As major powers have recently sought to acquire space capabilities, several questions have been raised about whether the next war will be a space war. One should take into consideration that if a space war occurred, it would be destructive for the world economy, so the great powers should develop a robust, multilateral approach for space exploitation in order to make war in space less likely.

Space has played a significant role in modern warfare. Today’s military forces rely on space-based capabilities for everything from satellite navigation to C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance).^[i] Accordingly, space has become a decisive domain in warfare, which make it as essential as navy, air forces and even nuclear weapons.

Even without access to space-based capabilities (or an air force, or navy, or nuclear weapons), it would have been very hard to defeat ISIS on the ground. It was useful and facilitated the recapture of territories that were once under ISIS’ control.

However, the recent great powers’ behavior in space is worrying. China has upgraded its space capabilities dramatically in recent years, especially in the field of anti-satellite (ASAT) technologies. In response, the former Obama administration in the US militarized its approach to space as well.^[ii] More states are accelerating their capabilities as well to access outer space, so it is becoming “congested, contested, and competitive,”^[iii] a situation rife with peril, given the potential consequences of war in space.

The situation is not yet alarming. Space-based capabilities are mostly about deterrence, to protect one’s nation from prospects of war.^[iv] If a war between great powers destroyed or severely degraded these countries’ space-based capabilities, the world economy would be thrown into a downturn that would be worse than the Great Depression witnessed in the 1930s.

Accordingly, all the great powers, and especially the US, Russia, and China, understand that future great power conflicts, if militarized, will rely on space-based capabilities to boost the capabilities and efficiency of military forces on the ground. Operation Desert Storm in 1991, during which American and allied military forces expelled Iraqi military forces from Kuwait, showed this beyond any doubt.^[v]

Some authors mistakenly called this war “the first space war,”^[vi] even though it was nothing of the sort. Ground forces were the decisive factor in that war, but their decisiveness relied on a comprehensive integration of all warfare domains including, land, air, space, sea, and cyber.^[vii] Like military capabilities in any warfare domain, those in space will matter for outcomes on the ground, but you can neither rely on it solely, nor will great powers consider such worthy of fighting a war over.

All wars are fought for political objectives, and are decided by a contest of political wills.^[viii] How they are fought depends on how the combatants use the tools at their disposal to impose that will on their enemy. Space-based capabilities are just an additional set of tools for states to fight with. For example, the air domain was not very important to warfare until airplanes flew around and attacked the ground in numbers that impacted the outcome of battles. Planes became more essential and efficient in World War II, rather than in World War I, but that did not identify World War II as an “air war.”

In this regard, one should note that if a war erupted between the world’s super powers, space-based capabilities would likely play a much more active role in such wars rather than in the conflict with ISIS or other non-state or small state actors. China, Russia, the US, and European states have been boosting significant space-based capabilities, ranging from satellite navigation systems like GPS (US), Glonass (Russia), and BeiDou (China); to spy and weather satellites and advanced missile systems.^[ix]

Weaponization of Space

Literature has presented a range of views concerning the prospects of a space war to occur. One school of thought emphasizes the increasing militarization and weaponization of space, and especially in the light of the Chinese efforts to negate American space dominance in the event of a war between these two great powers. The other school of thought emphasizes the difference between war and warfare.^[x]

Followers of the first school of thought conducted an in-depth study of China’s ASAT weapon program, from the highly-publicized Chinese shoot-down of a derelict weather satellite in low-earth orbit (LEO) in 2007, which left over three thousand pieces of trackable space debris, to a 2013 suspected ASAT launch that reached nearly to geosynchronous orbit (GEO). These launches provide an evident proof of a rapid increase in Chinese ASAT capabilities, due to the fact that the American GPS satellites are stationed in GEO, and since newer Chinese ASAT systems employ mobile launchers. In case a war was launched between the US and China, the Chinese capabilities could degrade the ability of the US military to operate in its customary, information-dominant way. This analysis has raised questions about why the US has not taken any measures to counter China’s ASAT capability, or at least to constrain China’s space weaponization program. Until now no one has proposed any international treaty to regulate and manage the space race. Since the 2007 Chinese launch that created tremendous amounts of space debris, the US has made very few public statements regarding Chinese efforts to weaponize space.^[xi]

The lack of US concern can be attributed to the following three reasons:

1- The Dual Nature of Space programs: The Chinese program is not the first attempt by a nation to weaponize space. During the Cold War, it was evident that the Soviet civilian space program had a dual use. The same rockets that took cosmonauts into space, could also carry nuclear warheads across the globe. Furthermore, a nation that has celestial bodies in orbit can use them to attack the ground. Given that they could be put on the right trajectory, they would have the same kinetic effect equivalent to a small nuclear bomb. As a result, the US and USSR signed the Outer Space Treaty in 1967, in an effort to avoid the proliferation of weapons, especially nuclear weapons, in space.^[xii] International space law has developed upon the basis of this treaty, and further treaties have been proposed to regulate space exploitation.^[xiii]

On the other hand, regardless of whether one nation has satellites carrying ground-attack weapons or not, just the possession of satellites by another nation is enough to deter the enemy from using his own satellites as kinetic weapons, or from launching weapons from those satellites. Likewise, the economic cost of bringing down the entire American GPS system would be so catastrophic that it would spark a wider and deeper military conflict between the US than China would countenance.

Given this, space-based capabilities, or the ability to destroy the space-based capabilities of another state, are nothing new. The militarization and weaponization of space, then, is aimed at degrading a potential opponent’s capabilities, but not destroying them.

2-   Mutual Deterrence: The possession of military space capabilities does not necessarily impose an eminent threat given that they’re degradation weapons, and not weapons of mutually assured destruction. Contrary to nuclear weapons, the space-based weapons does not suggest that it will augur in a civilization-ending cataclysm, unless they were coupled with nuclear weapons.  Accordingly, the US and China’s adopted behavior, for the past ten years, have developed an implicit understanding over the limits and utility of these weapons.

Moreover, after China’s most recent ASAT launch, the missile that reached nearly to geosynchronous orbit in 2013, the US launched an ASAT missile of its own.^[xiv] In effect, the Americans were telling the Chinese, “We’re not that impressed; we can do the same thing without too much effort.”

This behavior has ushered in an uneasy deterrence between the US and China.^[xv] Both states seem to recognize that the other can degrade its systems in space, but neither of them demonstrated their willingness to use space-weapons first. The exploitation of space has settled, at least for now, upon exploration, science, and the application of dual-use technologies, such as satellites sent to clean up space debris that could technically be used to attack or degrade other satellites.^[xvi

3-   Difficulty in enforcing agreements: The third reason that the US has not demonstrated more concern over China’s space program is that any agreement in this regard would be difficult to enforce. In fact, this is one reason the US has not signed the treaty that Russia and China proposed in 2008.^[xvii]

Set aside that any object in space can be turned into a weapon, given sufficient mass and the correct trajectory, but almost all space-based weapons systems have dual-usage. The only difference, for example, between ASAT weapons and civilian rocket systems is the software used.

Thus, the only reason to enforce nations to sign a regulatory treaty, for space-based and anti-satellite weaponry, would be to set higher international standards for illegalizing and hindering their usage as weapons.^[xviii] However, American President Bush approached space with an attitude of primacy based on military power. On the other side, the Obama administration shifted to a norm of construction approach, but then shifted back to primacy after China’s 2013 launch.^[xix] This has resulted in an uneasy, though apparently stable, deterrence. In sum, space weaponization, while dangerous, will not spark a great power war, in and of itself.

War vs. Warfare

Followers and supporters of the second school of thought argue that there are limited prospects for space wars. They further perceive that there is a need to distinguish between war and warfare. Even if a warfare occurred in space, the objective of war itself will continue to be very much on the ground.

War, in its classic definition, is a contest of wills between two actors, usually states.^[xx] The nature of war, as Clausewitz calls it, focuses on the political dispute behind a conflict. Wars between states break out due to their disagreement about some political objective, and their relative power.^[xxi] War is a destructive negotiation process to determine which of the two states can foist its will upon the other, thus solving the underlying dispute over the political objective.

Warfare, on the other hand, is how combatants fight. The character of war, as Clausewitz calls it, is conditioned on the elements of the famed trinity: violence, chance, and reason. Violence refers to the primordial hatred that every war engenders, and it is on vivid display in Syria today. Chance refers to luck (good and bad) in war, which can have a dramatic effect on how a war is fought. One example is the Egyptian crossing of the Suez Canal in 1973.^[xxii] Reason refers to war as an instrument of policy; how states fight rarely exceeds the bounds of what is politically expedient. In a war between states, all three elements determine how the states’ military forces fight each other.

In addition, World War II was much more violent and industrialized than World War I, earlier in the twentieth century. The good fortune of the Allies, in breaking the German Enigma and Japanese naval codes during WWII, certainly changed the way the Allies fought. It allowed them to fight on the move instead of resorting to attrition, as in the earlier war.^[xxiii] Chemical weapons played a major role in WWI, but a very small role in WWII. Ultimately, a political objective decided when both wars ended, but violence, chance, and reason played a role in how both wars were fought.

If a war occurs in space, especially between world’s super powers, then the political objective itself would have to be in space. Since the things in space today have little intrinsic political value, the prospect of a true space war is vanishingly small. If, however, one or a few states controlled access to a lucrative Moon base or Asteroid Belt mining post, then the prospects of a space war would become much more likely. This kind of restriction would be difficult to effect, but the US primacy approach contributes to a scenario where states try to build a technological gap impressive enough to shut out the others from space. Making space a scarce resource would make space war likely indeed.

Today, though, there’s not much to fight over in space. There is a very desirable ring of orbits over the Earth’s equator, but there are many ways to exploit space than to control equatorial orbits. Moreover, even if one state tried to control them, instead of coordinating them like the US does, that state would find it almost impossible to maintain that control, given that launch costs are decreasing year by year.

Despite decreasing launch costs, space is still really hard to get to. As long as that is the case, the prospects of a space war are slim. As a medium, space could impact wars on the ground, which is why it is critical to understand space-based capabilities and how current great powers’ weapon systems could degrade these capabilities. War may go through space, but it won’t occur solely in space. Space is, and will continue to be, a geopolitical sideshow, which means that the real worry isn’t great power space war, but great power war.

Conclusion

Conventional space deterrence between the US and China has settled into a general understanding that China could degrade US capabilities in space in the event of a regional conflict. Yet, the US can hold Chinese space-based capabilities hostage to its technological edge.

In addition, a treaty to manage weaponization of space would be almost impossible to enforce, and both sides recognize that it would probably be better to accept the opponent’s capabilities as an unsettling fact. Besides, space is becoming more crowded, so any bilateral agreement would have to be renegotiated in the future anyway.

However, settling for this status quo is incredibly short-sighted on the part of both the US and China. The potential economic benefits of exploiting space would be measured in trillions of dollars, but the only way to achieve these benefits is to construct a stable international system for exploiting space, not one based on uneasy conventional deterrence. The great powers, and especially the US, should sign and ratify treaties to control the weaponization of space, and they should commit to a “no first use” norm. A truly multilateral approach to space exploration and scientific inquiry, as the US began with Russia after the Cold War, would thicken the connections between the economic benefits of space and political decision making. In the long-term, humanity is much better off with a norms-based approach to space exploitation, as opposed to one of state primacy.

While the status quo is not alarming yet, we should seriously be concerned about great power war in space if we hear reports that nuclear weapons have been placed in space, or if one of the great powers makes a technological leap that could keep other states from accessing the benefits of space.