20 BriefingWar in space The EconomistJuly 20th 2019
2 cated service free of the Army and Navy to
foster such innovations. Similar argu-
ments are sometimes used by proponents
of creating a new Space Force inside the
Pentagon, as President Donald Trump has
suggested.
If actual space combat were called for, it
would be handled by the 265-strong Na-
tional Space Defence Centre at Schriever
Air Force Base, in nearby Colorado Springs.
Having begun round-the-clock operations
a year and half ago, its operators are sharp-
ening their skills in novel ways. Instead of
relying on simulators, its airmen treat
friendly satellite manoeuvres as hostile
and practice responses. Thrice-yearly
“Space Flag” exercises, begun in 2017, will
include allies for the first time in August.
To make such exercises—and, if need
be, eventual operations—run better, situa-
tional awareness needs to be improved.
The airmen at cspoc currently have to
make do with something more like a series
of snapshots than a live feed. Low orbits
may be mapped out a few times every day.
Higher up, maybe just once in three days.
“Things can happen between those looks,”
says Major-General Stephen Whiting, who
commands most of the Air Force’s space
units. Space Fence, an especially powerful
radar on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Is-
lands, will help to keep an eye out. It should
be able to track more than 60,000 objects
down to the size of a marble once it enters
service later this year.
Learning to fight is one thing. Limiting
your losses is another. For some purposes
America uses small numbers of eye-water-
ingly expensive satellites that take over a
decade to develop. Mr Donovan points to
the importance of designing resilient sys-
tems instead. “It’s really efficient to put one
giant satellite in space. The problem is that
it’s the equivalent of putting all your eggs
in one basket.” At Buckley Air Force Base,
Colonel Bobby Hutt points to the ceiling,
where a scale model of one of the sbirssat-
ellites is hanging. The chronically delayed
project cost $19bn. “The Chinese love our
acquisitions cycle,” he says.
Like the private sector, the Air Force is
moving towards “mega-constellations” of
smaller, cheaper and more numerous sat-
ellites in low orbits that can ping informa-
tion securely to one another. To degrade
such a system’s performance an enemy
would have to knock out a significant part
of the whole fleet, rather than just one tar-
get. The Blackjack programme, which is
run by the Pentagon’s far-out research
shop, darpa, envisages putting military
sensors onto commercial satellites that
cost less than $6m each.
As well as resilience, there is replace-
ment. Losing a satellite is a lot less worry-
ing if you can quickly pop a substitute up
into orbit. The development of a more ca-
pable and responsive commercial-launchindustry has already improved matters.
But the Pentagon wants to push things fur-
ther. Next year three companies will partic-
ipate in a darpacompetition to launch two
small satellites into orbit from two loca-
tions with a few weeks. The site will be re-
vealed just weeks ahead of launch, and the
payload itself within days.
Better response, more resilience and
faster resupply are all good ways for Ameri-
ca to make itself less vulnerable to anti-sat-
ellite attacks—and thus to make such at-
tacks less appealing to adversaries. There
are also multilateral approaches to consid-
er. At the moment, there are neither laws
nor norms specific to space warfare. The
1967 Outer Space Treaty bans weapons of
mass destruction in outer space but is si-
lent on conventional arms. And if two sat-
ellites get menacingly close there are no
agreed appropriate responsesThe fine art of nerf herding
In 2008 the European Union proposed a vo-
luntary code of conduct to promote “re-
sponsible behaviour” in such matters. The
same year, China and Russia suggested a
binding treaty to ban weapons in space.
The two ideas were to some extent in oppo-
sition to each other; they both foundered.
The treaty was aimed not so much at
anti-satellite weapons as at anti-missile
weapons based in space—weapons which
could be used to destroy icbms when they
popped out of the atmosphere. America
has an interest in such things dating back
to the Star Wars programme of the 1980s. It
was silent on weapons launched from
Earth—such as the one the Chinese had
tested the year before. It also failed to es-
tablish how states would tell good space-
craft from bad, says Bleddyn Bowen of the
University of Leicester. America was hav-
ing none of it.
Opposition to the code, though eggedon by Russia and China, came mostly from
countries in Latin America and Africa.
They liked the idea of a demilitarised space
that the treaty sought to champion. They
disliked the code’s acknowledgment that
countries with assets in space had a right to
use force to defend them.
Both technology and politics mean that
there is unlikely to be much progress in the
near future. The line between conventional
and space weapons is blurred: when Amer-
ica struck its own satellite in 2008, it used
an sm-3 interceptor developed for use
against incoming missiles. India’s anti-
satellite test was also, it said, a missile-in-
terceptor test. Then there is the issue of
trust. America and Russia are busy trashing
earthly arms-control deals; they are un-
likely to find common ground for a new
one. Nor does America show much willing-
ness to try. “We’re basically saying no to
everything, and we don’t have a better al-
ternative,” Mr Weeden complains.
But even if there can be no deals, there
should at least be dialogue. During the cold
war, America and the Soviet Union appreci-
ated that risk reduction and escalation
control required a sound understanding of
the other side’s nuclear thinking. Yet Amer-
ica and China do not appear to have held
talks on space security for three years. Just
as the two sides have agreements on en-
counters between warships at sea, they
could flesh out norms for safe distances for
proximity operations. That could include
requirements to use transponders on all ci-
vilian satellites and to provide prior notice
of any planned inspections. Many military
space operators would be keen on this. If
more civilian satellites broadcast their lo-
cation and behaved predictably, suspicious
behaviour would be easier to pick out.
Finally, the fact that there is no law of
space war does not mean that the custom-
ary laws of war do not apply in space. They
apply there as surely as they do on the high
seas. How they do so—how to balance hu-
manity and military necessity in a domain
without humans—is unclear. But such
challenges have been met before. The Tal-
linn Manual did a comparable job for
cyberspace in 2013. The Woomera Manual,
spearheaded by four universities in Austra-
lia, America and Britain, and the milamos
project, led by one in Canada, hope to do
the same for space.
The act that established nasain 1958 de-
clared loftily that “it is the policy of the Un-
ited States that activities in space should be
devoted to peaceful purposes for the bene-
fit of all mankind.” Even then, that was a
half-truth. But space has since become a
sinew of terrestrial military power in ways
that were unimaginable even when Apollo
11 touched down in 1969. The point is not
that the next war will be fought in space, as
though it is a battlefield unto itself; it is
that the next war may not spare it. 7