The United States is at risk of creating a Maginot Line in space, primarily with military satellite communication (MILSATCOM) assets, because it continues to assume that space systems will not be attacked in conventional conflict, according to an analyst from a leading Washington think tank.
Todd Harrison, from the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), said even though the United States has continued to improve its space systems over the years, they are still primarily designed to protect against the same threat as they were during the Cold War: nuclear attack.
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| Boeing’s Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS) satellites. Photo: Air Force. |
“If we keep going in that direction, we are exposing ourselves to critical vulnerability,” Harrison said Wednesday in a Capitol Hill briefing to preview his newly-released study, The Future of MILSATCOM. “Just as the Germans violated international norms by invading (France) through Belgium and Luxembourg, we could have an adversary that violates international norms by launching an attack in the space domain, even in a conventional conflict.”
France’s Maginot Line was a 1930’s era line of bunker fortification to prevent Germany from invading from the east as it did during World War 1, Harrison said. Considered technologically advanced for its era, with underground tunnels and air filtration systems, the Maginot Line was ultimately futile as Germany invaded France through Belgium and Luxembourg.
“The Maginot Line actually did what it was designed to do: it prevented a German invasion of the Alsace-Lorraine region,” Harrison said. “The problem was that the French failed to anticipate how warfare would change and how adversaries could adjust their tactics accordingly.”
What was once a stable competition, as Harrison described, between the United States and Soviet Union, space has change drastically with more competitors and diverse uses. Harrison said he believed the 1991 Gulf War was the turning point in space as it demonstrated the value of fusing space-based capabilities like Global Positioning System (GPS) and SATCOM with conventional weapons systems, creating what he said some call the space-enabled reconnaissance strike complex.
As space becomes more contested and crowded and the United States becomes more reliant on space capabilities, Harrison said U.S. space systems have not adjusted to take into account their new reality.
“We’ve been making juicier targets for our adversaries in conventional conflict,” Harrison said.
MILSATCOM assets are particularly vulnerable, Harrison said in his report, because they are susceptible to physical (kinetic and non-kinetic), electronic and cyber attack. Potential adversaries, Harrison said, are also not as reliant as the United States on space-based capabilities and do not have symmetric vulnerabilities, making traditional deterrence in space a difficult proposition.
Harrison said, additionally, the U.S. military’s critical dependence on space-based capabilities for global power projection means that counter-space capabilities may figure prominently in an adversary’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) operations.
“From the perspective of other nations, U.S. military space systems are weapon systems, and space is a domain of warfare that can, and will, be contested,” Harrison said in his report.