Spacepower and War Prevention

Spacepower provides different ways to manage security concerns. Because of its matchless ability to gain global access and achieve global presence while delivering nearly ubiquitous capabilities, spacepower is playing an increasing security role in war and peace around the globe on a perpetual basis. This chapter examines the opportunities spacepower provides to secure the peace and to fight wars.

Spacepower and War Prevention

Spacepower is ideally suited for war prevention—securing the peace—as a matter of day-to-day statecraft. To put this in clearer terms, "the primary value of spacepower is not support to warfighters, rather it is that space capabilities are the primary means of war prevention."(1) Spacepower can provide both indirect and direct methods to achieve war prevention. Indirect methods involve cooperative interstate behavior to reduce security concerns without the use or threat of force. Direct methods involve the use of force or threats of force. For now, spacepower lends itself more toward indirect methods such as providing global and cislunar transparency and expanding broad international partnerships. Direct methods are more hard-power–centric and include those capabilities that deliver assurance, dissuasive, and deterrent effects, matched with careful diplomacy, in a cost/benefit calculus. As space weapons proliferate, spacepower will offer effective direct methods of preventing war. Each indirect and direct method is discussed below.

Indirect Methods

Transparency. Space-based reconnaissance and surveillance platforms, because of their global nature, contribute directly to reducing security concerns by providing insight into observable human activities around the globe and in the cislunar region. Insight into human activity in space, manned or unmanned, is every bit as important as observations of terrestrial activities. When considered together, such insights can alleviate unfounded fears and prevent miscalculations, as well as deliver warnings and indications of activities of genuine concern. This was obvious right from the start of the space age during the Cold War when the first successful American reconnaissance satellite, called Corona XIV, returned more imagery of Soviet nuclear forces from deep inside the Soviet Union than did all of the prior U–2 missions combined.(2) This new satellite-derived information caused a sharp downward revision in the estimate of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile launchers from 140–200 to between 10 and 25.(3) Later, only six of the sites were determined to be operational.(4) This application of spacepower helped reduce the American security concern and allowed the Eisenhower and subsequent administrations to right-size their nuclear deterrent force against a much smaller threat than suggested by estimates formulated without satellite data. Space was no longer merely a science project, but a real instrument of policy. True spacepower had arrived.

As the example above illustrates, spacepower provides transparency that reduces the fog during peacetime, increases the certainty of information, and allows contemplation of matters with a better approximation of the facts.(5) While this is entirely beneficial to the actor who possesses such information, the value of transparency has its limits. Some states feel increased security concerns if satellite-derived information about their observable affairs is distributed widely. China voiced this complaint shortly after the release of Google Earth, but accommodations were made to degrade the quality of images of areas sensitive to the Chinese government.(6) Such concerns must be addressed and dealt with directly, but accommodations can be made. Many states undoubtedly will change their conduct of military and other affairs to ways that are not observable by satellites. India, for example, avoided detection of its efforts to develop and test a nuclear device in 1998 by conducting activities when US imagery satellites were not passing overhead and during times when sandstorms and intense heat could disrupt surveillance sensors.(7) Such nefarious workarounds can be eliminated by fielding a large constellation of several dozen reconnaissance and surveillance satellites owned and operated by suprastate or trans-state actors using multispectral technology. The point is that every inch of the Earth could be imaged several times a day using various techniques that can counter various many concealment efforts. Global transparency efforts are large and expensive and by their very nature will require a high degree of international partnering.

Partnering. Another opportunity that spacepower provides for managing security concerns is capitalizing on collaborative international security space arrangements to provide global transparency, space situational awareness, and space traffic management, to name just a few. Such partnerships need not be limited to security-related functions, but must cross into civil and commercial endeavors as well, such as space-based solar power, human missions to the Moon and Mars, space stations, space-based astronomy, and so forth. The goal is not only to accomplish something meaningful in space, but also to build mutual understanding and rapport among the participating states.

The American and Soviet joint venture on the Apollo-Soyuz mission in the mid-1970s is one such example. Although the tangible scientific benefits of the exercise are debatable, it demonstrated to both parties and to the international community that cooperation on a very challenging task is possible, even between the two Cold War antagonists with their widely divergent strategic cultures. This civil spacepower effort became a point of departure for other confidence-building gestures between the two and certainly eased tensions in the homelands and among the rest of the world as well, thereby reducing security concerns.

Partnering on spacefaring projects brings together more brilliant minds and resources to solve problems and to advance the art. It not only heightens the likelihood of success of those programs, but over time it also reduces the friction during peacetime between states, decreases the potential for cultural misunderstandings, increases the opportunities for alliance, integrates aspects of each state's economic and industrial base, and fosters working relationships between governments.(8)

Partnering is not always easy, as the members of the International Space Station or the mostly European states belonging to the Galileo Consortium will attest. In fact, it can be frustrating and even maddening. Disparate economic strengths, distribution of resources, and talent give each state a different value as a potential partner. States that are rich in some areas will be highly sought after as partners. Poorer states will not. However, from a partnership perspective, all are valuable as prospective partners as part of a collaborative international security arrangement.

The opportunities that spacepower offers spacefaring and non-spacefaring states alike in the forms of global transparency and international partnering in order to prevent wars are entirely different from opportunities provided by operations in any other media. The strategic cultures of most states—especially weaker or developing ones that are not yet spacefaring—will find the indirect methods highly attractive and engender soft power to the leaders of such efforts.(9) These approaches may be sufficient for most states' space-related security needs while reducing their security concerns inside the terrestrial confines.

Direct Methods

Many states will not feel comfortable having their security rest on such idealistic constructs as the indirect methods alone. Some states, especially those with more militaristic strategic cultures, will likely seek space weaponry (overtly or covertly) in the form of defensive systems to protect their space assets from attack and offensive systems to prevent foes from exploiting space to gain a military advantage.

The focus here is on hard power and space weapons—weapons that create their effects in space against the space segment, regardless of where the weapons themselves are based. We will not be looking at spacepower's longstanding support to terrestrial forces that are continuously engaged in dissuasion and deterrence strategies. This is particularly the case with nuclear forces but is increasingly so with conventional forces as well.

Many factors contribute to space-related security concerns faced by states and directly correlate to their likely drive for space weaponry. Each state will perform its own threat-risk calculus and respond accordingly. There are some elements of the threat-risk calculus that must be kept in mind. For example, more advanced spacefaring states have the most at risk in space and therefore have greater incentives to field defensive weaponry. Less advanced states may build offensive weapons as an asymmetric means of countering the power of a space-reliant potential adversary. The proliferation of space weapons will drive the need for greater space defenses. The lack of sufficient space situational awareness for threat and damage assessment and attribution increases the sense of risk by all. Finally, every state, whether it is directly spacefaring or not, is a user of space services, and therefore all states are space actors and must consider their space threat-risk calculus.

Acquiring weapons is not a sufficient precursor to war, as the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War illustrates. In fact, the possession of hard power capabilities managed in a responsible and constrained manner enables the war preventive strategies of assurance, dissuasion, and deterrence, as were used to avert hostilities during the Cold War and beyond. There is an important point that must be made here. States can only practice assurance, dissuasion, and deterrence if they openly possess a credible force of space weapons.(10) There is no war prevention benefit gained by keeping space weapons a secret, other than avoiding a space arms race. A potential adversary must clearly perceive a credible space weapons capability for these strategies to work. There are no agreed definitions for these terms, so care will be given to explain exactly what is meant.

Assurances. The concept of assurances is borrowed directly from nuclear-related literature. It involves stronger and weaker states making guarantees (assurances) for the purpose of preventing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and war. There are negative and positive security assurances. These concepts can be related to space weapons and warfare. Negative assurances would be guarantees by space weapons states not to use or threaten the use of such weapons against states that have formally renounced space weapons. Positive assurances would be the agreement between a space weapons state and a non–space weapons state that the latter would receive assistance if it is attacked or threatened by a state that uses space weapons against them.(11)

Presently, there are no known assurances between space weapons states and non–space weapons states in the international community beyond those in the Outer Space Treaty. This is a wide open area waiting for diplomatic engagement. Presumably, the threat posed by space weapons has not yet raised the level of security concerns among the international community to stimulate assurance-making among states.

As we have seen in the nuclear community, some states will give public assurances not to proliferate, only to work to acquire weapons covertly. There is always the risk of being hoodwinked, which highlights the need for greater transparency and other soft power–related means of securing the aims of policy. In addition, no state has yet come forward and declared itself a "space weapons state," even though we see evidence of testing and actual employment of such weapons with increasing frequency. The utility of space weapons–related assurances are questionable until it is clear who has space weapons and who does not.

Dissuasion. Dissuasion, like soft power, rests on the ability to shape the preferences of others so they behave in a certain desired manner.(12) But unlike soft power, where others choose a course of action you would like them to pursue simply because they find it attractive, dissuasion is really about persuading them not to do something that you would not like them to do. Dissuasion is a negotiation of sorts, where one party "talks" the other out of doing something by demonstrating to them that the costs outweigh the benefits, because the competition is so far ahead that it becomes either impossible or simply impractical to catch up.

Dissuasion is a method attempted by powerful, long-established nuclear states to persuade nonnuclear states from proliferating. They approach states before they proliferate and directly or tacitly attempt to dissuade them from proceeding with their program by convincing them that the cost of competing with the powerful established proliferator in the nuclear arena is just too great. The hope is for the state to decide on its own that joining in the nuclear competition is not in its interest.

As applied to spacepower, a state that demonstrates a robust defensive and offensive capability may tacitly dissuade others from attempting to compete against that state in space(13) Conversely, if a state's overall power, especially military power, appears directly tied to its space-based assets—a center of gravity—but it has no visible means for defending them or denying other states from exploiting space for military gain, it almost baits potential adversaries into fielding space weaponry.

The evidence shows mixed results with dissuasion with regard to nuclear proliferation. Since the mid-1990s, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have acquired nuclear devices, and Iran may be well on its way. Libya may be a success story. Its leadership seems to have made a cost-benefit analysis that resulted in the shutdown of its nuclear program. Other states may have been dissuaded, but the evidence is not clear.

There is an important note to add regarding spacepower. A state that has overwhelming spacepower may successfully dissuade another actor from competing militarily in the space arena, but that actor might choose to pursue asymmetric and potentially more violent means of achieving its aims as a result.

Deterrence. When soft power, assurances, and dissuasion fail, spacepower plays a central role in deterrent strategies that may prevent wars. Deterrence is the prevention of war based on coercion by threat of damage.(14) It must be a credible threat of inflicting unacceptable damage on an opponent. This was the case during the Cold War standoff between the United States and Soviet Union.

During the arms race of the Cold War, US and Soviet space systems became thoroughly integrated into their states' nuclear attack warning, command and control, assessment, targeting, planning, and most every aspect of finding, targeting, and potentially destroying each other. The end of the Cold War and the commensurate reduction of security concerns that followed allowed the focus of space systems to evolve rapidly away from purely support to nuclear forces toward support to all warfighting activities, conventional, covert, and otherwise. It remains clear, however, that spacepower assets, as deeply integrated as they are in all aspects of military operations among advanced spacefaring states, will continue to be the interconnecting glue making terrestrial deterrence more effective.

It may be possible to deter an advanced spacefaring adversary who is heavily reliant on space systems but who has taken few or no precautions to defend them. In this case, possessing a credible set of offensive space weapons may threaten the adversary into avoiding confrontation. Sensing this, the adversary may initiate a crash program to acquire defensive capabilities or space weapons of its own.

Unfortunately, deterrence is based on an abstraction where there is no limit to the extreme of violence that can be threatened in retaliation. As Clausewitz noted, "Each side, therefore, compels its opponent to follow suit; a reciprocal action is started which must lead, in theory, to extremes."(15) This tendency can easily lead to arms racing.

Assurances are faith-based at best. Meanwhile, dissuasion and deterrence come with very real risks. Both presuppose that both sides of a potential confrontation are equally rational, have equal understanding of the stakes, and are using the same rational calculus to establish policy in an interactive fashion.(16) Given the differences in the strategic cultures of the players involved, these presumptions can never be the case in reality. As a result, there are margins of error associated with every calculation. A state that overtly builds offensive space weapons for the purpose of enabling dissuasive and deterrent strategies for war prevention may be misunderstood as having hostile intentions that trigger security concerns across the globe. The same is true for a state that may build what it considers to be a defensive system but that has an apparent dual application as an offensive system. China's test of a direct ascent antisatellite weapon in January 2007 may be a case in point.(17) A state may do its best to tailor its forces to support dissuasive and deterrent strategies and focus them at whatever it suspects the enemy holds dear, only to discover that the enemy reacts quite differently than expected. There are no guarantees.(18) A way to reduce the margins of error and the risk associated with direct hard power war prevention strategies is to include them within the policy-driven context of both indirect strategies suggested above: within the framework of global transparency and within broad international partnerships. (Continue with part two)

(1) The claim that the proper primary mission for spacepower is war prevention was first made to the author of this chapter by Brigadier General S. Pete Worden, USAF (Ret.), in the fall of 2005. He expands this to claim that spacepower is the primary means that states can use to prevent wars. See also chapter 30 in this volume by Worden, "Future Strategy and Professional Development: A Roadmap."
(2) The security concern of facing the threat of a Soviet missile attack faced was so great that the Eisenhower administration tolerated 12 successive failures of Corona systems before the 13th actually delivered usable imagery. Described in William E. Burrows, The New Ocean (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 232–233.
(3) A National Intelligence Estimate released in February 1960 assessed the Soviets as having as many as 140–200 ICBMs on launchers by mid-1961. Dwayne A. Day et al., Eye in the Sky: The Story of the Corona Spy Satellite (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1998), 216–217.
(4) Ibid., 217.
(5) Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 140. In describing what he calls the "uncertainty of all information," Clausewitz describes the quality of information in war as affected by a kind of fog, which he claims "tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are."
(6) Google Earth is an Internet-based imagery database set in an easy-to-use imagery manipulation program that is expanding to show relatively high-quality images of the entire Earth.
(7) Tara Shankar Sahay, "Pakistan Feels Let Down by U.S. Spy Satellites," Rediff on the Net, May 13, 1998, available at www.rediff.com/news/1998/may/13spy.htm and Krishnan Gurswamy, "India Tricks U.S. Satellites," Associated Press, May 19, 1998, available at http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/India980519_nukes.html
(8) Clausewitz, 119–121. Clausewitz, who limited his discussion only to war, described friction in this way: "Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult." This is also true of large organizations and partnerships. But like a machine, the more frequently the partners work together, the easier it becomes, as if the process has a way of lubricating itself. In this way, partnering may be difficult as first but will become easier with time; hence, it will reduce the friction.
(9) Soft power defined by Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 5.
(10) One may wonder if the successful Chinese antisatellite test conducted in January 2007 is an example of a state attempting to establish its dissuasive and deterrent powers against the leading spacefaring state at that time, the United States.
(11) "Positive and Negative Security Assurances," available at www.reachingcriticalwill.org/legal/NSA.htm
(12) Derived from the definition of soft power found in Nye, 5.
(13) This is part of the central thesis found in Everett C. Dolman, Astropolitik: Classical Geopolitics in the Space Age (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002).
(14) Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 3.
(15) Clausewitz, 77.
(16) Author interview with Michael Krepon, May 10, 2007.
(17) Earlier ASAT tests by the United States and the Soviet Union from the early 1960s through the 1980s may also be examples of this phenomenon. It is by no means limited to the Chinese. See description of U.S. and Soviet ASAT tests in Clayton S. Chung, Defending Space: U.S. Anti-Satellite Warfare and Space Weaponry (New York: Osprey Publishing, 2006), 32–37.
(18) Author interview with Jeffrey Lewis, May 27, 2007.