The next major global conflict may unfold beyond the earth, as military powers navigate the complexities of space warfare and their far-reaching repercussions, says the writer.
Image: File
Andreas Kluth
In his press briefings after the United States attacks a country - a regular occurrence these days - Dan Caine, the chairman of the joint chiefs, never forgets to give a shout-out to the Space Force and its guardians, as the service members are called. And for good reason. Whether America swoops into Venezuela or bombs Iran, it first takes out the eyes and ears of its adversaries, and that invariably involves assets and technologies in space that communicate or interfere with kit on the ground.
Neither Venezuela nor Iran, though, is a technological peer to America in the space domain. The question that occupies the brightest minds of space warfare is instead what the next major war will look like when the adversary is either Russia or China; or both simultaneously.
To peer into those scenarios, I recently talked (off the record) to insiders in Washington, DC, and Colorado Springs, home of the Peterson Space Force Base, which accommodates several integrated commands including the one for space. Herewith my own impressions, informed by these conversations.
One point of agreement was that the first shots of the next world war will almost certainly be fired in space (with simultaneous volleys being exchanged in cyberspace, which increasingly overlaps with the space domain). The controversy is about what form an attack would take, and whether America in particular is vulnerable to a “space Pearl Harbor.”
All major military powers today, but especially the US, China and Russia (in that order of sophistication) use space to spy on, map and track their enemies, and also to direct their own forces and firepower. That obliges all of them to have offensive and defensive plans, to take out the satellites and ground stations of their opponents while protecting as many as possible of their own.
At a bare minimum, this involves electromagnetic jamming, which already occurs regularly, even if it rarely makes the headlines. This type of interference tends to be temporary, though, and by itself wouldn’t count as a casus belli. More hostile types of attack include directed energy such as lasers or physical missiles, fired from the same space orbit or from the ground.
An assault could also take the form of satellites ramming, swallowing or otherwise damaging other satellites. The US is keeping a close eye on Russian satellites that were described to me as nesting dolls, with one opening up to release another, which can then do peaceful repair jobs or, on command, turn into a kinetic kill vehicle. China has satellites with robotic arms that, again, could either be peaceful trash collectors or become wrecking balls.
As ever in the history of war and weaponry, the accelerating innovation in space has already triggered an arms race in some orbits, especially those relatively close to Earth. Rivals are turning their satellites’ thrusters on and off in daring orbital “dogfights” that can stretch out for days.
Such skirmishes aren’t trivial at speeds of 17,500 mph. As of today, moreover, the US doesn’t necessarily have the technological edge in those games. In an atmospheric analogy, American military satellites maneuver more like Boeing 747s (not all that nimbly, that is), while the Space Force wants them to move like F-15s.
The larger defensive adjustment is architectural. Historically, the US military has favored launching relatively few but highly engineered and expensive satellites. Those nowadays look like “large, big, fat, juicy targets,” as one general calls them, almost tempting adversaries to launch a preemptive strike.
Hence a trend toward “proliferation,” which aims at deliberate redundancy and decentralisation, with many cheap satellites networked together in constellations, so that it becomes less worthwhile for adversaries to take out any particular node.(1)(A similar logic prompted the Pentagon in the 1960s to distribute its communications systems, which led to the modern internet.)
As the US makes its space forces more resilient, adversaries adjust their own tactics. A frightening scenario that came to Congress’s attention in early 2024 is a Russian plan to launch a satellite with nuclear weapons. Moscow denied the reports, but my interlocutors consider them realistic and the director of national intelligence told Congress this month that Russia’s “development of a nuclear counterspace weapon poses the greatest single threat to the world’s space architecture.”
A space nuke wouldn’t kill humans on earth directly, either with its blast or its radiation. But as Kari Bingen at the Center for Strategic and International Studies explained to me, nuclear detonations in space could overcome the resiliency of proliferated constellations by making entire orbits unusable.
The blast would first take out all the satellites in line of sight with an electromagnetic pulse that fries the electronics. It would then leave a radiation zone that destroys all the other machines in the orbit as they transit during their revolutions.
Such a weapon would be a massive breach of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. More to the point, it would amount to a tool of coercion, a provocation and a menace that couldn’t go unanswered. In strategic terms, it would be comparable to Soviet plans to station nukes in Cuba in 1962, which led to a crisis that nearly ended in atomic holocaust.
Even without a space nuke, though, the threat of orbits becoming unusable points to another danger, a “tragedy of the commons.” As empty as space looks to the human eye, it’s actually becoming perilously crowded, not only with new commercial satellites but also with the detritus of all the dead ones.
Space watchers estimate that about 130 million pieces of junk are orbiting the Earth already, of which about 35,000 are large enough (the size of an orange, say) to be tracked. But even pea-sized debris, travelling at space speeds, can take out a working satellite or spacecraft. Those collisions then create more flotsam, which wrecks even more satellites, and so on in a hellish cascade known as the Kessler Syndrome, which could leave entire shells of space functionally dead.
These orbits play an essential role in our daily lives. Beyond obvious uses such as our car navigation, satellites also power the communications that let us pay by credit card, fill up our gas tanks or even eat (since modern agriculture also relies on space). Make space inaccessible, and you may as well turn off the world economy.
An important strategic wrinkle is that societies rely on space to different degrees, which creates asymmetries of vulnerability. America and its European and Asian allies are most dependent. (Germany’s defense minister recently called space his country’s Achilles heel.) China is becoming more vulnerable as it catches up with the US. Russia, by contrast, is comparatively less exposed; more of its economy could keep functioning if space suddenly went dark.
This asymmetry explains why the US generally takes a different approach to space than Russia or China. Because Washington wants to preserve space as a domain, it wouldn’t launch an all-out preemptive war there for tactical advantage on the ground. Moscow, by contrast, might try to prevent military defeat on Earth with an initial strike in space, calculating that it would be more likely to survive what comes next.
In such a scenario, humanity could at a stroke revert to the developmental stage of the previous century, if not the pre-industrial age. The damage and suffering would be less than that following a terrestrial nuclear war, but still greater than anything we can imagine today, when the closure of just one strait in the Middle East keeps us busy.
The US, like its allies and adversaries, will of course keep honing its skills in space warfare. Even Washington’s plans for a Golden Dome - a constellation of satellites that would detect and shoot down incoming missiles from anywhere - are nothing categorically new; the only conceptual innovation would be placing interceptors in space, when they are currently only on the ground.
And yet all countries, and especially the three mightiest military powers, would be wise to incorporate into their war games the lessons of nuclear strategising, and especially the specter of Mutual Assured Destruction: The best strategy is not the one that would let them win the next war, but the one that will prevent it.
- - -
(1) This trend extends across all domains, with similar shifts away from expensive fighter jets and toward swarms of cheaper drones, for example. Plans by US President Donald Trump to build a “Golden Fleet” of mega-ships, by contrast, run counter to the trend, which is one reason why experts don’t expect the idea to float.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics.