Let’s talk about space force.
Yes, we have a lot of physical assets in space, which in turn support an enormous amount of our every-day activity as well as critical security and defense activities. It is important to safeguard these things. 1/
Yes, we have a lot of physical assets in space, which in turn support an enormous amount of our every-day activity as well as critical security and defense activities. It is important to safeguard these things. 1/
Importantly, there are several ways to “attack” space-based assets. One is kinetic - using physical force to damage the physical integrity of the asset. All others are non-kinetic, e.g. messing with the software that runs them or using lasers to blind them (temp or perm)
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They can also be attacked in ways that may not affect their functioning at all, but will affect the security of the data they produce.
So: they can be damaged/destroyed, rendered unreliable, “captured”, or blinded.
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So: they can be damaged/destroyed, rendered unreliable, “captured”, or blinded.
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You can’t *defend* space assets from kinetic attacks. All you can do is try to deter them. Other countries w significant space assets are less likely to engage in kinetic attack bc the resulting debris can be dangerous to their own stuff.
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Less-invested states might be less self-deterred, but the capability to shoot down satellites is expensive and dfficult, and it’s nearly always possible to attribute the attack bc it’s hard to hide the fact that you just launched a gigantic missile.
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So kinetic attacks are not likely to be a big issue for our space assets. Will we want to engage in kinetic attacks? Maybe, but not if we’re smart. We are more vulnerable to the negative side-eefects of kinetics in space than just about anyone else.
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So. Non-kinetic attacks are cheaper, easier, and less attributable, and therefore nearly impossible to deter. The best thing to do about non-kinetic attacks is to have good defenses as well as pro-active preventive measures.
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How do you defend against these? Is it even possible to defend against someone shooting a laser at a satellite to make sure it doesn’t see what’s happening for the next five minutes (dazzling)? What about preventing hacking?
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Such problems always turn into competitions between the offensive and defensive tech and practices. The advantage tends to swap back and forth. Three implications of this stand out to me:
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1) we need to build up a lot of resiliency, bc it’s basically inevitable that some attacker at some point will be successful, and that could be very bad. So we need duplication and redundancy of systems. That is expensive.
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2) these tasks (resiliency, defense, counter-measures) won’t be significantly different for space-based and non-space-based cyber-assets. It’s not clear to me why we need a dedicated *defense* force/org for space.
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3) the skill sets we need to do these things are skill sets the US military has had low success in recruiting and worse success in retaining. Given the interest the private sector has in the general protection of space assets, a public-private partnership makes more sense.
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In sum: do we need to think more about how to protect our interests in space? Yes, absolutely. Is another branch of the military a good way to do that? IMO, not at all.
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P.s. I’d like to thank my former student, Eric Zarybnisky, for writing the excellent paper that got me thinking about all this stuff in the first place last year.
