🛰 The story of the US Space Force: A Quick Q&A with … defense policy analyst Todd Harrison

A Friday Flashback conversation from one of my most popular interviews of 2024

Nov 22, 2024

The US Space Force, the newest branch of the American military, takes national defense to a new frontier. Back in February, I podcast chatted with AEI senior fellow Todd Harrison to discuss the state of the Space Force and its evolving mission.

Harrison has served as senior vice president and head of research at Metrea, a defense consulting firm, been a senior fellow for defense budget strategies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, directed the Defense Budget Analysis and Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and served as a captain in the US Air Force Reserve.

His research this year includes “Building an Enduring Advantage in the Third Space Age” and “It’s Not a Space Race, It’s the Space Olympics.”

The following is an edited excerpt of our earlier conversation.

After seeing an image of Earth's growing satellite network, I realized why we might need Space Force to monitor and protect this infrastructure. This prompted me to wonder about the current state of debates over whether this new military branch is necessary. What are your thoughts?

The number of satellites in space has been growing literally exponentially in the past few years. In 2023 alone, about 2,800 new satellites were launched, and in that one year it increased the total number of satellites in orbit by 22 percent, just in one year. And all the projections are that the number of satellites, number of launches, are going to keep growing at a pace like that for the foreseeable future, for the next several years. A lot is going into space, and we know from all other domains that where commerce goes conflict will follow. . . Space has been a contested war-fighting domain, really, since the beginning of the Space Age. The first anti-satellite test was in 1959, and so it has become increasingly important for economic reasons, but also for military reasons. Now, when the Space Force debate kicked into high gear, I think it took a lot of people who weren't involved in military space, I think it took a lot of people by surprise that we were having this debate. . . It was very controversial at the time. The secretary of the Air Force at that time was adamantly opposed to it. Eventually, Trump forced it on the civilian establishment at DoD, and Congress ultimately enacted it.

Is the Space Force currently focused mainly on tracking satellites and debris, or does it engage in combat operations?

Yes and no. A lot of what the Space Force does on a day-to-day basis is they provide space-enabling capabilities to the other military services. So if you want to get intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance from space, you can go to the Space Force. Separately, we have intel space that's run through the National Reconnaissance Office—that has not changed its organization. If you want to get GPS, the Space Force runs our GPS constellation of satellites, and they're responsible for defending it against all forms of attack, which it is attacked daily. If you want satellite communications, the Space Force delivers that. If you want missile warning. . .

So the Space Force delivers lots of enabling capabilities for other parts of the military. At the same time, it is tasked with defending those capabilities, and it's not just against kinetic forms of attack where an adversary is literally trying to shoot a satellite out of the sky. . . The truth is there's not a lot you can do to actively protect against that—at least, we don't have a lot of capabilities right now—but the forms of attack we see on a daily basis are cyber, electromagnetic, and other forms of non-kinetic attack like lazing the sensors on a satellite. You could temporarily, or even permanently, blind the sensors on a satellite with a laser from an aircraft or from a ground station. . . But the Space Force has ways to overcome that. We have protected military GPS signals, we have ways of increasing the strength of those signals to overcome jamming. There's lots of things you can do with counter-space and then counter to the counter-space.

The Chief of Space Operation at the Space Force recently published a short white paper, which begins to lay out kind of a doctrine, like, “What is the mission? How do we accomplish this mission?” What do you make of it?

I think one of the criticisms of military space for a while has been that we didn't really have space strategy, space doctrine, we didn't have a theory of space power that was well developed . . . One of the reasons you need a military service is to actually get the expertise that is dedicated to this domain to think through those things and really develop them and flesh them out, and so that's what this white paper did, and I think it did a pretty good job of it, developing a theory of space power. He calls it a “theory of success for competitive endurance in the space domain.”

And one of the things I thought was really great that they highlight in the paper, that a lot of US government officials in the past have been reluctant to talk about, is the fact that we are under attack on a daily basis—gray zone-type aggression in the space domain—and we've got to start pushing back against that. And we've got to actually be willing and able to exercise our own defensive and counter-space capabilities, even in the competition phase before we actually get to overt conflict, because our adversaries are doing it already. They're doing it to us. We need to be able to brush them back. We're not talking about escalating and starting a conflict or anything like that, but when someone jams our satellite communication systems or GPS, they need to feel some consequences. Maybe something similar happens to their own space capabilities, or maybe we employ capabilities that show them we can overcome what you're doing. So I thought that was a good part of the theory of success is you can't just sit by and let an adversary degrade your space capabilities in the competition phase.

How much of Space Force is focused on the military capabilities, protecting military capabilities, the military capabilities of other nation versus the commercial element which is only going to grow in importance?

Today, the vast majority of the Space Force's focus is on the military side of providing that enabling military capability that makes all of our forces more effective, protecting that capability, and then, to a lesser extent, being able to interfere with our adversaries’ ability to use space for their own advantage.

They are just now starting to really grapple with, “Okay, is there a role for the Space Force in protecting space commerce, protecting commercial space capabilities that may be economically important, that may be strategically important to us and our allies, but are not directly part of a military capability?” They're starting to think through that now, and it really is the Space Force taking on a role in the future that is more like the Navy.

I don't know if such things even currently exist, but if you have satellites that can kill other satellites, do those exist and does the Space Force run them?

That is a thing that exists. A lot of stuff is kept classified. What we know that's unclassified is, back in the 1960s and early ’70s, the Soviets conducted many tests, a couple of dozen tests, of what they call a co-orbital anti-satellite system, that is a satellite that can kill another satellite, and there's still debris in space from some of those tests back in the ’60s and ’70s. We also know, unclassified, that China and Russia have on-orbit systems that appear to be able to rendezvous with other satellites, get very close. We've seen the Russians deploy a satellite that appeared to fire a projectile at another Russian satellite — looks like a test of some sort of a co-orbital weapon. So yes, those capabilities are out there.

Looking forward a decade, one can imagine a lot more satellites, multiple space platforms, maybe some run by the private sector, maybe others not. One could imagine permanent or semi-permanent installations on the moon from different countries. If you have a conflict between the Chinese military installation on the moon and the American, would that be in the Space Force domain?

There are folks in the Space Force, like in the chief scientist’s office that have thought about these things; they publish some papers on it. There's no real effort going into that right now other than thinking about it from an academic perspective. Should that be in the mandate of the Space Force? Well, I think it already is, it's just there's not a need for it yet, and so it's something to keep an eye on.

Now, there are some rules, if you will, international agreements that would suggest, “Okay, some of these things should not happen.” Doesn't mean they won't; but, for example, the main treaty that governs how nations operate in space is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. The Outer Space Treaty specifically says that you can't claim territory in space or on any celestial body like the moon or Mars, and it specifically says you cannot put a military installation on any celestial body.

So, should China put a military base on the moon, they would be clearly violating the Outer Space Treaty. If China puts a scientific installation that happens to have some military capabilities on it, but they don't call it that, well, you know, what are we going to do?

. . . I think that there are some concerns that we could be headed in that direction, and that's one of the reasons NASA is pushing forward with the Artemis program to return humans to the moon and a set of international agreements called the Artemis Accords, where we've gotten, I think, more than 20 nations now to agree to a way of operating in the lunar environment and, to a certain extent, in Earth orbit as well, which will help make sure that the norms that develop in space, especially in deep space operating on the moon, are norms that are conducive to free and open societies and free markets.

If we were to track a large space object headed toward Earth, whose job would it be to stop it?

So it would be NASA's job to spot it, to find objects like near-Earth orbit asteroids. Whose job is it to stop it? I think we would be figuring that out on the fly. First of all, we would have to figure out, can we stop it? Is there a way to stop it? And it would probably require some sort of an international effort, because we all have a common stake in that, but yeah, it is not in anyone's job jar.

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🛰 The story of the US Space Force: A Quick Q&A with … defense policy analyst Todd Harrison

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