russia—will have a significant window of opportunity to exploit American weaknesses. In fact, the U.S. Space Force was created because the national command authority believed that America’s position in space, notably the strategic orbits around Earth, was eroding. At the time of its creation in 2019, the Space Force was given a simple strategic doctrine: “Space Dominance.” But that’s not where the story of space war ends. China and Russia want more than just to deny the U.S. access to space in a time of war, so fighting outside the confines of Earth will come in stages. China already has crafted plans to displace the United States as the dominant satellite power in orbit. And soon, wars will be fought over control of vital territories in space, such as the Lagrange points between Earth and the moon that help telescopes sit steady in space or the resource-rich asteroid belt. If either China or Russia ever managed to become the dominant space power, that country would surely become the dominant power on Earth as well, since space and Earth are so intertwined in the digital age. In anticipation of the coming space war era, America needs to take actionable steps to rule the domain outside our own planet—and keep its enemies at bay. But the transition to space warfare won’t happen overnight; it’ll come in phases. Phase I Right now, any potential space war will be closely tied to geopolitical developments on Earth. Thus, a space war would begin as a fight over satellites with the end goal of denying one’s enemies access to space to blind its forces and sow confusion in its populations back home on Earth. For instance, if the geopolitical situation on Earth between the U.S. and Russia or China broke down sufficiently, either of these two rivals could fire anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons at those vital-yet-vulnerable U.S. satellites in orbit. The debris generated from such an attack might be so profound that it would ricochet and annihilate nearby satellite constellations, causing a massive chain reaction, known as the Kessler Syndrome, that would result in the total loss of all satellites across the orbital plane. Or, Russia could simply detonate a nuke in orbit. The electromagnetic pulse it would create would saturate the space above Earth and effectively disable all satellites there. Chinese co-orbital satellites floating nearby sensitive American nuclear command, communication, and control satellites or near the U.S. Navy’s Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) satellite constellation, which allows for the global coordination of U.S. Navy forces, would be used to physically sabotage these important American systems in orbit. Chinese counterspace forces could target the critical Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) satellite constellation for disruption, too. From the Xichang Satellite Center in China, powerful lasers could be fired up at U.S. spy satellites in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) passing by, rendering American (and allied) forces in the Indo-Pacific blind. Over the years, senior Space Force officers from Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado have insisted that the U.S. military, too, can threaten Chinese and Russian satellites in orbit; it’s just that neither Russia nor China yet rely upon satellites the way the U.S. does. Further, in space warfare, the advantage goes to the attacker rather than the defender. Once a nation starts losing its satellite constellations, it becomes nearly impossible to save those satellite capabilities. It’s a knock-on effect. Phase II Eventually, though, there will be conflict among actors in space that goes beyond targeting unmanned satellites. That distant war might occur entirely in space, relatively unaffected by developments on Earth. Let’s go back to those Chinese and Russian co-orbital satellites that stalk American satellites in orbit, such as the MUOS or WGS constellations in geosynchronous orbit around Earth. One suggestion by experts for countering the threat these co-orbital satellites pose is the creation and usage of so-called “bodyguard” satellites. As the name suggests, these bodyguard satellites would be co-orbital satellites deployed alongside the U.S. satellites in orbit to defend against incoming counterspace attacks by Chinese or Russian space forces. Like a Secret Service agent diving in front of an incoming bullet, these bodyguard satellites would physically intercept and deflect incoming co-orbital satellite attacks. While not fool-proof, these co-orbital, bodyguard-type satellites would buy America’s critical satellites time to continue operating in a degraded environment, thereby giving American military units fighting on Earth below tactical advantages over their enemies. Phase III Contrary to how many space policy experts may think about the strategic domain of space, it will not be an area relegated only to unmanned military systems and manned research facilities, such as the International Space Station. Eventually, military operations will take place through—and from—the strategic high ground of space. In fact, in 2002, this almost became a reality when a daring U.S. Marine officer championed his branch purchasing one of Richard Branson’s spaceplanes and converting it for military use. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, U.S. ground forces were presented with a tough set of options: they had to rapidly advance into landlocked Afghanistan to hunt down and destroy the terrorist enclaves that had given succor to Al-Qaeda. There were concerns about being given access to the airspace surrounding Afghanistan. One solution was to create a force of sub-orbital space planes that would launch into orbit from American territory, pass over the airspace of other countries (without crossing through it), and then land in the target country. Think of it as being akin to the dropships featured in the popular Halo video game series. This idea never took off, but variations of it exist today. In a new, multipolar world environment where the strategy of denial is most commonly used against the U.S. military’s power projection capabilities, having a rapid response fleet of spaceplanes to quickly send ground troops into combat in distant lands, without ever violating the airspace of surrounding nations, might be one way to ensure that the U.S. military can continue projecting power when needed. The U.S. Air Force has called for a similar project. Instead of creating spaceplanes to drop ground troops into battle, though, the Air Force wants to build the equivalent of warehouses in low-Earth orbit in order to more quickly supply forces engaged in combat in what will undoubtedly be contested and degraded airspaces (making it harder for traditional forms of resupply to get to those American forces). Keeping those supplies in orbit, according to the Air Force, would be more cost-effective in the long run because you could conceivably cut down on the distance between the point of origin and the destination for those supplies. Phase IV With the rise of hypersonic missiles as well as a return of the threat of nuclear world war, the old Reagan-era concept of space-based missile defense has become a hot topic among America’s national security space policymakers. Back in the 1980s, when President Reagan first proposed building a constellation of satellites to knock out incoming Soviet nuclear ballistic missiles, the 40th president was derided as being delusional; the technology needed to shoot down incoming missiles was still in its infancy. Today, however, the technology has more than matured, and the U.S. is now vulnerable to a surprise nuclear missile strike each day that the Pentagon refuses to build and deploy these systems. As for the growing threat of hypersonic weapons, multiple defense sources insist that the only real defense against them will be from space-based assets. Specifically, swarms of satellites operating in Low-Earth Orbit could be used to intercept hypersonic glide vehicles, preventing those weapons from ever reentering the Earth’s atmosphere and destroying their vulnerable targets below. The threat of hypersonic weapons have less to do with their speed (although they are quite fast), and more to do with the way that they radically maneuver on their way to their target, stymying conventional air defense batteries. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source at the Air Force’s Western Air Defense Sector (WADS) at Joint Base McChord confirmed that the kind of hypersonic weapon the Russians fired at Dnipro in retaliation for Ukraine’s use of American-made Army Tactical Missile System (ATACM) and British-built Storm Shadow cruise missiles cannot be reliably defended against by most conventional air defense systems. So, in both conventional nuclear missiles as well as newer hypersonic weapons threats, the only defense is space-based. Such systems would have a birds-eye view of incoming attacks and could tether those real-time observations of incoming attacks to a multi-layered defense screen that operated continuously around the Earth, working alongside existing anti-missile defense systems. But space will be key. Indeed, as Reagan conjectured, such space-based defenses could render the entire threat of nuclear weapons attack obsolete. At the very least, it could degrade the threat of nuclear warfare. Nevertheless, wars will still occur. Indeed, they will increasingly migrate to the Solar System itself, as humans move deeper into the galaxy and settle permanently on celestial objects, such as the moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt beyond. The fight in the strategic high ground of space will be less about controlling the domains on Earth below and more about controlling key territories of the Solar System. Phase V Over time, there will eventually be combat waged between actual spaceships, although these spaceships are unlikely to look like what most fans of science fiction are used to seeing on their television screens. The spaceships will probably be large, clunky vessels. Modular design itself will be helpful. In battle, if sections of the spaceship are damaged beyond repair, they could conceivably be detached so that the rest of the spaceship could continue fighting on. Further, these spaceships could be outfitted with modules and payloads specific to whatever type of mission they were undertaking in the depths of space. In fact, these large, modular spacecraft could possibly detach into smaller spacecraft, making themselves into an armada of smaller craft rather than one large, lumbering spaceship. Rather than sleek and stylish, these cumbersome spaceships will be modular vessels likely powered by an Electromagnetic (EM) Drive or possibly even a nuclear-pulse-detonation engine—both of which are highly experimental today. An EM Drive is a wild experimental technology that was first posited by a British satellite engineer, Roger Shawyer. The U.S. became interested in the technology (as did the Chinese) for use as a possible engine on future satellites. This is a microwave technology that converts electrical energy directly into thrust. Propellant is not used. The system has been dubbed the “Impossible Drive” by many scientists who remain skeptical that it will work as intended. Nuclear-pulse detonation is another idea that’s been floating around for decades. Such an engine would essentially “use nuclear explosions, detonated behind a reaction surface on a spacecraft, to push the spacecraft forward.” Warp drives, unfortunately, are unlikely to be in use even at this later date. Just as in Star Trek, warp drives compress space in front of a starship, expanding it behind the spacecraft. The ship can, therefore, travel at faster-than-light speeds. Although, there are real theories for how humanity could be using warp drives, such as those of Miguel Alcubierre, these are infeasible and likely will be for some time. More Must-Read Defense Stories ⬇️ China Invented an Invisibility Cloak for Drones