\n<\/p>\n
Space Force leaders readily describe their guardians as working toward a state of combat readiness, even as they hope an era of actual conflict never arrives. In October, I went to the Pentagon to meet with Gen. Chance Saltzman, the chief of space operations and the Space Force\u2019s highest-ranking officer. Saltzman remarked that several decades back, when he began working with satellites in the Air Force, the notion that there could be combat losses in space was not part of the conversation. But \u201cthose are discussions now,\u201d he told me, \u201cbecause both the Chinese and the Russians have demonstrated operational capabilities that truly placed those assets at risk.\u201d In 2007, China\u2019s decision to test an ASAT weapon to destroy one of its own satellites sent shock waves through the U.S. military and created a vast field of debris. A similar Russian tactic, in 2021, generated more than 1,500 fragments and led Secretary of State Antony Blinken to describe the act as \u201crecklessly conducted.\u201d The Space Force\u2019s own squadrons, Saltzman told me, were still tracking pieces of junk that date to the 2007 explosion. \u201cYou know, the other domains kind of clean themselves up after war,\u201d Saltzman said. \u201cYou shoot an airplane down, it falls out of the sky. Ships sink out of the sea lanes. Even on land, you bring the bulldozers in and you move things around. But space doesn\u2019t heal itself.\u201d <\/p>\n
Debris has led military strategists to ponder a related issue: In space, it\u2019s difficult to get out of the way of conflict. Right now, Saltzman noted, if you pull up real-time data to see where flights are around the world, the airspace over Ukraine is empty. \u201cYou will see a void,\u201d he said. \u201cCommercial air traffic does not want to fly over Ukraine.\u201d The same thing happens in shipping lanes, like the Strait of Hormuz, when the Middle East is in turmoil, as it is now. \u201cSo in other domains, refugees, displaced persons, people get out of the way of conflict. Commercial entities move out of the way and avoid conflict.\u201d In space, orbital mechanics take over; machines keep going around and around, following the laws of gravity. NASA satellites may not be able to steer away from a potential combat zone. And commercial entities can\u2019t move \u2014 or won\u2019t know where or when to move. \u201cAnd then potentially every satellite becomes more debris,\u201d Saltzman remarked. \u201cEvery peaceful satellite could become a weapon accidentally.\u201d <\/p>\n
I asked Saltzman what he and his colleagues had learned from observing the war in Ukraine. With a caveat that the fighting is hardly over \u2014 \u201cit could still be a catastrophe on a grand scale,\u201d he said \u2014 he pointed to several crucial events. The first was how one of Russia\u2019s earliest endeavors was to deny Ukrainian troops access to a satellite communications system they relied upon, known as Viasat, which is stationed in the distant geosynchronous orbital belt. \u201cAnd they did it with a cyberattack against the ground infrastructure,\u201d he said. \u201cSo you attack the ground network to achieve the space effect you want.\u201d This wasn\u2019t a surprise to him, he said, yet it was a reminder of the potential power of cyberwarfare and how battles to dominate space could still be terrestrial.<\/p>\n
Another crucial point came after that attack \u2014 Ukraine\u2019s decision to go to a commercial vendor, SpaceX, and use its Starlink system for combat communications. Here the lesson was twofold. First, that what Saltzman called \u201ccommercial augmentation\u201d could prove vital in a crisis. As important, he added, Starlink \u2014 a configuration of hundreds of \u201cproliferated\u201d small satellites flying in low Earth orbit \u2014 has proved hard to bring down. \u201cThe Russians are trying to interrupt it,\u201d he said, \u201cand they\u2019re not having very good success.\u201d And the takeaway is that proliferated systems of many small machines in low orbit can be more technologically resilient to hacking and disruption than a few big machines in higher orbits. This seems to fit into Saltzman\u2019s goal of maintaining strength during combat while achieving a larger objective of avoiding conflict altogether. \u201cIf I have two or three satellite communications doing nuclear command and control, maybe those are targets,\u201d he explained. \u201cBut if I take nuclear command and control and spread it across 400 satellites that are zipping over the horizon [every] 15 minutes, there\u2019s a targeting problem. How many satellites do I have to shoot down now to take out the U.S. nuclear command and control?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n