Table of Contents
Bert Chapman
Professor Bert Chapman is Government Information and Political Science Librarian at Purdue University and a Mackinder Forum member.
Space has become essential to all aspects of civilian and military space policy. In our personal lives, cell phones use GPS satellites to track our locations, satellites are involved in multiple bank and financial transactions, and when we watch news and sports from domestic and international locales such as the Winter Olympics, we depend on satellites to transmit and receive these images. GPS guides commercial airlines and container ships to their locations along ambulances, fire departments, and police depending on GPS to execute their responsibilities. Storms such as hurricanes are also tracked by satellite.
Recent years have seen the establishment in the US and other countries of government agencies aspiring to regulate the commercial space industry and space transportation. This has also been true as the national militaries have also developed or are in the process of developing military forces and intelligence capabilities to defend space assets and monitor the capabilities and threats posed by hostile countries. Examples of some of these agencies for the US and their allies include the US Space Force, the 3 Canadian Space Division, the Australian Defence Force’s Space Command, Britain’s Royal Air Force UK Space Command, and France’s Air and Space Force. These military forces have also begun developing military doctrine to conduct operations in space.
Within these democratic countries, multiple legislative oversight committees have been created to conduct oversight, update legislation, and fund civil and military space programs with varying degrees of success and failure.
Among powers antagonistic to the US who have established military presences in space include China’s People’s Liberation Army Aerospace Force and Russian Space Force. These authoritarian powers seek to exploit the heavy dependence on space by the US and its democratic allies.
Last year, Bloomsbury published the book Space Strategy and Military Doctrine: Policy Documents of NATO Allies Space Strategy and Military Doctrine: Policy Documents of NATO Allies which documents the availability of significant quantities of publicly available information on these policy developments for assiduous researchers.
This book examines the critical importance of space to US and allied domestic and international economics and security. It opens with a scenario of how a disruption of space satellite communications would adversely impact the United Kingdom in multiple ways, documents how long it would take for such disruptions to be impactful, the length of time required to launch new satellites, and how using counter-space weapons may have multiple adverse impacts affecting all sectors of the world. Examples of such adverse impacts include damaging satellite or ground stations, targeting electromagnetic systems enabling space systems to transmit and receive data, and how such attacks may be difficult to distinguish from accidental interference.
Individual book chapters examine and analyze publicly accessible civilian and military space and doctrine policy literature produced by the US, Canada, Australia, Britain, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and European Union. The conclusion focuses on how historic and contemporary air power, army, naval, and space power theory must also incorporate classical geopolitical theory from Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman. Work conclusions are that relatively democratic maritime states work collaboratively to resist attempts by authoritarian powers such as China and Russia to deny these countries access to space. It also advocates decoupling Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and South Africa from the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), private sector and governmental collaboration to build up commercial and military space assets against Eurasian authoritarians intent on dominating space, promoting the asteroid belt, Moon, and Mars as places for natural resources extraction, determining whether to use crewed or uncrewed vehicles to achieve maritime democratic space objectives, the need to conduct Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPS) in space by these democracies, winning the information narrative against authoritarian powers, and bluntly telling public opinion in these democratic countries that space is no longer an idyllic venue for scientific exploration, but an arena of geoeconomic, geopolitical, and strategic competition.
Finally, it concludes by recommending a prime time US presidential Oval Office address on space’s critical importance to US national security comparable to President Ronald Reagan’s March 23, 1983, address on the Strategic Defense Initiative followed up by regular highly publicized events on this subject with commercial and governmental stakeholders.
This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.
