Soon after the U.S. Space Force rewrote its mission statement, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall stated the Air Force and Space Force “cannot sustain deterrence by standing still.” He believes integrated deterrence in its current form is insufficient to deter aggression, especially in space.
Deterrence should dissuade adversaries from involving space in any conflicts. The United States’s dwindling space dominance is challenged by peer competitors and near-peer rivals who recognize, likely even more so than the American public, that America’s asymmetric advantage in orbit is also its Achilles’ heel. And they are prepared to supplant America’s leadership in space, relegating the United States to a follower of authoritarian powers.
Last month, Dauntless Space published a discussion about integrated deterrence, highlighting how the U.S. framework’s lack of public escalation ladders and failure to consider the uniqueness of space undermine its credibility, and thus its effectiveness. Adapting America’s deterrence posture for space needs to be a top priority across the government.
This will no doubt require national-level shepherding by the U.S. National Security Council (NSC). The U.S. Space Council (NSpC) must also fulfill the need for an open and unclassified dialogue with America’s public, corporate sector and international partners.
The United States deters space attacks through a two-layered approach. First it deploys resilient space assets, hoping to convince rivals that space attacks are too difficult to be worth attempting. If that fails, integrated deterrence hopes to deter by threatening to inflict proportionate harm on attackers. This framework depends on asymmetric deterrent threats (i.e., threats to retaliate in a separate domain from the original attack). Asymmetry is needed to impose equivalent costs on rivals who are not as dependent on satellites nor as vulnerable to space attacks when it comes to employing their national security and military forces.
However, this framework fails to address three characteristics of space.
This first issue is the lack of manned, military space assets. Threatening to retaliate in non-space domains where human casualties are probable in response to attacks on unmanned satellites might not seem credible to U.S. rivals. China likely perceives attacks on satellites and space infrastructure as less escalatory than terrestrial ones precisely for the lack of human casualties. This interpretation is unlikely to be shared in Washington due to America’s dependence on satellites for its most critical national security functions. Yet, integrated deterrence lacks the public communication necessary to convince adversaries that satellites are vital interests — things for which nations have fought over — of U.S. national security to warrant asymmetric deterrence.
Second, U.S. credibility falters regarding American responses to attacks on dual-use satellites serving simultaneous civilian and military missions. In 2022, after a Russian official declared that U.S. commercial satellites assisting Ukraine’s war effort could become legal military targets, American officials and academics argued the opposite, citing the ambiguity of international law and the lack of precedent. Integrated deterrence’s ambiguous threats to “leverage a breadth of options across all operational domains to deter aggression” do nothing to build consensus about the actual military value and role of dual-use satellites in armed conflict. Without public escalation ladders to bolster credibility, integrated deterrence leaves too much room for different plausible expectations of retaliation to be effective.
Finally, the credibility of the framework is hurt by the lethality of non-kinetic capabilities in space. Non-kinetic capabilities often include weapons whose existence, potential threat or actual use is not easily perceived by other states, including electronic, cyber and non-kinetic physical systems. The possible imperceptibility of non-kinetic attacks (such as whether a satellite collision was accidental or intentional) or of their malicious intent (such as whether jamming is from a deliberate attack or unintentional interference) is not sufficiently dealt with by the ambiguity of integrated deterrence for it to be credible.
Considering the lack of known precedent in responding militarily in a non-space domain to an attack in space, convincing rivals of one’s beliefs about equivalence (and thus credibility) requires more robust public communication. Many reports exist on the topic of space deterrence, but what is needed are public debates about how to credibly deter space attacks in practice.
For years, such discussions were classified. In the words of Gen. John Hyten: “You can’t deter people if everything you have is in the black.” America’s contingency plans should be guarded, but its deterrence policy red lines must be public to be useful.
The United States must fix integrated deterrence’s lack of credibility by communicating its perceptions of escalation to rivals using declared escalation ladders. Given America’s reliance on asymmetric deterrents, any ladder should contextualize space attacks within a holistic view of escalation and conflict across all domains. Military doctrines, policies and other strategic communications must integrate these ladders. American perceptions of cross-domain equivalence should be included in not just space-focused exercises like the Schriever Wargames, but all national security exercises.
This need applies to stakeholders beyond the Department of Defense because America’s space architecture is complex and bureaucratic. The NSC and the NSpC should co-lead the formulation of space-related escalation ladders, gathering inputs from all government stakeholders, the private sector, research institutions, and international partners. The combination of a top-down and bottom-up approach should ensure that the resulting ladders provide enough specificity to improve American credibility without revealing impertinent classified information. As always, Congress should track these efforts and consider their progress when considering authorization and appropriations.
Conflict and war in space will hurt the United States. Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations, recently expressed his concern about conflict in space: “I just can’t live with debris fields flying around all these orbits for hundreds of years. I’ve got too many plans for space and the space domain.” One way to prevent conflict is to change the culture from one of secrecy to one of public discourse. Without the adoption of publicly declared escalation ladders, it may not just be integrated deterrence but the next major conflict that is lost in space.
Timothy Georgetti is a M.A. candidate in the Security Studies Program in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He has particular expertise in the areas of U.S. national security policy and emerging technologies. The views expressed here are his alone.
Dr. Mir Sadat has more than 25 years of experience in private industry, the U.S. Navy, Department of Defense, and National Security Council. He currently teaches space policy at Georgetown University, serves as editor-in-chief of Dauntless Space and fellow at the Atlantic Council, and is on the advisory board of the University of Southern California’s Center for Research in Space Technologies. The views expressed here are his alone.