The first in a four-part series looking at the U.S. Military’s reliance on Space and what we can do to take away our enemies’ asymmetrical advantage.
Space Powers Modern Warfare
The war started on a Monday.
INDOPACOM didn’t get a warning. There was no news chyron and no presidential address. Instead, the signals coming to Earth from space just stop. The U.S. tracked the launch of several missiles, then, nothing. Satellites not destroyed by kinetic interceptors are some blinded, jammed, or hijacked. On the ground, everything looks the same. Americans wake up to their coffee and breakfast, but inside numerous operations centers and cockpits the realization that we have lost access to space is setting in.
The location and timing the military relied on since the 1980s stops coming. Tracks drift as messages stops flowing. Commanders feel it first as a delay, then as uncertainty, and finally as something close to vertigo. They no longer know where their forces are. In Hawaii, INDOPACOM cannot track its fleets or aircraft, in the Pentagon, the nerve center of U.S., people panic. Forty years of reliance on a near perfect ability to command and control over vast distances built a capable but fragile system that is now crashing.
This is what “a day without space” would look like. Not fireballs over Manhattan, but the systemic collapse of command and control systems and situational awareness in a military and economy that has built its nervous system on orbital infrastructure.
The Foundations of Modern War
The military likes to talk about space as a separate theater, a domain. We even created a Space Force. That is not how it actually works. Systems and information from space, while invisible, provide critical links and information regularly to forces on the ground, in the air, and at sea. It is integrated across all domains. Today, roughly 9,000+ active satellites orbit the Earth, a tenfold increase since 2010, with projections of tens of thousands more by 2030. The U.S. military rides on a relatively small but critical subset of that capability.
The Gulf War changed how America’s adversaries look at us. The Iraqi Army was the 5th largest in the world and had just spent eight years fighting the Iranian military after the 1979 revolution. They overran Kuwait quickly and were threatening the oil rich Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The U.S. military and its coalition was expected to have a hard time pushing the Iraqis out of Kuwait. Instead, the ground fight lasted 100 hours. The U.S. was able to virtually destroy and break the will of the Iraqi Army from the air with precision air strikes. The Gulf War was the start of the U.S.’s movement towards a reliance on space-based information.
Today, the U.S. military and its allies rely on space for Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT). This comes from GPS and allied GNSS constellations and tells us where and when we are. The U.S. relies on satellite communication from tactical movements to nuclear command and control. We rely on the ability to pull overhead imagery and information from around the globe at the speed of relevance. Lastly, military planners rely on updated weather and environmental measurement to time and phase operations and logistics. Our adversaries recognize this strength and want to make it a weakness.
None of our space-based capabilities are a luxury. At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. built a new military doctrine grounded on the foundation of our ability to see and communicate uncontested. Now, the U.S. the wedded to this way of fighting, but our adversaries, the PRC, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are willing and increasing capable of challenging in this space. Space Force doctrine describes space as a “contested, congested, and competitive” warfighting domain, not a benign support function. That’s bureaucratic-speak for something simple: if adversaries can shift the foundation, the entire edifice of the U.S. military becomes shaky. Despite this weakness, the U.S. continues to rely on space as the main means of moving information quickly around the globe.
