Space technology enables our way of life today – each time we make a mobile phone call, switch on our televisions or want to find directions and the fastest route to a given destination, it is a growing constellation of satellites that make such benefits possible. Space is an extremely useful place from which to monitor earth and provide communications connectivity and, logically, is recognized as vital to optimizing military capability. Critical data and services from satellites for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), navigation, communications, missile warning, and environmental monitoring can be directly cascaded into a decisive combat advantage for warfighters.
Space capabilities have evolved in significant ways since the end of Desert Storm. Militaries have expanded their reliance on satellites for warfighting and military operations other than war (MOOTW), particularly with the provisioning of strategic ISR and situational awareness (SA) across vast operational expanses – all round-the-clock – from satellites. Their inherent limitations aside, space-based platforms have presented a life cycle cost effectiveness, persistence in capability and erstwhile security of operations that alternative military platforms simply could not match or rival.
The past decade has seen an acceleration in space being harnessed by military actors to extend their operational reach by synchronizing widely dispersed forces and disaggregated resources. From creating more resilient command and control (C2) enterprises to compressing time cycles to deliver decisive combat effects, space has become a vital component of global military operations and networks. Space will prove pivotal in massing and concentrating fires with greater precision in the years ahead and for reducing collateral damage in conflicts.
Alongside the ‘traditional’ operational domains of Land, Sea and Air, Space has emerged in military science as a new and distinct operations domain of its own (together with a fifth, Cyberspace). Space power will prove decisive in developing and maintaining a qualitative military edge (QME) in the years ahead, particularly in the face of shrinking numbers of combat platforms whose per unit costs have risen manifold over the past decades. The integration of the space domain is a critical element of multi-domain operations (MDO) capability and achieving the force multiplier effect it promises to the edge warfighter.
Such trends have highlighted the strategic imperative to integrate space as a domain into military operations more explicitly and more seamlessly. However, the global strategic convergence on the utility of space for military purposes means intensifying military competition and the emergence of new threats to space power in the years ahead as well. Lower costs of manufacturing, off-the-shelf technologies, and faster cycles of space engineered platforms will correlate to lower barriers of space access. Given these realities, military competition in space will not be feature of great power competition only but also see the emergence of smaller military powers into the competition continuum.
There is a growing realization that any assured ability to exploit space for military capability is not a given and assumptions about space power being harnessed unimpeded for military purposes are logically being reconsidered. The scale and nature of competition in space for military advantage will vary widely among the emerging spectrum of military actors in space. Yet, as space develops into an increasingly contested military operations domain, military actors will be compelled to strategically adapt their acquisitions, capability planning and concept of operations (CONOPS) in fundamental ways.
As these forecasted developments take hold more strongly, there are pronounced implications for the Air Force. The Air Force is leading the transition to fifth generation warfare capabilities and is the best placed among its sister services to lead the integration and fusion of space as an operational domain, both for itself and for the wider Joint Force. The immediate focus for the Air Force will be on delivering a proof on concept and CONOPS, with the necessary supporting C2 architectures, to effectively integrate space for MDO into a Joint Force context.
The Air Force will need to be wary about claiming a monopoly or pursuing space objectives with a purely air-minded culture and approach when its sister services on land and at sea are impacted by the space domain just as vitally as the Air Force is. Within the backdrop, the Air Force must generate a strategic framework and begin to shape a long-term vision for integrating and ultimately fusing space into MDO in ways so that its sister services are enabled to independently tailor their own ‘downstream’ uses of space technology as appropriate.
Keeping an eye on future developments, the Air Force must also consider how to devise appropriate responses at the Air Force, Joint Force and broader national levels against serious attacks or interference with their use of space. A space conflict or, short of that, the loss of space infrastructure could take down long-range strike capabilities, reliable on-the-move communications, and a range of ISR capabilities. Given the growing constellations of commercial, military and mixed-use satellites, it is unlikely that failure beyond localised signal degradations would occur but even these scenarios may severely disrupt and degrade the ability of the Air Force and Combat Commands to prosecute time-critical MDO.
The emerging globalised space infrastructure exists and evolves on multiple tiers – together with the space segment where satellites are positioned, there are ground segments which feature the users, control stations and receiving facilities as well as the link segments where communications with space-based assets takes place. Cooperation and interdependence between allies and partners but also with commercial services providers will be an overarching feature of space activities and space power. As the Air Force begins thinking about ways to firstly avoid and then to terminate any future conflicts in space as early as possible on favourable terms, there is much to ponder. In particular, the cyberspace domain and information warfare will be critical determinants of success.
Objective, offense, mass, economy of force, manoeuvre, unity of command, security, surprise and simplicity are principles of war that will apply to the space domain as they have applied to every other domain. From hardening and concealing satellites to satellite manoeuvrability and tactical launch capability at one end and hard- and soft-kill anti-satellite operations on the other, there is a wide options space to consider for the Air Force. As rules of engagement in space come into effect for the Air Force and other military actors, they must also recognize the importance of promoting a rules-based order to ensure responsible behaviour and minimize the possibility of space conflicts occurring in the first place.
