2021: A Space (Force) Odyssey: Norms, Arms Control & Warfighting

WASHINGTON: The past year was such a momentous year in national security space, it’s hard to put a lasso around all the policy, political, bureaucratic and technical issues facing US decision-makers next year.

In a totally unscientific poll (comprising people we could reach before the holiday lull), analysts and industry experts raised a handful of critical questions regarding the service’s maturation under a new administration likely to be less, well, focused on space in general. But they also raised are a number of macro economic and geopolitical trends in motion, which the US needs to begin to address or risk deleterious affects on national security.

Administration Support 

While no one expects the Space Force to be undone, experts say that, at a fundamental level, the incoming Biden administration will need to take stock of whether leaders are comfortable with the re-orientation of military space efforts toward a stronger focus on warfighting in space.

Todd Harrison, director of the Aerospace Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told me in an email that the Space Force will need to work on “getting the attention and buy-in of the Biden team.” He explained that “some of the people who are likely to take senior civilian roles in the Pentagon are folks who were against creating the Space Force, and may still need to be convinced about why it is needed.” One factor to look for will be “whether the new administration keeps the National Space Council and who chairs it.”

“I will be very curious to see how the Space Force shakes out in the next year or so. It’s not going away but how it manifests itself could be different,” Victoria Samson, Washington Office director for Secure World Foundation, said in an email. As one example, she said, “I’ll be watching the rhetoric over cislunar space vis-a-vis China.”

Retired Air Force Gen. Hawk Carlisle, head of the National Defense Industrial Association, said that one key task will be decisions about how DoD prioritizes resources to address the “congested, contested and competitive” space environment (a phrase coined by the Obama-era Pentagon.) “How do we transition from what we built, based on that benign environment, to what’s next, and how do we continue to resource a brand new service so that it can accomplish the mission? How this new administration resources, how it looks at where we’re going with this US Space Force — and US Space Command for that matter — that’s going to be incredibly important,” he said.

Brian Weeden, director of program planning at Secure World Foundation, said that presumptive Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his team will need to make decisions about funding the long-touted need for space system resiliency. “I think it’s mentioned every 5 words in the national security section of the new [National Space Policy] and also featured in the Defense Space Strategy that came out a few months ago,” he said. “Again, the big question is ‘will there be any actual follow-through, particularly in changes to national security space architectures’?”

Harrison noted that an indicator will be “how the new administration approaches the Space Development Agency in terms of moving it to the Space Force and the pLEO programs it is currently pursuing.”  Proliferated LEO, or pLEO, is short-hand for the use of large constellations of small satellites in Low Earth Orbit (below 2000 kilometers in altitude) as alternatives, or back-ups, to current military space systems comprising small numbers of large, and expensive, satellites in higher orbits.

Space Force’s Organization

While the Pentagon has done an enormous amount of work on standing up Space Force since its Dec. 20, 2019 inception, the new service remains in its infancy. Thus, scores of organizational issues need resolution over the next year. “This first year was all about inventing that service. This next year is all about integrating the Space Force more broadly,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Jay Raymond said in a Dec. 15 briefing with reporters.

For example, CSIS’s Kaitlyn Johnson said she will be keeping a close eye on “the space acquisition piece.”

As Breaking D readers know, Air Force, DoD and the White House have yet to agree on a plan for reorganization of space acquisition authorities — much to the concern of Congress, which has demanded an independent Space Force acquisition executive. A proposal on a new organization was due to Congress this past March, but has been delayed by internal administration squabbling.

“Will they ever resubmit that report?” Johnson asked. “Will Congress acquiesce to less oversight?”

Jamie Morin, vice president of defense systems operations at the Aerospace Corporation’s Defense Systems Group, noted in an interview that the Space Force also is going to have to figure out how much risk it actually is willing to take in order to speed space acquisition cycles.

“There’s been a lot of talk about a need for dramatic acceleration in cycle time to deal with the competitive space environment on the national security side. And some of the goals that have been set out have been very, very ambitious,” he said. “They’re the sort of time goals you could only achieve if you are willing to buy fundamentally different things — meaning less complex things. And you’re willing to buy those different things using different processes.”

Expanding the Space Force’s cadre of personnel (now known, to some hilarity in the Twitter-sphere, as “Guardians”) to include representatives from services other than the Air Force and establishing an independent culture also will require action next year, experts say.

“Making sure the space components of the other services (the organizations, people, and budgets) are transferred to the Space Force” is critical, Harrison said. “The nation cannot afford the redundancy and confusion created by leaving space forces in the other services. It is one thing to have space experts who can interface with the Space Force, but not space programs and space operators.”

“We’ve never fought an actual war in space,” Robin Dickey, space policy and strategy analyst at Aerospace’s Center for Space Policy and Strategy, told me in an interview. “We don’t actually know what conflict in space will look like, but you can also be pretty confident that from a warfighting perspective, the typical Space Force Guardian is going to be doing some pretty different activities from the typical army infantry men.” The trick to establishing a unique Space Force culture will be balancing that warfighter identity with that of being a space operator. “And those two are not things that have ever been truly explored and combined before.”

Norms & Arms Control

Looming above all the specific questions about the Space Force itself is the foundational question of how does the United States, or at least the Biden administration, best ensure against conflict that could eviscerate the economic and societal benefits provided by access to space? Key to doing so, experts across the political spectrum say, will be decisions the US makes next year about its role in setting international norms of behavior for space operators — both in peacetime and wartime.

Morin said the US has to get real about setting norms and rules on issues ranging from space traffic management in a much more crowded and “democratized” space environment, to debris mitigation/removal, to access to the radio frequency spectrum. DoD must also choose wisely about which commercial activities it invests in — and ensure that if fully understands the potential vulnerabilities and consequences.

“From a national security perspective, I think all of that can construct sort of a background environment … potential things that could go wrong that could be perceived as for runners to conflict,” he said. “If the big question in crowded and democratized space, in light of the contested nature of the spaces domain, is how do we, United States and other nations, conduct ourselves such that we avoid having a war —  and, such that if we end up in a war, we avoid having that war extend to space — if that’s the big geopolitical question of this era, I think we actually have some significant choices we’re making in just the next year or so that are going to establish or not establish key norms … in ways that are either stabilizing or not.

“If we are all on edge watching for harmful interference or kinetic attacks on satellites and we have a way more crowded environment, we’re increasing the chance — in some cases geometrically — of those things of accidental things being perceived as intentional,” he explained.

Rick Ambrose, Lockheed Martin Space executive vice president, said in an email that “space sustainability will grow in importance” over the next year. “We want a future where all of humanity can use space for peaceful purposes and socioeconomic benefits, but orbits are becoming overcrowded. Space sustainability needs to be addressed now through adaptive policies and encouraging new technologies.” This will require the US and other governments to “continue establishing cooperative policies to manage space traffic and reduce the risk of satellite collisions and interference,” including forcing companies to include “post-mission disposal plans in satellite design from the start, or there will be an unmanageable amount of space debris that could be catastrophic to the systems we rely on every day.”

Dickey said one thing “most immediately relevant” is for the US to define “what is reckless or aggressive or hostile behavior in space. … What the United States national security community says and does about space will be a major step towards defining what is acceptable and not acceptable” including at the international level.

Brian Weeden agreed that normative issues are now at the forefront of space security. But despite the Trump administration’s call for the US to take a lead in norm setting, he said, “the question of whether or not the US will actually propose any norms” remains up in the air.

Embedded in the discussion of norms, Johnson stressed, is the “worrying, growing trend of normalization of direct-ascent ASAT tests and other counterspace technologies like jamming and spoofing.”

Likewise, Jessica West, of Canada’s Project Ploughshares, said that not just norms but actual arms control will be a big issue for 2021. “The UK initiative on norms of behaviour in the United Nations seeks to restart a long-stalled conversation on space security, but I think that there will be additional pressure to think more seriously about arms control, particularly because the United States is persistently publicizing what it views as weapons tests by Russia,” she said in an email. “The question is, whether 2021 will mark a year of engagement and attempts at convergence, or continued divergence and dithering.”

Finally, norm setting comes to play not just in space, but also in what the US uses space for to achieve on Earth, suggests Robbie Shingler, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Planet. Addressing climate change is one example where the US can make decisions that can shift behavior.

“Climate change is the challenge of our generation, and a significant national security issue,” he said. “As sustainability and climate action become increasingly important elements of corporate strategy and governance, we expect to see concerted efforts to combine federal Earth imaging systems with commercial datasets to better measure, record, coordinate, and disseminate climate change data across government, research institutions, and state and local governments. This whole of government approach to addressing climate change with commercial remote sensing data will enable agencies, communities, and individuals to make better decisions.”