A 1959 article in Air Force Magazine by Albert Stillson applied several concepts from traditional seapower and airpower theory to warfare in space, finding most of them wanting and generally inapplicable. Situational awareness and pre-conflict positioning will grant a combatant enormous advantages, perhaps making surprise decisive.Īnd this is by no means the first theory of space warfare. The political object of war will remain central, and will govern the means with which states decide to fight in space. States will deal with an extraordinary degree of uncertainty, as the identity of attackers and even the existence of an attack will often be unclear. The rules are necessarily speculative, but they can serve as a basis for thinking about what war in space might entail. Paul Szymanski of the Space Strategies Center has a list of forty rules of space warfare. Whether or not the US Air Force was a good idea, those who founded it knew what they wanted and knew how they wanted to get it. But the United States Air Force definitely was very well-theorized from the start, building upon decades of complex discussion and analysis and the experience of many wars. The Army and the Navy were not particularly well-theorized when they were established, and the Marine Corps remains confusing from a theoretical point of view (as well as from many other points of view). To be sure, you can have a service without a theory of employment. Space does not yet have its Jomini or its Mahan or its Douhet. The 19 th and early 20 th centuries seem to have been the golden age of military theorization, with Corbett and Mahan on the naval side, Clausewitz and Jomini on the land, and finally Douhet and the Air Corps Tactical School for air. There certainly is excellent work from serious analysts, but the lack of any good evidence about what space warfare might look like hampers our ability to develop theories like those that helped give birth to the US Air Force in 1947. We do not have a firm body of theory about space warfare. And yet, the United States has created a Space Force designed, at least in part, to ensure the endurance of US space dominance. Several countries (including most notably the United States) have successfully integrated space assets into their warfighting, but this effort has been one-sided no country has tried to deny another access to space. Various countries (most recently Russia) have conducted technical tests of their ability to destroy objects in space. ![]() It’s 2021, and no one has ever fought a space war.
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