Vulnerable Frontier: Militarized Competition in Outer Space

Among the various environments into which humans have expanded their economic, military, and scientific ac­tivities, outer space is easily the most unwelcoming and inhospitable. Im­possible to access except through mas­sive expenditures of energy per unit of mass to be placed into orbit, and utterly hostile to human life as well as to many types of man-made machin­ery, the maintenance of a permanent presence outside Earth’s protective atmosphere remains a highly ambi­tious undertaking. Despite various complications, however, this presence – which, in most cases, has entailed the placement of unmanned artificial satellites in earth-centric orbits – has become an essential pillar of the global economic and security systems in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. From highly specialized scientific and com­mercial services to everyday applica­tions of information technology (IT), space-based infrastructures now form part of the life-support system of a civilization that has tied its economic well-being and, indeed, its very sur­vival to global connectivity.

However, while the economically most developed societies in particular have come to accept this state of depend­ence on space-based systems as fairly natural and unproblematic, the space domain is, in fact, highly vulnerable to the direct and indirect effects of reckless behavior on the part of both commercial and governmental enti­ties. Instances of overcrowding are already in evidence within certain or­bital planes, increasing the likelihood of serious accidents, such as the 2009 collision between the Iridium 33 and Cosmos-2251 communications sat­ellites in low-earth orbit. Decades of ill-regulated activities in space have created millions of pieces of orbital debris, many of which have sufficient kinetic energy to permanently disable a satellite.

However, the most serious threat to the continued accessibility of the space environment by far is the pros­pect of a military confrontation, in­volving the use of kinetic anti-satellite (ASAT) weaponry by any of the grow­ing number of states that now possess the technological wherewithal to field such capabilities.

As was rather vividly demonstrated by the Chinese test of a direct-ascent ASAT missile in January 2007, which is estimated to have created more than two million pieces of debris up to ten centimeters in size as well as 2,500 larger objects that can be routinely tracked by earth-based sensors, such a conflict would probably result in mas­sive environmental damage. Depend­ing on the number and position of satellites destroyed, the utilization of affected orbital planes could be severe­ly impaired. In a worst-case scenario, these orbits could become virtually unusable for extended periods of time, as most of the debris would remain in place for decades or even centuries, with serious implications for both commercial and military users.

Unfortunately, several trends point in the direction of an increased risk over the next 10 – 20 years of terrestrial con­flict that may involve attacks on space systems, including the use of kinetic ASAT weaponry. These trends are pri­marily the results of the re-emergence of sustained strategic rivalries among some great and medium-sized powers – including the US and China in East Asia, the US and Russia in Eurasia, and potentially the China-India-Pa­kistan triangle in South Asia. With the exception of Pakistan, all of these states have already demonstrated a ba­sic anti-satellite capability, and the US and China in particular are integrat­ing space warfare scenarios into their military planning.

Moreover, the ongoing diffusion of underlying clusters of technologies – which include ballistic missiles and space launch vehicles (SLVs), ad­vanced radar and seeker technologies, conventional and micro-satellites, solid-state or chemical lasers, as well as battle management networks to co­ordinate attacks – will further increase the number of states with a latent anti-satellite potential. It is entirely possible that the pace of technology diffusion will accelerate further in the coming decades.

Against this backdrop of renewed stra­tegic rivalry and continuing prolifera­tion, the specter of space conflict will be a prominent feature of global poli­tics in the coming decade and prob­ably beyond. This chapter will first discuss the problematic, but largely irresolvable entanglement between civil and military activities in space, as well as the limited effectiveness of multilateral governance instruments in regulating these activities. It will then outline in considerable detail the current geostrategic and military trends that increase the likelihood of military confrontations and render space an ever more vulnerable do­main. Finally, it will review several ways in which states can mitigate their dependence on vulnerable space systems and provide an assessment of their potential effectiveness.

Irresolvable entanglements

Over the last several decades, space-based services have become a critical component of the global econom­ic system as well as of the civilian infrastructure of government. Long-range communications, public and commercial broadcasting, imaging and remote sensing, positioning and navigation, meteorology, and a host of specialized scientific applications are all highly dependent on the smooth functioning of satellites and their di­verse payloads. Vital sectors of the glo­balized economy, including finance, shipping, and civil aviation, rely on these space-based infrastructures, as do agricultural planning, urban plan­ning and surveying, disaster manage­ment, and environmental monitoring.

The provision of these various servic­es is valued at over USD 300 billion per year, and has remained a growth industry even in the aftermath of the 2007 – 2008 financial crisis. The overall economic contribution of space-based infrastructure in terms of establishing global connectivity, reducing transaction costs, and pro­viding unique sources of information about terrestrial activities is much more difficult to quantify. However, it undoubtedly makes a substantial con­tribution to the current gross world product of more than USD 74 trillion and thus likely exceeds the direct prof­its garnered by space-related industries many times over.

While space activities are still primar­ily conducted by a small number of advanced nations and private enti­ties, the number of stakeholders has grown exponentially over the past 50 years. In its early stages, the utilization of space was the exclusive domain of the Cold War era superpowers. Today, only half of the more than 1,200 ac­tive satellites are still operated by the US or Russia, and in the case of the US almost half of those are owned by private businesses. Overall, more than 50 nations now have one or more sat­ellites operating under their flag.

While the direct stakes of the leading spacefaring nations still exceed those of less capable or newly emerging ac­tors, small states that are tightly in­tegrated into the global economy are now nearly as vulnerable to disrup­tions of the orbital environment as are the great powers. At the same time, the capacity of most of these actors to unilaterally hedge against a loss of ser­vices without incurring unacceptable economic costs is rather limited.

This state of vulnerability, which is a product of states’ dependence on space-based services and the current lack of viable alternatives to such services, is compounded by the fact that the infrastructures in question are inherently fragile. Due to the dif­ficulty of placing them in orbit and keeping them in working order in the stringent conditions of the space environment, space assets tend to be expensive, scarce, and difficult to re­place. As a result of constraints in weight and size, they also typically lack physical robustness beyond what is absolutely necessary to keep them op­erational over their specified lifecycle. Consequently, the human foothold in the space domain is fundamentally less resilient than is our hold over other more easily accessible components of the global system, such as the mari­time domain.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that any distinction be­tween the civil and military spheres of space activity is at best porous, and in many cases non-existent. Not only are most space programs military in origin, they also tend to embody the very essence of dual-use technology, as their civil components are either direct corollaries of military services (as is the case with the US Global Positioning System, or GPS) or can be employed for military purposes with no, or only minimal, modifications (which is the case in many commercial communica­tion and imaging applications). In fact, among some 500 satellites that are not directly related to a governmental or military agency, a substantial major­ity provide services that potentially have military applicability. As a result, debates about the perils of ‘militariza­tion’ are largely moot – space is, and has been ever since the 1950s, a thor­oughly militarized domain.

This entanglement of civil and mili­tary infrastructures in space has im­portant implications as far as future security dynamics are concerned. On the one hand, in case of a seri­ous confrontation, their potential military relevance may require that a large number of foreign-operated spacecraft be considered as targets. Otherwise, an opponent would be al­lowed to immunize essential services from attack by outsourcing them to commercial entities or third parties. On the other hand, attacks on such third-party satellites would likely be perceived as particularly escalatory, requiring that fragile and ambiguous distinctions be upheld during a crisis or conflict. This would seem to create considerable opportunity for miscal­culation and miscommunication.

At the same time, entanglement also accentuates the fact that civil and mili­tary infrastructures are equally vulner­able to any large-scale environmental effects of kinetic space warfare. Even if distinctions between enemy and ‘neutral’, as well as between military and commercial, spacecraft could be upheld, attacks would inexorably en­tail some amount of collateral damage within that particular orbital plane. While some military satellites are already designed to weather specific types of adversarial effects, such as the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) created by high-altitude nuclear explosions, and could perhaps be better protected against other effects as well, a compre­hensive program of satellite hardening would almost certainly entail prohibi­tive costs. Therefore, the prevention of destructive anti-satellite warfare would seem to constitute the only viable course of action if major risks to the ex­isting infrastructures are to be avoided.

The hollow promise of comprehensive governance

Among the options available to poli­cy-makers to ensure that space does not become the scene of serious mili­tary confrontation, the institution of a framework of binding rules and norms that underwrite the status of space as a non-weaponized ‘sanctuary’ that is off-limits to any direct military inter­ventions would seem to hold consider­able appeal. If such a framework were embraced and collectively upheld by all the relevant space powers, the pos­sibility of space conflict would almost certainly diminish, and access to the space environment would continue to be relatively unproblematic for dec­ades to come. In fact, several initia­tives with the declared goal of achiev­ing such an end state are currently on the table, including a draft treaty pro­posed by Russia and China in 2008, which has recently been updated, and a non-binding code of conduct sup­ported by the EU.

Unfortunately, hopes for a compre­hensive scheme of governance that ensures the military inviolability of the space domain are largely based on extravagant extrapolations from the limited achievements of Cold War space diplomacy, or of more recent civil-commercial governance instru­ments. While the former were made possible by a specific set of political-military conditions that no longer ap­ply, the latter fail to provide a work­able template for regulating military activities in space, which are among the most sensitive and least transpar­ent aspects in the military policies of the great powers. As a result, it is unlikely that multilateral governance will be able to effectively prevent ter­restrial rivalries from spilling over into space. Far from offering any deci­sive solutions, it should be regarded as one of a number of mechanisms that may be able to make a limited contri­bution to a stable space environment.

Historically, space governance has enjoyed some success only where the great powers had a shared interest in preventing a further escalation of on­going activities, notably where weap­onization in the very narrow sense of permanently deploying specific types of weapons in orbit, was concerned. This was laid down in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which remains to this day the most significant legal docu­ment regulating activities in space, and the now defunct Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, ratified in 1972. While such partial achievements remain a possibility, trust in comprehensive multilateral governance would appear to be largely misplaced where mili­tary competition is perceived by one or both sides as providing important strategic or political advantages.

To the extent that effective govern­ance remains elusive, space will once again become – and likely remain – a contested zone of influence, and po­tentially a zone of conflict, between the great powers. Governance efforts, in the form of confidence-building measures and arms control initiatives, could be instrumental in regulating the more escalatory or destabilizing as­pects of militarized competition. The stationing of weapons in orbit, in par­ticular, will remain a distinct and per­haps more manageable concern. That said, the re-emergence of strategic rivalries between several of the great powers and the persistence of rivalry in other settings indicate a heighten­ing of competition in the near- and medium-term that any existing or proposed mechanisms of governance are unlikely to prevent.

The return of strategic rivalry and the rise of space denial

As the unrivalled military and eco­nomic predominance of the US, which has been the hallmark of the post-Cold War era, begins to wane, geopolitical competition with China in the Asia-Pacific and with Russia in Eurasia is inaugurating a new era of rivalry in an increasingly multipolar global system. Intermittent tensions in the East and South China Seas, which from a US perspective largely amount to confrontations by proxy over the future regional order, and the acute crisis in NATO-Russia relations over Ukraine are but the most visible crystallization points of these growing fault lines in great power relations. As scenarios of conventional or ‘hybrid’ interstate warfare begin to reshape the horizon of military planning, these rivalries are also increasingly finding their expression in outer space. But the strategic conditions under which the next round of militarized interac­tion in space will take place differ very considerably from those of the Cold War competition, and in ways that indicate a much greater potential for conflict escalation.

Of course, space has been an arena of geostrategic antagonism and jostling from the very inception of human orbital activities. Throughout the first half of the period since 1957, when the civil and military utilization of space began in earnest, great-power relations were dominated by an en­trenched militarized rivalry between two largely incompatible systems of government. However, alone among the environments into which humans have extended their economic and military reach, space has never seen a direct military clash between hostile political actors. This outcome might be seen as an encouraging sign of the great powers’ ability to regulate their interactions even in the absence of comprehensive space governance or, at the very least, to successfully ‘muddle through’. It appears increasingly un­likely, however, that this run of good fortune will hold indefinitely.

A strong case can be made to the effect that space conflict during the Cold War was of limited importance be­cause it was viewed almost exclusively through the prism of space systems’ intimate association with the strategic nuclear balance. Throughout the bi­polar standoff, satellites were utilized mainly for strategic command and control (C2), early warning, and re­connaissance. As a result of this close integration of space and the nuclear sphere, attacks on spacecraft were gen­erally seen as a corollary of, or prelude to, full-scale nuclear war, and consid­erably less attention was paid to space warfare as a serious issue during more limited conflicts. It was thus expected that, should attacks on spacecraft ever occur, they would almost immedi­ately be eclipsed by far more serious events.

It was only during the 1991 Gulf War that the current paradigm of space operations in support of con­ventional force deployments began to take hold. In the quarter-century that followed, the contribution of space-based services to conventional military operations has increased to the point of becoming the chief rai­son d’être of space power, with other advanced military forces clearly seek­ing to emulate the US in this regard. As a result of these developments, the perspective of potential ASAT users on space denial operations has changed completely. Far from being a prelude to an all-out nuclear assault, space warfare is now seen primarily as a means of denying information sup­port and C2 to the opponent’s con­ventional forces, thereby depriving them of vital force multipliers. Such considerations are particularly promi­nent in the warfighting concepts of armed forces that view the highly space-enabled and space-dependent US military as a likely opponent.

As a matter of fact, concerns about US conventional military superiority have been the main driver behind the renewed interest in anti-satellite capa­bilities. Attempts at offsetting the US advantage in space – and thereby di­minishing the US armed forces’ over­all margin of superiority in a future conflict – are now quite prominent in Chinese and Russian conceptions of future warfare, and are manifest­ing themselves in a number of devel­opment programs and tests not seen since the 1980s. With space warfare gaining currency in the doctrinal de­bates of some of the world’s most ca­pable armed forces, other nations are beginning to take an interest in mili­tary counter-space options as well.

The remarkable rebirth of ASAT

In retrospect, the developments that placed space warfare back on the agenda of great power politics were the direction taken by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in its modernization drive, which finally be­gan to gather some steam in the early 2000s, and the US decision in 2002 to withdraw from the ABM Treaty. It was only in the aftermath of Chi­na’s much-noted shoot-down of its Fengyun-1C weather satellite in early 2007, however, that the issue began to reenter the public consciousness. It was this rather dramatic event, which drew a thinly-veiled US riposte in the destruction of the defunct USA-193 reconnaissance satellite in an ASAT test known as Operation Burnt Frost in February 2008, which reestab­lished the prospect of space warfare as a prominent global security concern.

In the eight years that have passed since the Fengyung intercept, a wealth of evidence has emerged that points to renewed efforts by several of the great powers to develop a capac­ity for effective space denial by both kinetic and non-kinetic means. Of these, China’s development of the di­rect-ascent missile system, known as the SC-19, which was first observed in two non-destructive tests in 2005 and 2006, and also employed in the 2007 destructive test, has understand­ably received the greatest amount of public attention. Four additional tests with a suspected ASAT background have been reported in 2010, 2013, and most recently in July 2014. According to one notable technical analysis, one of two tests observed in 2013 may have utilized a more advanced missile and reached much deeper into space than did earlier tests, with an apogee in excess of 10,000 kilometers. The same may have been true of the test report­ed in 2014. Should the PLA be able to consolidate such an extended-range capability, it will be able to threaten a much greater number of satellites than has hitherto been the case.

One significant feature of the SC-19 system is that it has been tested in a road-mobile configuration, which points to the development of an op­erationally credible and survivable ca­pability that may already be deployed in small numbers with the Second Artillery Force (SAF), which also has responsibility for the land-based com­ponent of China’s nuclear deterrent. Even a few SC-19s could do consid­erable damage to selected high-value military assets in low-earth orbits, and the same could be true of the extend­ed-range system purportedly tested in 2013 and 2014 if it is targeted against relatively vulnerable constellations in geostationary orbits. Meanwhile, the GPS constellation in medium-earth orbits is generally considered relative­ly robust, due to its distributed na­ture. Bringing the system to its knees for an extended period of time would require the coordinated expenditure of perhaps a dozen or more weapons, which would almost certainly draw an extremely robust – possibly nuclear – response from the US.

In addition to its direct-ascent, hit-to-kill system (or systems), China is also reported to be testing systems for co-orbital attack. This is based on the observation of a number of unusual maneuvers by satellites Shiyan-7, Shi­jian-15, and Chuangxin-3, which are thought to have begun in July 2013. The exact extent and implications of this additional path to an ASAT capability are currently difficult to fathom. Moreover, the PLA is known to also have engaged in the ‘dazzling’ or ‘blinding’ of US imaging satellites by means of terrestrial laser systems, and has likely acquired GPS jammers, which can be effective in protecting critical installations from certain types of precision-guided munitions (PGM). It may also be developing a range of other space warfare techniques based on microwave, electronic attack, and cyberspace capabilities. Given the considerable breadth and depth of its space warfare programs, the PLA’s activities are currently the main driver of a burgeoning arms dynamic in this area of strategic interaction.

The US, meanwhile, is not known to be operating or developing dedi­cated anti-satellite weapons, which is explained in part by the much lower dependence on space-based services of even the most capable among its poten­tial opponents. The US military does, however, field several types of missile defense interceptors, some of which are inherently dual-use capable, as was successfully demonstrated in Op­eration Burnt Frost. Its ballistic missile defense (BMD) programs thus provide the US with what is probably the most extensive and most widely distributed ASAT potential among the great pow­ers. However, the reach of this arsenal is currently limited to low Earth orbits. Moreover, while the BMD and anti-satellite missions are fundamentally very similar, and satellites are much less operationally demanding targets, substantial technical modifications are nonetheless required to realize the la­tent ASAT potential of these systems. It is therefore fair to say that the US does not routinely field space weapons as part of its global defense strategy.

The Russian Federation is also report­edly engaging in a variety of space war­fare activities, driven in large part by US insistence on a continental missile defense system, which Moscow per­ceives as a potential threat to its nu­clear deterrent, as well as by Chinese and US ASAT testing. The most recent example of such activities is what may amount to a reactivation of the co-or­bital attack programs that constituted the backbone of Soviet space warfare during the Cold War. According to media reports, a satellite launched in May 2014 and known as Cos­mos-2499 has been engaging in unu­sual approach maneuvers that may constitute a series of ASAT-related tests. Russia has also maintained and recently updated the ground-based sensors that used to support its co-orbital attack programs. In addition to its traditional focus on co-orbital attack, Russia may be reviving its air-launched Kontakt system as well as an airborne laser that could be employed to temporarily dazzle, and perhaps even permanently disable, satellites in low Earth orbit. Russia is also a leading manufacturer of GPS jammers, which it has exported to various countries.

Another significant military power that is known to possess at least a la­tent direct-ascent ASAT program is India. The Indian armed forces are currently working towards a layered missile defense system and have so far conducted at least seven tests, which may have provided sufficient know-how to conduct an ASAT mission with relative ease. India is not current­ly known to be developing or fielding a dedicated capability, but is sure to keep a close watch on China’s activities in this area, given its own growing stakes in outer space, its unresolved territo­rial disputes with that country, and a potential for serious geostrategic com­petition in the Indian Ocean.