GoKawiilImagine this: The US military begins tracking a mysterious spacecraft maneuvering near one of the Space Force’s missile-warning satellites more than 22,000 miles over the equator.
This US satellite cost several billion dollars to build and launch. It’s one of a handful of sentinels keeping constant watch for ballistic missile launches that might threaten the US homeland or US military bases overseas. Suddenly, this missile warning satellite goes dark. Ground controllers at a military base just outside of Denver scramble to figure out what went wrong.
There are two possibilities. Perhaps the mystery spacecraft lurking nearby somehow disabled or destroyed it, or as sometimes happens in the unforgiving environment of space, something important broke on the satellite, rendering it unresponsive. If the former, was it an intentional attack or an accident? Who carried it out and why? If the latter, how might controllers reactivate the satellite?
These are questions that could easily cloud decision-making in a key moment of uncertainty. How should a military commander respond? A think tank staffed with retired Air Force and Space Force officials gamed out such scenarios in a two-day workshop earlier this year. They reported on their findings and recommendations last week.
“We had 50 subject matter experts from military, government offices, industry, as well as academia join us,” said Charles Galbreath, a retired Space Force colonel and director and senior resident fellow for space studies at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. “We wanted to understand how a conflict in space might manifest and what we and our allies or our partners could do to prevail in each of those situations.”
The workshop’s facilitators posed a series of hypothetical adversarial actions, or vignettes, to the participants. All of the scenarios began with a “show of force” from China, which docked one of its satellites with an inoperable European commercial satellite and repositioned it in orbit without prior coordination. The organizers then told participants of additional hostile activities occurring at predetermined intervals, with attacks attributed to China, Russia, Iran, and an unidentified actor.