Manned spacecraft firing at adversaries beyond Earth’s orbit may not be the mission of the Space Force, but staying one step ahead of aggression, including by deploying space-based weapons, falls within its national security scope, a Pentagon official said today.
“We have the most to lose,” Stephen L. Kitay, deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy at the Pentagon, said Thursday morning at an event organized by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.
Historically, the Department of Defense has put satellites in space for communication and GPS needs without regard for assuring their capabilities throughout a conflict, Kitay said. The Space Force’s job will be to assure their protection in a contested space. “We put them up there and … assumed it was a sanctuary, but we were not as concerned about the threats that we see today.”
War fighter support from space has long been an integral part of the Pentagon’s national security strategy, but the new Space Force will seek creative ways to protect space architecture better and defend it with offensive measures.
“We have also progressed from seeing space purely as a support function to recognizing it is a war-fighting domain in its own right,” Kitay said.
As the group of journalists, industry professionals, and active-duty officers pondered celestial warfare over eggs, grits, and bacon at the Capitol Hill Club, it was not clear how close to Star Wars dogfights the Space Force’s imagination might roam.
Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. Uriah L. Orland sought to dampen science fiction dreams in comments to the Washington Examiner.
“Its not necessarily a spaceship that’s flying around and shooting stuff in space,” he said. “You can protect and defend from terrestrial means and also attack from terrestrial means.”
That includes earth-based anti-satellite weaponry. Orland did, however, acknowledge that adversaries such as China and Russia are contemplating space-based weaponry.
Kitay told the Mitchell Institute crowd that creative thinking would be required to reimagine what defense from space would mean. “From a national security perspective, this is not about us waging through the galaxies in exploration, that is not our mission,” he said. “We are tied to national security. If we see threats beyond geosynchronous orbit, we need to be ready for them.”
Kitay described how the Pentagon hopes to empower creative thinking, streamline bureaucracy, and leverage the best of all the services in the new Space Force.
“This is our opportunity to build a new way of doing business from the ground up,” he said while clarifying that adding defensive measures is not a shift from space-based support but an expansion of the Pentagon’s mission. “The way that we think about it is, ‘How do we assure the capabilities to the war fighter?”
[Previous coverage: ‘The case for a Space Force is overwhelming’: Congress paves way for new branch of military]
The Pentagon official called the Defense Department’s coterie of 15,000 space professionals a “small community” that will be “steeped in” thinking about and putting into practice the new ideas necessary to maintain U.S. superiority in space as a national security imperative. “It will be complex,” he said. “There’s a variety of threats we’re going to have to defend against, and its not as easy as, they shoot a missile, we shoot a missile.”
That may lead to the United States placing weapons in space, which is permitted under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, he said.
“It does not prohibit weapons in space,” Kitay said of the treaty.
The treaty prohibits weapons of mass destruction in space, but adversaries are prompting the U.S. to contemplate how a weapon would be defined and to verify that others are following that definition.
One thing is clear in the U.S. effort to deter hostile activity in space, Kitay said: “We’re going to need the ability to protect and defend ourselves, and there’s a variety of ways to do that to stay ahead of the threat.”
Col. Elvert Gardner, an assistant professor at Fort McNair’s National Defense University and who attended the event, acknowledged that our adversaries know our vulnerabilities.
“The idea is not to get behind,” he told the Washington Examiner. “Its about organizing, training, and equipping to ensure national security in space.”
