Warfare in Space Part I: Today’s Choices Make Tomorrow’s Space Conflict Inevitable
In this first of three essays, I argue that we are drifting toward a dangerously militarized future in space. No one truly wants war in orbit, but incentives, budgets, and institutional habits are quietly pushing us there. Understanding these factors is the first step to resisting them.
Part of what makes outer space so fascinating is the fundamental paradox at the heart of humanity’s interaction with it. It has a tremendous capacity to both unite and divide us, and it is a domain where people pursue both the highest ends of peaceful cooperation and the most destructive means of technological warfare. The allure and danger of outer space exist alongside each other in perfect tandem. We do not have to physically go there to sense it.
Instinctively, as long as people have looked up at the stars, they have recognized that the universe beyond the thin veil of our atmosphere is vast, beautiful, and deadly. Early astronomers speculated that the movement of the planets was just as responsible for love and good fortune as for pestilence and death. Today’s mythologies about space continue to confront this duality. As the intrepid explorers and daring heroes of fiction step out into this unknown frontier, they encounter spectacular beauty beyond the wildest imagination, danger beyond all comprehension, and adventure beyond the limits of human dreams. In the public imagination, outer space is a place where anything can happen. To a great extent, this is also true in reality.
The past, present, and future of human activity in outer space is inseparable from the pervasive military context that shapes technological development in aerospace more broadly. Early triumphs in human space exploration would not have been possible if not for the Second World War (with V-2 rocket technology being converted for scientific and human use under Operation Paper Clip) or subsequent great power rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union (with the Apollo program famously used as a demonstration of American technological prowess).
Today, the same private space companies who lend their rockets and payloads to NASA also build out their portfolios by taking on lucrative contracts with the United States military for weapons development. These things are normal, expected, and baked into the economic calculations that make peaceful use of outer space possible. They are also hardly unique to the United States or its strategic partners: the same Chengdu Aerospace Corporation making headlines for enabling satellite space computing is also responsible for developing stealth fighter jets that may one day be used in a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Military involvement in outer space is not the same thing as militarization of outer space. This is an important distinction to make, and recent developments necessitate a proper exploration of where the boundaries on military action in space ought to be firmly drawn. Although the defense industry has often acted as a key enabler of space innovation, not everything the so-called “military industrial complex” does or wants to do is conducive to human interests in outer space.
Every public or private entity that seeks to place an object or a person beyond Earth’s atmosphere is required to undertake considerable expenses. Rocket fuel and space-grade parts do not come cheap. No one would ever put anything in outer space without a reasonable expectation of returns that justify the initial investment. For this reason, even bitter adversaries in world affairs and industry have had to abide by norms of due regard and, yes, cooperation. Sabotage of technology invites retaliation, which quickly escalates risk for all participants, thus diminishing the value of doing anything in outer space in the first place. This is especially true in Low-Earth Orbit, a highly interconnected environment where a disabled satellite or drifting debris cloud can easily trigger a chain of collisions between everyone, ally and adversary alike. A basic understanding of game theory by all parties involved has (so far) held back total militarization of outer space.
Lobbyists, theorists, and managers of the defense industry generally recognize that total war in outer space is undesirable. However, they also recognize that total peace—that is, a lack of demand for any weapons in orbit or elsewhere—is bad for their bottom line. Their “comfort zone” is space existing in a gray area: absent any overt acts of aggression, but with plenty of room for systems of surveillance and deterrence, as well as expensive weapons that can be placed in space and, ideally, never be used. As long as this status quo can be maintained, everyone is happy: governments demonstrate to their constituents that they are taking national security seriously, industry gets to stimulate jobs and investment, and no one really gets hurt.
Unfortunately, we have no reason to believe that this gray area is sustainable, especially in a time of escalating tension between adversaries like the United States and China, or Europe and Russia.
To see where things are headed, follow the money. In the United States, much alarm was raised by the space community when the President tried not once but twice to gut NASA’s civil science budget. But here’s the thing: discourse on both sides of that debate linking the NASA cuts to austerity or deficit reduction was missing the point. Buried in the headlines was the fact that the same budget request documents were also asking for an increase—higher by orders of magnitude than the NASA cut proposal—in spending for the military’s space force programs, including the initiation of the Golden Dome space interceptor project, whose final price tag is projected to easily surpass $1 trillion.
Yet the bellicose Trump administration, with its newly rechristened and ever-expanding Department of War, is far from the only government pushing space in a more militarized direction. National budgets are a statement of regime values, and governments everywhere have generally followed the same trend in recent years: scaling back their ambitions in civil space and massively increasing their financial commitments to military space projects. At last year’s ESA Ministerial, member states committed to historic new space security initiatives at record-breaking funding levels, only mere months after the United Kingdom shuttered its independent space agency and France committed to a 70% increase in space military spending. Just a few months later, Macron’s government would also impose a strict sequestration on CNES, the French civil space agency.
Proponents of militarization in space—as in other domains of military expansion—invariably cite the need to counteract the capabilities of adversaries like China and Russia, which certainly are considerable and have been growing. The fact that they are developing counterspace technologies capable of pulling a satellite out of orbit is worthy of concern. But reflexive action is not the same as strategy. Limitations like the Wolf Amendment prohibit conversations on crucial issues that could facilitate de-escalation, while rapid military expansion—loosely justified under vague allusions to national security commitments—is likely to provoke further force escalation and suspicion on both sides of the NATO-BRICS divide. A mutually destructive tit-for-tat arms race solves nothing for anybody in the long run. Ideally, it should be avoided altogether.
The economics of space warfare are also as unsustainable as the geopolitics. War is a zero-sum game: it consists of expending public resources as rapidly as possible to impose a greater cost on the resources of a designated enemy. Rather than being a mutually beneficial arrangement, or even one that directly benefits either side at the expense of the other, any protracted military conflict is actually mutually deleterious: that is to say, the cost to all participants increases as it continues. Take the present conflict in Iran: within just a few months after the start of the war, the United States had exhausted more than half of its critical missile stockpile to target Iranian drones and facilities, which are actually cheaper to produce per unit. As a much wealthier nation, the United States is technically losing less by comparison to what Iran is losing, but it is losing considerably more than it would have lost had the conflict never begun in the first place. The missile stockpile will eventually need to be replenished, which will require yet more spending. In the near-term, it also exposes the United States to vulnerabilities by other actors against whom the missile stockpile has historically helped to deter. The entire economic business of war is one of self-inflicted harm.
By contrast, investment in civil space typically turns out to be a far more productive use of public resources: it can accelerate technological development just as conflict can, but in a context that is mutually beneficial to all partners. Civil space technology is also typically easier to transfer to other domains due to lower classification levels and fewer export control requirements. Finally, it provides countries with opportunities to collaborate with one another and share expertise, develop greater understanding and appreciation, and create informal networks of discussion that can ultimately be leveraged to reduce international tensions.
In Part 2 of this three-part series of essays, I will discuss these and other reasons why it is worthwhile to give peace in space a chance.
