Insidiously and persistently, space is being militarised. Sabre-rattling is commonplace—provocative acts are increasing, skirmishing is happening and destructive anti-satellite tests are occurring. Reports that Russia is planning to develop nuclear capabilities in orbit could have raised the stakes even higher. With this inexorable, explosive escalation, the notion of conflict in space is growing where its impact is shifting in step with our increasing dependence on space services.
The doctrine of combat in space is different from that in the air, land, maritime and cyber domains. NATO and the West go to great lengths to protect civilians from the effects of combat. But in contrast, everything in space is everywhere all the time; it’s just not practical to move satellites away from shooting or its effects. So, in a space war, everything will be affected, whether in orbit or on Earth. Debris from the Nov. 15, 2021, Russian anti-satellite test is a marker of how destruction in space imposes decade-long effects on everyone. Space combat would be messy, indiscriminate and severely affect life on Earth.
Temporary disruption would be deeply painful but longer-term denial would feel more medieval. Power grids would become unstable, public transport severely disrupted, aircraft grounded, the financial system suspended, critical medical facilities impacted, farming (crops and cattle) would revert to manual methods, manufacturing mostly paused and the internet unreliable or inaccessible. A day without space would be unrecognisable to all but the most elderly in society and war in space would touch every part of our life on Earth.
It would take a truly catastrophic act to impose this simultaneously across the globe, but localised or temporary effects are possible now and technology is advancing so rapidly that even positioning in geostationary orbit (26,000 miles altitude) will soon not offer protection. The prospect of interruption in space is unconscionable, uninsurable and would set the Earth back years. No matter how grim this might be, malign acts in space are escalating, not attenuating, in scale and impact. This is why the U.S. Space Force has set its role as “to ensure our forces, our allies, and the world never experience a day without space.”
Deterrence
As terrestrial sophistication grows with space-enabled dependence, our vulnerability grows, too. Where assets have value, their denial is a lever of pressure. Critical national infrastructure, like power grids, are so important to our way of life that their disruption, denial or destruction becomes another adversary chess move in the grand geopolitical game of deterrence and escalation. There is no higher ground than space and so it is logical, indeed inevitable, that threats and risks to space services will only grow. So, now is not the moment for a strategy based on hope, but for deepening and extending the terrestrial concept of deterrence—compelling a state through the imposition of cost or denial of benefit—in space.
Traditional deterrence is where a state might coerce another to act in a particular way through incentive or threat, messaged with clear, credible and compelling signals. Benefits and costs must be valued by the target state, but the oppressor’s calculation of reaction is key—too great a threat and the reaction might be over-powering or counter-productive, too little and the threat fails. Complexity and ambiguity both make this calculation harder and so are very effective methods of enhancing the aggressor’s threat or deterring it. So deterrence is classic statecraft that seeks to strike a delicate strategic balance between interests and threats.
If complexity is protection, space offers unique advantages. Why? Because the military, civil (that is to say non-military government) and commercial boundaries in space are blurred. Unlike the clear separation on Earth, above the Kármán line there is an indivisible mix of activity. Earth-imaging satellites monitor borders and track fish shoals just as easily as they see the first military moves on a battlefield. Communications satellites carry holiday season family calls and enable foreign ministries to function whilst connecting warships at sea and distant agents with the mothership at Langley. And GPS delivers precision time to the power grid and financial industry whilst allowing combat aircraft to deliver lethal effects.
In space an attack on one element of this system will likely impact the others. This might be viewed as a risk by some. Counter-intuitively, this inseparability of acts in space is a deterrence advantage. The very uncertainty of where effects will be felt and for how long is raw complexity and ambiguity which itself might prevent escalation or help de-escalation in space conflict. Emerging space nations could usefully exploit this approach for their and the wider space ecosystem’s medium to longer-term protection.
Conflating the ownership, roles and clients of a satellite is a way of further increasing this complexity in order to enhance deterrence. The more diverse a satellite’s builders, bankers or businesses—governments, industry, commerce, academia, society—the more fiendishly difficult it would be to compute reactions to its denial. Predicting the reaction to a threat against a UK civil low Earth orbit communications satellite with a Japanese microgravity and Singaporean science instruments and a 5-nation (Chile, Columbia, Rwanda, Spain and Belgium) thruster would be extremely tough. So, cluttering corporate, construction and client complexity is a form of deterrence.
Large constellations also offer protection, whereas single and bespoke satellites are vulnerable. A constellation’s in-built attrition to accommodate launch, deployment and operational malfunctions and its self-healing ability, through trajectory adjustment to ensure coverage, significantly reduces the aggressor’s benefit of its disruption. If the costly denial of a satellite could be overcome in hours, it is not a useful target; conversely, the loss of a nation’s sole satellite carrying unique payloads would be keenly felt.
Protection is further enhanced by the growth of responsive space launch. The USSF’s prescient assured access to space requirement to get a satellite to orbit in 24 hours and function in 48 counters the threat of attack. These timelines are stressing, but are possible now with software-defined payloads, solid fuel rockets and Astraius launch systems (C-17 and parachute extraction system). With eight nations and NATO holding a responsive horizontal launch capability and an increasing shift to homogenised software-defined satellites, the risks of on-orbit denial, particularly of low Earth orbit large constellation satellites, are much reduced.
The indivisibility of services and indiscriminate effects of conflict mean that any attempt to distance oneself from war in space would be pointless. Military, civil or commercial operators from all nations will all be involved in space conflict whether they like it or not. The seemingly arbitrary nature and wholesale dispersion of debris is a further complexity for an aggressor to compute. So, the continued development of space capabilities by government and commerce in tandem indirectly helps secure against the unthinkable—but not impossible—war in space.
Interestingly, it is civil and commercial space services that might offer the greatest possible anti-war or combat de-escalation data. Changes in unit communication, novel encryption and unlikely quiet periods suggest manoeuvres ahead of combat. Blanking, spoofing or shifting GPS signals indicate the imminence of kinetic strikes. And Earth observation data sees today’s military activity on contemporary battlefields. The fusion of all this data and growth into other parts of the spectrum in near-real time with refresh intervals in single-digit minutes, will soon enable states to call out aggressors, perhaps even before a hostile act; think pre-cognition in Minority Report. Civil and commercial space data is crucial now, but will become more important in the drive to prevent escalation and aid de-escalation in space conflict.
Averting the Unconscionable
Our international collective goals—protecting interests, peaceful development, building prosperity—are unlikely to change much over the next decade or more. But in that time, space will become more cluttered, congested, confused and increasingly conflicted. Intentional launches to prevent exploitation of key orbits, deliberate shadowing and interference with sensitive satellites, conscious positioning to deny solar power capture, planned destruction of satellites creating vast debris fields and deliberate threats of space services’ denial are real events on an ongoing gentle and unimpeded spiral towards the contested use and a possible war in space.
We can do better. The military, civil and commercial space operators have more to gain than lose by operating closer together to protect and advance their respective and collective interests. Adversaries’ choices would be far more difficult to compute if capabilities (hardware, software and downstream data) were intentionally more integrated and entwined—nationally and internationally. An irrefutable and internationally-recognised set of space domain data could form a curated and catalogued version of the “space truth” and be the origin of understanding, monitoring and attributing events to owners, operators and states. The faster we make space complex and ambiguous, the quicker it will become a safer place and the greater chance we have of avoiding the unconscionable day without space.
About the Author:
Andrew Turner is the Co-Founder of Space4Sight, a leading strategic space consultancy. He has a range of interests in deep/emerging tech in space launch, quantum computing, hydrogen storage, fossil-free fuel and e-logistics. Prior to this, he was the Deputy Chief of the Royal Air Force, the UK Director of Global military operations, principal UK military liaison to the White House, Pentagon and U.S. Strategic Command and a veteran battlefield helicopter pilot of 19 combat deployments.
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