U.S. military’s modernization bets assume three things:
- Our sensors will be there.
- Our networks will be there.
- Most of our tech works.
Break any one of those, and you get friction. Break all three, and you get something closer to confusion. An attack that denies space creates a significant degradation of the U.S.’s military capability. The strongest effect of a day without space is not that we go back to map and compass. We can and should still train those basics, as they are basic. The deeper effect is that generals, pilots, and platoon leaders stop trusting the digital world they’ve grown up in, and it makes everything slower. Time stretch, the delay in the military’s decide, detect, deliver targeting framework, is where an enemy can exploit situational and positional advantages.
So What?
This isn’t an argument for abandoning space or PNT. It’s an argument for sobriety. If the U.S. military is drunk on GPS and space-enabled command and control, the answer is not prohibition. It’s learning to fight and think without a constant need to take another drink. We will be jammed, we will be disrupted, we will need to fight without access to space.
This means that all systems must start with A-PNT as a design feature. This is not a nice- to- have. Chip-scale atomic clocks, inertial, terrain, and vision-based navigation, terrestrial and LEO PNT, and cooperative timing meshes have to be part of all platforms and systems. This is especially true for unmanned systems and precision fires. Without this system-of-systems approach, each device hinges on a single point of failure.
Micromanagement must give way to mission command. If commanders assume they will have a perfect common operating picture, they are going to fail. That picture can vanish quickly. Organizations that can move on intent and not perfect information are going to respond faster to the loss of systems. And we will lose systems in a peer fight.
Units must train in environments where their equipment lies to them. This is not an academic pursuit where soldiers can still fall back on their cell phones to make communication when the radios are not working. It needs to be explicit that the purpose is to encounter and work through failure. If we try everything and where our systems stress and where they break, we will have identified failure points. We can address those to make the system more than robust, it can become anti-fragle. A system that grows stronger when an enemy pressures it because the effects of their actions disproportionately affect them. This will lead to the creation of new tactics and techniques or new equipment that enables our warfighters to operate in any environment.
A day without space will happen in the next war. It is the logical endpoint. Russia’s NAVWAR in Europe, GPS jamming in the Middle East, hacking against satellite operators, and public acknowledgement that space is now a battlefield, not a sanctuary, all mean that we have to become less reliant on space before we are lost.
