Accessory to War

by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

For half a century, US space rhetoric echoed the assertive tone of Kennedy’s public declarations. Military and quasi-military policy documents dating to the opening decade of the twenty-first century emphasized space (reflexively paired with cyberspace, like Adam and Eve or rice and beans)8 as the battlefield of the future, a domain to capture, control, and exploit. By contrast, policy papers on robotic and human exploration of deep space have extolled the pursuit of science. Usually they invoke the need to collaborate rather than dominate—again, the idiom of science rather than conflict. But since the earliest days of the space race, when the word “race” was an unambiguous call to scientific arms, those in power have been adamant that science plays second fiddle to military capability.

  Take the 2006 Air Force doctrine document titled Space Operations. Twenty-first-century warfare, it states, must be “space-enabled warfare”:

  Today, control of the ultimate high ground is critical for space superiority and assures the force-multiplying capabilities of space power. Tomorrow, space superiority may enable instant engagement anywhere in the world. . . . [T]he Air Force views space power as a key ingredient for achieving battlespace superiority. . . . Space power should be integrated throughout joint operations as both an enabler and a force multiplier.

  As recognized enablers, nonmilitary organizations would be subject to conscription: “Today, many civil, commercial, and foreign organizations contribute space capabilities to military operations [that] often must be requested on an unplanned basis. For example, the military may request NASA to redirect focus from a scientific mission to support a military operation.”9 So, neither NASA, Google, Intelsat, ExxonMobil, the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, nor the European Global Navigation Satellite System Agency sits beyond the reach of the Department of Defense.

  Counterspace Operations, a slightly earlier Air Force doctrine document, strikes a more combative note. It details the US military’s commitment to disable or destroy anybody else’s asset that does, can, or might interfere with any activities conducted in space by the United States or its allies. To protect and preserve America’s space superiority, along with the option to go on the offensive when doing so, is a recurrent theme. Precluding a potential adversary from “exploiting space to their advantage” is essential. Deterrence is paramount. But if deterrence isn’t enough, the military has available a portfolio of options, from camouflage and dispersal of space assets to satellite repositioning and “suppression of adversary counterspace capabilities.” In other words, an offensive attack.

  Attacking on the basis of mild indications of probability suggests a broad definition of self-defense. Taking the offensive to achieve this self-defense involves what the Air Force calls the Five D’s: deception, disruption, denial, degradation, and destruction, carried out by technology ranging from radio frequency jammers and malicious codes to remotely piloted aircraft, missiles, antisatellite weapons, and lasers. Special-ops forces, too, may join the fray. Counterspace demands a broad reach.10

  Leadership was President Kennedy’s prime theme. Like assertiveness, it has had a long thematic life. Through at least the first decade of the present millennium, it was almost axiomatic that a world in which the United States did not lead would be intolerable:

  “To achieve national security objectives and compete successfully internationally, the U.S. must maintain technological leadership in space,” states the 2001 report of the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization.

  “Other nations, against whom we compete for jobs in the global economy, are also intent on exploring space. If not us, someone else will lead in the exploration, utilization and, ultimately, the commercialization of space, as we sit idly by,” states the 2004 report of the President’s Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy (another commission on which I served).

  “The United States is the leading space power. . . . Therefore, the failure of the United States to remain in the forefront of space technologies would have both military and commercial implications. Advances in the military or civilian sectors will overlap, intersect, and reinforce each other. Consequently, the development in the United States of a dynamic and innovative private-sector space industry will be indispensable to future U.S. space leadership,” states the 2009 report of the Independent Working Group on Missile Defense, the Space Relationship, and the Twenty-First Century, a project of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis.

  “For over 50 years, our space community has been a catalyst for innovation and a hallmark of U.S. technological leadership. Our space capabilities underpin global commerce and scientific advancements and bolster our national security strengths and those of our allies and partners,” states the 2010 National Security Strategy of the Obama administration.

  “U.S. national security is . . . increasingly predicated on active U.S. leadership of alliance and coalition efforts in peacetime, crisis, and conflict. . . . U.S. leadership in space can help the United States and our partners address the challenges posed by a space domain that is increasingly congested, contested, and competitive,” states the unclassified summary of the 2011 National Security Space Strategy.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the world has not stood idle. That phrase “congested, contested, and competitive” from 2011? In certain quarters, presumptions of US primacy are now being undercut by recognition of vulnerability, or at least multiplicity. Even back in 2006, Space Operations recognized three levels of advantage—space parity, space superiority, and space supremacy—and conceded that supremacy “may sometimes be an unrealistic objective because sources of space power include commercial and third party space capabilities, and it is difficult to completely deny an adversary’s access to these capabilities.” Quite true—unless you’re willing to turn space into a permanent battlefield.

  Power doesn’t disappear as a goal just because there’s competition. In 2014 a deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy stated: “Space remains vital to our national security. . . . It’s a key to U.S. power projection, providing a strong deterrent to our potential adversaries and a source of confidence to our allies.” But that same assistant secretary, in the same testimony to a Senate Armed Services subcommittee, also stated that the strategic environment of space is evolving in ways that challenge the United States. Space, he conceded, is now a frontier open to all.11

  By now, that last idea is a self-evident truth. It’s clear that America’s current asymmetric advantage in space is not impervious to erosion. A multilateral space regime has shot well beyond the launch phase. US power is under threat. And it’s becoming ever clearer that the heavy US military, commercial, and civilian dependence on space assets creates its own heavy problems.

  Here’s how General John E. Hyten, commander of US Air Force Space Command, portrayed the situation in the summer of 2016:

  Despite world interest in avoiding militarization of space, potential adversaries have identified the use of space as an advantage for U.S. military forces, and are actively fielding systems to deny our use of space in a conflict. This is not without precedence. Through the centuries, nations formed armies, navies and air forces to defend the right to use the global commons of land, sea and air. Securing our right to use space is simply an extension of an age old principle to guarantee use of global commons.

  Space as a global commons is vital to commerce and is an essential element of Joint Warfare and global stability. Space is no longer a sanctuary where the United States or our allies and partners operate with impunity. Although Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) has a long history of providing space capabilities vital to the defense of our nation, the training and skills that sustained our space operations for the last several decades are not the same skills we need to fight through threats and win in today’s contested, degraded and operationally-limited (CDO) environment.

  Gone are the repeated references to US leadership, here replaced by “our competitive advantage in space.�
� Gone, too, are the days when the job of US space forces was “simply [to] provide space services.” Now the focus is on “improving combat capability against ever-increasing threats and complex scenarios.”12

  A year later—and a day after being sworn in to her new office—the secretary of the Air Force, Heather Wilson, took a similarly combat-focused stance at a Senate Strategic Forces subcommittee hearing. Flanked by three top Air Force space officials, she testified that space is no longer simply “an enabler and force enhancer for U.S. military operations.” Now, it is “a warfighting domain just like air, land, and sea.”13 Space war: just another option.

  Like General Hyten, European Union defense officials invoke stability as a vital goal. But they don’t introduce it in the same sentence as warfare. Nor do power projection, operating with impunity, or space superiority figure in their discussions. One recent EU document lists stability alongside inviolability of borders, human rights and fundamental freedoms, rule of law, media freedom, and fair democratic elections. Another maintains that the EU’s reliance on soft power has long been a point of pride for Europeans, even though they see that soft power isn’t enough to address evolving realities. As for the global commons, the European Union sees it as primarily a civil, not a military, domain: “[O]ur security and prosperity increasingly rely on the protection of networks, critical infrastructure and energy security, on preventing and addressing proliferation crises, as well as on secure access to the global commons (cyber, airspace, maritime, space) on which our modern societies depend in order to thrive.”14

  The European Commission construes the lengthening list of space actors mostly in economic terms: Europe now faces “tougher global competition,” “high dependence on non-European critical components and technologies,” “a global value chain that increasingly attracts new companies and entrepreneurs.” On the political front, Europe is far less concerned about contestation of leadership—America’s usual worry—than about cooperation, the upholding of international standards, and sustainable access to space for all who reach for it.15

  In short, European postwar interest in space—and science in general—has been predominantly nonmilitary. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, was created in 1954 to investigate the fundamental structure of the universe. The 1962 document that created the European Launcher Development Organisation—tasked with building a rocket that would end European dependence on US launch technology—stipulated that the organization limit itself to peaceful applications. The European Space Research Organisation, created in 1964 to develop European satellites, “should,” argued one of its early proponents, “have no other purpose than research and should therefore be independent of any kind of military organisation and free from any official secrets act.” The mandate of the European Space Agency, created in 1975 as the successor to the earlier organizations, has always been to “promote, for exclusively peaceful purposes, cooperation among European states in space research and technology.” Plans for Galileo, the European global-positioning system, were initiated in 1999 so that the Continent would no longer need to rely on America’s military-controlled GPS.16 Getting out from under US dominance and control was a central motivation.

  Contemporary Western Europe, having emerged from two devastating twentieth-century wars on its own soil within three decades, prefers conflict resolution to military confrontation. Between 2006 and 2008, the aggregate military spending of the almost thirty member states of the European Union hovered around €200 billion, about half that of the United States and the second highest globally. In 2010 it slipped to little more than a third of the US amount. But in response to the following decade’s waves of desperate refugees from Africa and the Middle East, and multiple terrorist attacks in European cities, Europe’s policymakers began to press for more military spending. Even amid these new pressures, however, as of 2012 Asia had displaced Europe as the number two military spender.17

  Important fact: At present there is no such thing as a standing, full-spectrum European Armed Forces, let alone a European Space Command. There’s the European Defence Agency, which describes itself as a catalyst—promoting collaborations, launching new initiatives, introducing better defense capabilities. There’s the Common Security and Defence Policy, which stresses peacekeeping, conflict prevention, and crisis management. There’s the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, with its three-sided view of security: political/military, economic/environmental, and human. There are the individual militaries and gendarmeries of the European Union’s member states, and the United Nations’ frequent multinational efforts at peacekeeping. None of these is a permanent warfighting machine.

  Even less war-oriented are the EU’s space-related agencies: the twenty-plus-member European Space Agency, the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, the European Global Navigation Satellite System Agency, and the European Union Satellite Centre.

  Other than its multinational, rapid-response Battlegroups, intended for crisis management rather than all-out war, the European Union’s closest approach to a conventional military force is NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Though the territory it defends now stretches from the western shores of Canada and the United States to the eastern border of Turkey, far indeed from the North Atlantic, its name persists. Article 5 of its founding treaty, signed in 1949, declares that an attack against one member is an attack against all. This is the principle of collective defense, invoked for the first time in NATO’s history following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. NATO has also intervened in conflicts between and within nonmember states, such as the Bosnian War, the Kosovo War, and the Libyan Civil War.

  But NATO has no explicit space policy and no integrated space command. Should there be another Article 5 attack, the only space assets NATO could muster would be the space assets of its member states. And what Europe could presently contribute consists mainly of remote sensing, commercial communications, and data from weather and scientific satellites, along with Galileo and Galileo’s comrade EGNOS, the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service, which augments GPS signals over Europe. Surveillance is something Europe could contribute, but any battle-ready spacecraft would have to come from the United States, whose forty-fifth president did not merely express displeasure at the substantial level of US funding for NATO but also, early on, pronounced the organization obsolete.18

  The nonmartiality of European space policy matches that of overall European security and defense policy. “Space Strategy for Europe,” a European Commission plan adopted in late 2016, stresses that space technologies contribute to economic competitiveness, assistance to refugees, climate monitoring, and sustainable management of natural resources. The role of space in security and defense is presented as a side benefit, useful for addressing the increase in people fleeing their home countries and the consequent demand for increased border controls and maritime surveillance. Other named threats and risks include the proliferation of space debris, the effects of Sun-driven space weather on satellites and ground-level infrastructure, cyber sabotage of space assets, and the increase in space actors and space objects. Here the term “situational awareness” refers to space debris, not battle plans. Overall, Europe embraces a characteristically internationalist approach. Space power must be shared power.

  But the focus continually returns to economics. “Space Strategy for Europe” pegs the EU’s space sector, including manufacturing and ancillary services, at more than 20 percent of the total global value, and while the EU is now third globally in military spending, it remains second globally in public space spending, with a projected seven-year space budget of €12 billion.19

  Not that the military dimension is absent.

  The “Space Strategy” plan describes Europe’s Earth-observation and global-navigation satellite programs as “purely civilian programmes entirely under civilian control.” But that isn’t the full picture. Services and data generated by those programs can
, by request of an individual member state, be made available for emergency services, crisis management, border management, peacekeeping, and police operations. And the EU’s other space capabilities

  can provide additional operational capacity for the implementation of the common security and defence policy, notably with regard to precision navigation (Galileo), surveillance (Copernicus), communications (Govsatcom), autonomous access to space (launchers) and situational awareness (SST), and can contribute to European strategic autonomy and non-dependence. Space and defence technologies are also closely interlinked.20

  Sounds not too different from the US Air Force’s declared power to conscript NASA or Google or even a foreign entity’s satellite assets and data when needed. The biggest difference might be that in post-conquistador, post-Holocaust Western Europe, “defence” sounds more peaceable than “defense” does in America.

  Compared with the EU’s Galileo and Copernicus, the European Space Agency may be a less likely conscript for crisis management or peacekeeping. ESA’s stated foreground issues are innovation, inspiration, and industry—not migration or terrorism. Science is fundamental to every ESA endeavor. Safety and security are auxiliary, mentioned only in connection with the need for European space scientists to pursue their work unimpeded by threats, whether from orbital debris or cyber sabotage. Glance at the press releases and webpages produced for ESA’s triennial policy meeting of space ministers in December 2016, and you won’t find the word “military.” What you will find, repeated with variations, is simply the wish to pursue economic betterment and scientific enlightenment for all.21

  A straight comparison between Europe’s and America’s official visions of space power in the twenty-first century reveals two partners with divergent agendas. But ask European and American astrophysicists about their agendas, and what you’ll hear will strongly converge.