Space exploration and tech opens the barriers to space wars.

In this article, our aim is to extend the critical examination of power into the context of space expansion by considering the question: Is war (or at least the threat of war and therefore militarization) inevitable as humans or their constructs expand the scope of habitation and, through that process, political engagement beyond the confines of our planet. Despite arguments, such as Pinker’s claim that violence, including warfare, has decreased significantly over time, we are still far from eliminating war on Earth, thus it is reasonable to argue that war will follow humans into space (Pinker, 2012). Indeed, many in the space community note Pinker’s book as evidence that humans are “maturing” past their civilizational adolescence and that the future of expansion into the Solar System will be accompanied by an era of peace and international cooperation. Pinker’s argument has come under considerable criticism however, in part because of alleged cherry-picked data, downplaying periods of violence that do not fit his narrative, as well as other problems such as the ethnocentrism of his viewpoint, the fact that he largely ignores normalization of violence through its institutionalization, and the fact that the 20th Century, in terms of war, represents the most violent in human history–by far (Gray 2015). The early 21st Century, with ongoing wars such as the conflicts in Ukraine, Sudan and Israel, shows little evidence of that pattern abating anytime soon, even if one accepts the idea that there has been a reduction in violence over time.

And even if war is not inevitable, it is reasonable and prudent to assume there is a high likelihood that wars will be fought beyond our planet as different human groups with diverse interests encounter each other and vie for resources, such as limited water on the Moon. Here we will argue that, due to the fact that LEO has already become an arena for geopolitical tensions, locations such as the Moon, Mars and the asteroid belt are bound to become significant components in human geopolitics, if they have not already (Deudney, 2022, pp. 220- 249). It is essential that we avoid too easily accepting highly optimistic perspectives that generate an image of space as a new and inherently different context for human political behavior.

In this article we develop two key arguments. First, we argue that war in space is not simply likely, it is already happening, and we have been engaged in this (cold) war for several decades, first with the Soviet Union and now increasingly with China. The current war we are experiencing is not one that involves bloodshed but is what Possony and Purnelle coined in the 1970s as The Technological War in which competing political entities vie for technological breakthroughs that hold the potential for a decisive advantage over a potential or perceived enemy (Possony, Pournelle, & Kane, 1997, p. 2). When combined with ideology, technology can produce a powerful influence on intentions and as technological capabilities expand, so can political ambitions (e.g. China and the South China Sea). Second, the dimensions of the Technological War are far beyond the scope of anything humans experienced prior to the second half of the 20th Century, in that it encompasses our entire planet, increasingly translunar space, and eventually the Solar System as a whole. What is important to understand is that this Technological War is both protracted and has the potential to be extremely dangerous if it results in open conflict. It likely represents the most significant arena for military operations in human history given the forces, as Deudney notes, humans will harness through activities such as moving asteroids into lunar orbit, that when used in war will dwarf the destructive power of even our most powerful thermonuclear weapons (Deudney, 2022, p. 176).

2. Cooperation Among Nations in Space

Before diving into the question of conflict off-planet, it will be useful to review some key aspects related to cooperation among nations over the past several decades. On 17 July 1975, the US and USSR accomplished what only a few years earlier, at the height of the space race, seemed unlikely at best. An American Apollo spacecraft docked with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft after which the former competitors in space opened hatches and shook hands (Vedeshin, 2021). The moment was symbolic of a changing approach to space exploration in which political rivals began developing methods for cooperation that led to the Shuttle-Mir program and ultimately to the International Space Station (ISS), which brought in a collection of partners including not only the US and USSR, but also Japan, Europe, and Canada1 . Twenty years later, the moment was being hailed as the starting point for a relationship that some political analysts 1 The main space agencies referred to in this paper interchangeably with their respective political entities are Canadian Space Agency (CSA), European Space Agency (ESA), Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities (Roscosmos) described as “the key to humanity’s future exploration of space” (Logsdon & Williamson, 1995, p. 39).

The simple fact is that cooperation between the US and USSR/Russia in space exploration has not been a smooth process. After the initial Apollo-Soyuz orbital handshake, political tensions between the two countries made cooperation difficult and it was not until the dissolution of the USSR that improved political ties led to increased cooperation between the two space-faring powers and, ultimately, to Russian participation in the ISS. As we have seen in relation to the Russian attacks on Ukraine, however, that cooperative relationship is by no means simple, with Russia threatening to pull out of the ISS program several times as a result of political disagreements with the US (Heilweil, 2022).

There is little question that the ISS has been successful in terms of operating as a forum for international political cooperation, but we need to be cautious in assuming that the key motivation for this cooperation is the building of political alliances. While there has clearly been a desire of key players (Japan, ESA, Canada, US) to be partners, the relationship with Russia has been more difficult. The fact is that cooperation around the ISS has been deeply tied to expedience. Russian involvement meant a bigger, better space station for the same costs to the US, and involvement across several international space agencies diffused costs that were unlikely to be supported by the American public. When the Columbia disaster occurred, the US/Russian relationship intensified because the US had no other access to LEO and Russia needed the money from purchased seats and cargo space on Soyuz spacecraft. However, tensions developed because the Bush administration, following 9/11, pursued an increasingly unilateralist space agenda, including a push to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and increased research on ballistic missile defense, which Russia opposed (Moltz, 2007, p. 191). In short, the US and Russia have been strange bedfellows throughout the era of cooperation around the ISS, with periods of relative calm in the relationship peppered with periods of tension and jittery rhetoric, particularly coming from the Russian side in response to perceived slights by the US related to broader issues in international politics.

The fact is that the US needed to cooperate with Russia for a period to have any human access to the ISS and, following the successful launch of American astronauts by SpaceX, the need dissipated. It is not surprising that cooperation between the US and Russia has been strained in recent years, not only due to political differences, but also because the expediency no longer obtains for the US. To date state-level cooperation has been dominantly for LEO, with deeper space missions and colonization concepts being largely national. The future of development of LEO looks increasingly like it will involve China, a consortium of the ESA nations, the US, Canada, and Japan, India, and to the extent it is capable, Russia. Currently the US/ESA/JAXA group appears to be in the process of handing over LEO to private companies developing space stations while shifting cooperative government activities to cislunar space and the lunar surface. What the ISS experience has shown is that cooperation among space-faring nations is by no means linear. Instead, it is closely tied to international politics, domestic politics, and expediencies associated with the costs of space expansion. And it is clear that war on Earth, such as the Russian attack on Ukraine, can have significant political consequences for established cooperative relationships in space as well as space oriented businesses such as Starlink (Kim 2023). Even this bi-polar perspective is far too simplistic for today and needs to consider the complication of barely supervised private enterprise moving into space (Rementeria, 2023).

3. Weapons and Space

Space transit and LEO to geosynchronous orbits has been part of the doctrinal scope of warfighting for decades with space referred to as “the ultimate high ground" (Lambeth, 2003) (HQ US Space Force, 2020). This high ground, originally understood to mean Earth orbit, is now expanding in extent to cis-lunar space - the moon and environs and possibly including the Lagrange points much farther out (Fig. 1.) and will follow human activity as it moves beyond pure science missions to other planets.

Fig. 1. Cis-lunar space. Cis-lunar space is the three-dimensional volume of space dominated by the Earth and/or Moon’s gravitational influence, sometimes excluding the space from Low Earth Orbit (LEO – not shown, but inside the International Space Station (ISS) orbit) to Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO). The Lagrange points are special areas of quasi-stability within cis-lunar space. The 3-D shading represents the gravity fields of the bodies. Not to scale. (Image courtesy of NASA.)

Examples of how integral space is to current and future warfare for the US for example are woven throughout the network of White House and Department of Defense (DoD) strategy and doctrine publications:

The United States will defend its national security interests from the growing scope and scale of space and counterspace threats. Intensifying strategic competition presents a serious threat to U.S. national security interests, including in space. The military doctrines of competitor nations identify space as critical to modern warfare and view the use of counterspace capabilities as a means both to reduce U.S. military effectiveness and to win future wars… The United States also will take steps to protect its military forces from space-enabled threats. (The White House, 2020)

The 2022 NSS acknowledges the criticality of space-based services to national and homeland security, necessitating increased resilience of new and existing U.S. space architectures – a modernization objective that is vital to the overall combat credibility of the Joint Force. (Dept. of Defense, 2023)

Military considerations have been integral to superpower space programs from the start with the US and USSR initiating Anti-SATellite (ASAT) weapons programs within a year of the first Sputnik orbital mission (Harrison, Johnson, Roberts, Way, & Young, 2020). The US, USSR/Russia and the PRC have all conducted “live” ASAT tests even at, for the latest PRC ASAT test, great hazard to other spacecraft and humans in orbit (Mackey, 2009, p. 84). Both the US and USSR conceived of a variety of weapons to base in space up to and including nuclear weapons and in 2021 China demonstrated a nuclear-capable Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) (Garthoff, 1981) (Listner, 2021) (Lewis, 2021). Recently, the first claimed combat engagement in space occurred when an Israeli missile intercepted a Houthi-launched ballistic missile outside Earth’s atmosphere (The Economist, 2023). To bring this line of thinking to the present day, the latest US National Defense Strategy uses the words “space” or “counterspace” forty times in an 80-page document (with only 66 pages of actual text) (Dept. of Defense, 2022) - space is a theater of military competition and will be a theater of war in any major war in the future.

What about international law? Space law is limited mainly to the 1967 space treaty and focused on the cold war not spilling into space (United Nations, 1967). Weapons of mass destruction are not permitted in space and military bases are not allowed on celestial bodies. The strength of the treaty and whether parties would abide if they perceived a critical need to violate the treaty is debatable. But even setting that aside, the existing treaties have plenty of very large gaps. Both the USSR and US contemplated putting nuclear weapons in space but as far as is known, never did. The US, as part of Star Wars (The Strategic Defense Initiative), envisioned placing very powerful directed energy weapons in space. Other weapons, such as the “Rod from God” have also been proposed (HQ USAF/XPXC, 2003, pp. 59-60) (Deblois, Garwin, Kemp, & Marwell, 2004, p. 70). Currently, some parties are not content with the existing space law and driven by economic interest are now passing state laws that allow for commercial exploitation of resources and thus directly or indirectly contradict the 1967 treaty – further weakening the force of the treaty (Rementeria, 2023).

For the most part, when moderns imagine warfare in space, they think about massive spaceships launching things like photon torpedoes or aiming lasers at equally dangerous enemies. Battles in space are usually thought to be like naval battles. Wright notes that as humans consider expansion of war fighting technology into space, the assumption is that a naval model will be employed largely because the context of outer space has parallels with earthly oceans in terms of how travel is conducted–moving from isolated islands to other isolated islands or moving across vast distances between continents (Wright, 2019). It certainly seems likely if humans eventually develop fleets of military spacecraft, the naval model will influence the structure of military forces, given the way resources are dispersed in outer space.

Such forces remain for the present only within the scope of science fiction. However, this should not be interpreted as meaning that outer space is lacking in the infrastructure necessary to engage in warfare. In fact, the weapons are already there and the elimination of weapons from space is not a viable solution to the problem of open conflict expanding into and beyond LEO. This may seem inaccurate given the existence of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, to which the major space-faring nations are all parties (but not signatories). Although the treaty limits weapons of mass destruction in space, building bases, and prevents countries from claiming sovereignty over areas of outer space or other celestial bodies, from a war-fighting perspective the treaty has little in the way of teeth (United Nations, 1967).

Why? Because any spacecraft is a weapon just by virtue of its kinetic energy, and other objects, such as asteroids, readily convert to weapons. The same technology that can put an asteroid into orbit around the moon for mining purposes can be used to launch it at a city on Earth or settlement on Mars. Given the speeds involved with space travel, it does not take much to turn an object into a weapon with a destructive force similar to or beyond that of a thermonuclear bomb. As Sears puts it, this is one major case of the anarchy-technology dilemma where technology (and our capacity for self-destruction) is far outpacing our political capacity to control these technologies (Sears, 2020). A pebble colliding with the International Space Station could puncture it, cause a leak, or in the right spot cripple it or kill an astronaut. This is why the removal of debris in orbit has become a near-crisis. Now scale a pebble up to a small mountain and, if it were to hit the Earth, that object could destroy a city. Asteroids that are being looked at now as mining prospects are at least that size or larger. Couple the size with the capability to move an asteroid into a specified orbit and well… There is a negligible difference between putting an asteroid in orbit and aiming it at a terrestrial target or celestial installation such as the ISS. In short, banning weapons from space, including weapons of mass destruction, is meaningless because the weapons are already there and the capability to employ them is inseparable from peaceful economic activity.

There are also more overtly technological weapon approaches that have been seriously considered by militaries that take the concept of essentially throwing an asteroid at a target and reducing the scale. Cold war strategists considered the idea of the “Rod from God” as a technologically viable way to use LEO to attack targets on Earth. The concept envisions placing tungsten rods in a satellite. These rods could be deorbited on command and without any explosive materials, but simply by achieving hypersonic to meteoric speeds on re-entry, could release energies of the scale of a small tactical nuke on impact (HQ USAF/XPXC, 2003, pp. 59- 66 C7-C17) (Preston, 2002, pp. 40-44 137) (Deblois, Garwin, Kemp, & Marwell, 2004, p. 70).

The key point that needs to be recognized when considering the likelihood of war as humans expand into outer space is the fact that very little technological innovation will be required. The technologies that allow humans to put satellites into space and move through cis-lunar space also can be harnessed as weapons. The speeds involved with space travel necessarily mean that virtually any object has the potential to function as a lethal weapon in the space environment or on Earth, the Moon, or Mars.