 The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of naval sea power, both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in national security lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Well good afternoon and welcome to the fourth issues in national security lecture for academic year 2021-22. I am Commander Gary Ross and I'll serve as your host for today's event. Professor John Jackson is on a well-deserved vacation and I'm looking forward to hosting you today. To kick us off, I'd like to turn it over as normal to Rhea Maloshashana-Chapield, President of the Naval War College, so she can offer her greetings. Admiral? Okay, so I'd like to welcome our audience in person and those who have joined online. We are maintaining our hybrid approach to this lecture series because we know that there are still many factors that people are considering when they schedule their time right now, based on their needs of family and their requirements for pertaining to COVID. So thank you for coming in person and thank you for coming online. I'm really looking forward to the lecture tonight. I'm joined here by my husband, David Scoville, who has been such a good part of making these lectures even more relevant by working with our benefits partners to support our family discussion group after. So I'll turn it back over to Gary and again, thank you for coming. And I'd just like to say welcome to our 64 participants on Zoom. Thank you very much, Admiral. For anyone just joining us, I want to reiterate that this series originally was conceived as a way to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic experience with the spouses and significant others of our student body. Over the past four years, it has been restructured to include participation by the entire Naval War College extended family to include members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees, and colleagues throughout Naval Station Newport. We will be offering 11 additional lectures between now and May 2022, spaced about two weeks apart on a wide variety of national security topics and issues. An announcement detailing the dates, topics and speakers of each lecture will be sent by me, both on email and posted on our website. A special note, and because of the upcoming Thanksgiving Day holiday, our next lecture will be on Monday, 22 November. We will be featuring an engaging discussion on China and zombies with Professor Jim Holmes. China continues to be quite a bit in the news lately. Each lecture event consists of three parts, the scholarly speaker's presentation, a question and answer period, and then a family discussion group session. This final segment is a primary interest to family members residing here in Newport, and it will feature guest speakers from various support activities and organizations here locally or on base. The family discussion group special guest for this week is Eugene Genereau to discuss Humana Healthcare's open enrollment and tri-care benefits. Okay, on with the main event. Please feel free to ask questions using the chat feature in Zoom, and we'll address them at the conclusion of the presentation. I am very pleased to introduce our speaker, Professor David Burbach. Professor Burbach will survey how space has factored into U.S. national security from Sputnik to the emerging era of great power competition. Space was an important front of the Cold War, from beyond top secret spy satellites to 1 billion people watching Americans land on the moon. In recent decades, space-based services like GPS communications or high resolution weather forecasting have become a part of our daily lives as well as a critical enabler of military operations. The benefits provided by our space systems represent potential vulnerabilities in times of conflict, though, and competitors like Russia and China have significant counter-space capabilities. The presentation will describe potential threats and policy responses facing American space power today. Finally, he will discuss future possibilities, challenges, and misperceptions around the new U.S. space force. Professor Burbach teaches the politics of U.S. foreign policy, space security, and international relations. His scholarly interests include civil military relations, defense planning, and the relationship between international security and technology, particularly space and nuclear policy. Before joining the Naval War College faculty in 2007, he taught at the Army School of Advanced Military Studies and also worked for several policy analysis and information technology organizations. I am pleased to pass the microphone over to Professor Burbach. Well, good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to thank those of you here in the hall for joining us in person today. Everybody on Zoom for joining us from the comfort of your homes or wherever you may be this afternoon. And I'd also like to send a message to the future. And those of you who may be members of the public watching us on YouTube after the lecture, thank you for your interest in what the Naval War College has to offer. Today, I'd like to spend some time talking to you about space and how it relates to U.S. national security. Space, as you all know, is big. And the topic of space is very big. So I won't be able to cover everything that could possibly relate. But what I will try to do is to give you a brief introduction to how space mattered to us during the Cold War, what has changed, and how we're thinking about space differently now in this era of great power competition, some of the particular challenges and possible policy responses. And thinking outside space in a purely military context, I'm thinking about some of the new developments, whether it's NASA going back to the moon or the rise of commercial spaceflight. And I look forward to taking questions from those of you here in person and those of you on Zoom at the end. Those of you in the future, I apologize, but I haven't yet figured out how to make the questions come back in time to you today. But hopefully it'll still be of interest to you. So we often talk about space as a new challenge. It's something we need to pay more attention to as one of the new cutting edge things. But in a sense, space really isn't all that new. Sputnik was launched in 1957. Satellites are almost as old as helicopters or ballpoint pins. We've been operating in space for a very long time. Before almost anybody serving in today's military was born in most cases, at least certainly our war college students. So what's actually new? And I said, before answering that question, I'll try to give you a bit of a sense of how space mattered in previous decades. And you're probably familiar with the space race leading up to the moon landing eventually. And in the early days, one of the aspects of space in American policy was faced for national prestige. And this was a very, very conscious thing, trying to put astronauts in space to orbit the earth, to be the first in orbit or the first to have two people in orbit or the first spacewalk. This was something we saw, not just, wow, the world happened to pay attention. We very consciously understood that we were trying to prove that we represented the future, that America had the best technology, had the best system. And I haven't been able to find a better photocopy, but you may see in the newspaper, the editorial cartoon in the upper right, Soviet leader Sergei Khrushchev holding the hand of lesser nations, like a better term, but meant to be the developing world. Uncle Sam with just a bouquet of roses, and Khrushchev saying, who else can give you a moon? That cartoon is why we went to the moon. I mean, not literally that one cartoon, but we went to the moon to prove to the world that we could do it, that we could do it before the Soviets, and to show that if you were a newly decolonized country in Africa or Asia deciding who to align with, how to vote at the UN, that the future was going to be with America and not with the Soviets. And again, we very consciously made use of this. The photo that I'm standing in front of, perhaps, from your angle, shows after John Glenn's flight around the world, we actually sent his space capsule on another trip around the world by airplane and truck, showing it off in cities all over the world, with people queuing up to see this marvelous display. And of course, this really reached its fruition when we landed on the moon in 1969 and accomplished that mission that John Kennedy set out. One in every six human beings watched it on television live, and of course, television was much newer then. That was a pretty amazing audience for the time. And again, something that we consciously made use of our diplomatic and information elements of national power. We actually reached out and the United States helped fund the construction of TV networks in some developing countries. We actively worked to make it possible for people all over the world to see this. The photo here is just one representative example, a department store in Australia where people showed up in a crowd at 6 a.m. to watch the landing live because most people didn't have sets at home then, at least in Australia. So we very consciously used this manned space program, human space program, to show the world what our system could do. But at the same time, there was another aspect to space that was much quieter. We didn't talk about very much, but that was, as far as US national security officials were concerned, was just as important. And that was using space to spy on our enemies. We needed to use space to figure out what the Soviets and their allies were up to. And let me take a second. It's almost hard to imagine not knowing what's going on everywhere. The photo I have up here is just the first, I think it was from Bing, as opposed to Google Maps, image of the Chinese Ministry of Defense Complex in Beijing taken by a commercial satellite. You can pull up that kind of stuff easily. If any adversary wants to get a close-up view of the Naval War College and get our exact GPS coordinates to Spruin's Hall, that's now a trivial thing to do. If they're curious enough, in fact, to know we're people in the parking lot today, you can now get commercial imaging that is refreshed every few hours and see is the Naval War College parking lot full or not. But that's not what we had as an adversary in the 1950s. The Soviet Union was an extremely closed society. They didn't publish good maps. They certainly didn't publish good data. We in the 1950s in some cases were having to rely on captured maps from the Germans that they had made when they invaded the Soviet Union in the 1940s, because we didn't have any better. So we didn't know how many nuclear weapons do they have? Where are they based? What's the size of their nuclear program? Are they getting their nuclear missiles or nuclear bombers or eventually missiles? Are they getting them ready to launch? We didn't know. We tried what we could get from human spies. We tried launching balloons over the Soviet Union with cameras just randomly taking pictures. That, in fact, if any of you have heard of the Roswell New Mexico UFO in 1947, it was actually happened. It's one of the balloons we were testing for that program crashed. The various misstories, misinformation got out about that. We flew U-2 airplanes over the Soviet Union. Eventually, one got shot down in 1960. But what we really understood as far back as the 1940s was that the thing to do was going to be to look at our adversaries from space. And within two years of Sputnik, the first American spy satellite was in orbit sending film capsules back down with images of Soviet military facilities. The photo that you see here on the lower right is a much newer 1980s photo from a more advanced satellite. But this was revolutionary. It allowed American leaders to know what's the soap? What do they actually have? What are their capabilities technically? How much do they have? And what's their current state of readiness? President Lyndon Johnson, I love this because he says right at the beginning of the quote, I don't want to be quoted on this. And then it was in the New York Times immediately afterwards. But Johnson said, I know how many missiles they have. I don't have to worry about, are they secretly building a new missile force that I don't know about? Or are they getting their missiles ready for war? They can't sneak that by us. And as Johnson explained, that's good because we don't have to then spend money on defense just in case. We don't have to be at a state of readiness to possibly scare each other into going to war because we know what the current Soviet military posture is like because of our satellites. And as Johnson said here, it'd be worth going to the moon 10 times over just to have these spy photographs. At the time, when this went out, we didn't talk much about this program. This was a pretty strong statement. We didn't talk much about these capabilities. I think it's now, we all sort of understand this, but it's important to understand in the Cold War that on the military side, this was the crown jewels of American intelligence being able to see what the other side was doing. We also pretty quickly developed other military applications within, by the mid 1960s, the Navy had a very early predecessor of GPS. I don't know exactly how it worked, but I think there were some technicians doing a bunch of calculations as opposed to just showing you a nice dot on a map. But we pretty quickly were using navigational uses, weather satellites, communication satellites, and also critically, missile warning so that we would know if the Soviets launched their missiles at us so that we would have some warning time. And the Soviets also, you know, running behind the US technically, but they too realized they too made use of these technologies. And let's see. There, okay, there's where I want to be. One thing they didn't do, however, is, you know, when we talk about space and that, you know, one of the, one thing that people often wonder about is what about weapons in space, you know, attacking earth from space? We actually in the Cold War didn't really do this. And both sides realized pretty quickly that putting nuclear bombs in orbit ready to call down to attack earth was probably not a very good idea, because like, what if the other side launched some astronauts to go, you know, pull the wires out of your orbiting nuclear bomb, you know, that would kind of suck. Or what if something went wrong, you know, when it crashed during launch? So we realized with missiles and bombers, who needs to put nuclear weapons orbiting continuously in space? There's also theoretically you could have objects come down like meteors and, you know, strike targets on earth. But certainly with the technology of the Cold War, and even today, that's a really difficult problem. And we're starting to make progress with current hypersonic technology. But the notion that you basically have a big chunk of steel or tungsten or something come down, slam into tanks on earth, that's a really hard thing to do. So we didn't really do that either. What both sides looked into in the Cold War, there was how do you attack targets in space? And we did figure out pretty quickly that nuclear weapons are actually surprisingly nuclear weapons are actually good at blowing up satellites. They're going to blowing up anything nearby. Unfortunately, they're too good. We learned that the radiation from the bombs gets trapped in belts around the earth and will knock other satellites out of commission. The test that you see on the left, a nuclear test that's from Honolulu looking out over the South Pacific, that American nuclear test destroyed the first AT&T television relay satellite days later from some of the trapped radiation knocked out several of our military satellites. So we realized, you know, if you really have to in a war, maybe, but boy, a few nuclear explosions can render space unusable, as well as creating radiation that would kill astronauts. We also, both sides tried and, you know, the Soviets, especially some non-nuclear systems where like a satellite would get near another satellite, explode into fragments, a little clumsy, and it would create a lot of debris. If any of you've seen the movie Gravity, you know, this Kessler syndrome idea where fragments from one satellite destroy another satellite and, you know, pretty quickly space becomes a very difficult environment for everyone. So the bottom line in the Cold War was both sides actually ended up fairly restrained. You know, for all that in the very first few years of space, there were all like the Air Force proposed setting off a big nuclear bomb on the moon just to show we could do it. You know, they proposed, I go Air Force, you know, the, you know, there were proposals that we put battle stations in orbit that we needed, you know, to have, you know, moon troops stationed on the moon to, you know, the two never really got filled out very well. But pretty quickly, both sides kind of settled on this relatively restrained role where we understood space was important for nuclear early warning and understood that if you take out the other side's nuclear early warning, they might be afraid that you're about to launch and start a nuclear war. So there was a certain stabilizing value. We even signed something that's today kind of the foundational document of space law, the outer space treaty, where we and the Soviets and almost every other country on earth agreed to not place nuclear weapons in orbit. We also said that space is to be used for peaceful purposes. And that clause doesn't really get, you know, developed out very much. And so we've kind of interpreted it to mean, as long as you're not actually shooting at somebody, you're good, you know, but Italy says, let's try and keep space peaceful. So it's, you know, the term can be a little overused, but I'll go ahead and use it in the Cold War space was relatively a sanctuary where, you know, both sides had important surveillance assets, but we didn't do a lot. We certainly didn't shoot at each other and we really kind of left space a little bit alone. Well, so what's different now? Why are we thinking of space differently? Why do we see new challenges? And the basic issue is that space is now an absolutely everything, civilian and military. The navigational systems of the 1960s were, you know, big boxes of electronics on submarines or aircraft carriers. Today, we all have GPS in our cell phones. You might have GPS in a watch. We, in addition to the satellite signals being used for navigation, they're important for timing. You know, the cell phone network and the internet don't work without the nanosecond precision signals from space for our GPS satellites. Of course, we use it for communications on both the civilian and military side. You know, there's a very, you know, very typical Pentagon style chart here in the lower left of imagining, you know, networks of satellite sensors and communications. You know, for military operations or daily life, space is now critical. It's no longer kind of this special thing like, you know, that only really mattered for strategic nuclear systems. And, you know, as I said, from in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, we sometimes refer to that as the first space war where you first saw GPS being used widely. We didn't actually yet have GPS guided bombs, but it was being used by the aircraft using missile warning satellites for tactical warning of short range missiles, not only scanning for Soviet ICBMs. And since then, it's exploded where, you know, we have been using, you know, communications surveillance satellites to intercept terrorist cell phone calls in Afghanistan. I mean, at least, you know, we all assume we do that. We have, you know, tremendous capability that even for kind of low level operations, you know, anti-terrorism operations, space is fundamentally a part of that. So our military today uses space for just about everything. Well, when you combine that with the return to great power competition, well, you know, that makes things a little bit different in space, because we've been dealing mostly with adversaries who have no capability to take away our space capability. The Taliban certainly did not. Iran and North Korea may have some very rudimentary capabilities, but not very much. So we were able to exploit our space capabilities without really having to worry very much about what might be done against those capabilities. That would be very different against Russia or China. They're both capable militaries that have their own space assets that support their military operations. And very importantly, they both have counter space capabilities. They both have capabilities to destroy or interfere with other nations' use of space. And if you imagine that we're in a conflict with Russia or China, we then would have to worry, would they see a value in taking away degrading American space capabilities? And it seems like they probably would. I mean, not just in a sense of, well, you know, you want to do anything you can to help the adversary, but there's probably an asymmetry where we are more vulnerable to that threat than our likely adversaries in China or Russia, partly because we, you know, although they are capable and technologically advanced militaries, they aren't as space-reliant, as technologically dependent, as capital-intense as the US military. But a lot of it is also geography. On the graphic on the right here shows in red, you know, the length of the lines of communication from Beijing or Heilong Island to the South China Sea green from the United States. We're likely, if we're in a conflict involving Taiwan or the South China Sea, the US military is probably operating almost halfway around the globe from the United States thousands of miles away from any land bases. The Chinese military is going to be very close to home. They can use fiber optic lines from Beijing to bases on the coast, and then it's relatively short aircraft range, you know, out to where, you know, they might need to be. So, you know, the sheer geographic factor means we have to use space. Now, if, you know, hopefully it doesn't go this way, if the Chinese Navy were to try to attack San Diego, you know, it would be flipped. We'd be in a position of being able to operate very close to shore and the Chinese would be dependent on space to communications to operate halfway around the globe. But, you know, that seems a less likely scenario. So, we have to worry that if we get into a conflict with China, you know, China is going to know that the US military makes very heavy use of space assets to do almost anything that we don't have easy fallbacks when operating that far away from home across a big ocean. So, it makes sense that they might be interested in challenging or attacking US space capabilities. And there are a few ways they might do that. Technology for attacking satellites kinetically has gotten better. You no longer have to use a nuclear weapon to be sure. We and other countries are good enough at intercept now that the US, Russia, China, and India have all tested kinetic intercept weapons that destroy satellites. Now, this is still, the problem of space debris is still there. In fact, the Chinese and the Indians created a bunch of debris with their tests within the last decade. The US, we did a recent test with a satellite that fortunately was so low in its orbit, it was just about to re-enter that most of that debris did not stay in orbit very long. But if we were to have a shooting war, it wouldn't take very many attacks on satellites to create a lot of space debris that not only would affect our military satellites, but commercial satellites of every country in the world. So, this is a big concern, not just for national security people, but anyone in the world who uses space. There might also be some new technologies that would allow physical destruction of a satellite without creating so much debris. If you can see in my graphic on the right, little satellite grabbing onto a big satellite, if you have the technology to rendezvous with satellites and have a grappling arm that can stick out to repair or refuel your satellite, you also have the technology to close with an adversary satellite and stick out a grappling arm with a pair of wire cutters or a can of spray paint and disable their satellite. This is why we in fact, I think a few over enthused analysts on the US side said the new Chinese space station has an anti-satellite capability because it has a robot arm, kind of like the Canadian arm on our space station. Well, that's true. You probably wouldn't maneuver your whole giant obvious space station to try and we would see it coming. It wouldn't be a very smart way to do it. But if you have the technology to rendezvous and interact with the satellite to repair it, you might also be able to destroy it. So there are some new technologies we're thinking of. There's probably even more attention now on what can you do to a satellite that's non-kinetic, that doesn't create that debris problem. And we in the US, we now acknowledge that we have at least one actual jamming system, the big antenna issue you see there, Space Force zones, to overwhelm and jam communication satellites. We claim that the Chinese have tried firing lasers at US reconnaissance satellites passing over China to temporarily blind their sensors. And Russia has systems that also look like they are satellite blinding lasers. And one has to assume that a variety of countries are working on electronic systems that weather through laser damaging sensors, jamming, or cyber, it's even harder to know what the state of the art is because obviously no nation talks about we found a bug in the adversary satellite software and here's what we can do to them. Now nobody really knows. There have been a few cases of civilian satellites being hacked and some random hacking group taking control of them briefly. One has to assume that any of the major space powers is very interested in knowing how to do cyber attacks against adversary satellites. And one of the things that kind of makes this challenging is it may not be very obvious. I mean, this is very much an espionage kind of game where if your satellite stops working, is it because a cosmic ray just damaged the CPU? Or is it because an adversary cyber attack caused the computer to crash? There's no easy way to tell. And finally, if you can't deal with the satellites, maybe you can deal with the ground stations. On the left is the space force communication station just outside of Manchester, New Hampshire, where if something bad were to happen to it, couple of cruise missiles kind of come in from the coast, fly over Manchester, blow up those radar domes. Well, we're not talking to the satellites anymore. China and Russia have, of course, their own equivalence as ground stations, including outside of their territory. I mean, we have ground stations all over the world. China has been actively expanding its network. This is on the right hand side, you see a ribbon cutting for a Chinese ground station in Sweden to communicate with their civilian satellites and their human spaceflight program. But the Chinese, too, for example, they now have a station in Namibia in Africa. So one possibility that might come up if there's a conflict is our ground stations going to potentially be under attack. And an interesting question this raises is, is an attack on a satellite justification to attack a ground station that belongs to the other side where you might actually kill people as opposed to merely attacking the machine in orbit. That's one of the, law of war proportionality would say yes. But representative Jim Cooper, one of the key sponsors of Space Force, has said, hey, no president's going to want to kill people just because somebody blew up one of our satellites. And he says Space Force needs to figure out that this would be a bad idea for Space Force to say, we'll deter attacks on satellites by threatening to blow up ground stations of other countries. It's an interesting legal, political, and ethical problem. So given these new threats, what might the US do? And there are a couple of directions that our policy might go in. And some of these could be pursued simultaneously. One is we could try to make ourselves less vulnerable to attack. And one of the kind of popular ideas there is rather than having a small number of exquisite, expensive, battle-starred Galactica satellites that do everything, maybe we need hundreds or thousands of cheap satellites. If you have a thousand satellites that can kind of easily communicate and work as a network to do your communications instead of a few giant satellites, that's a much more difficult problem for an adversary that has to target them. You might also make satellites less fragile. You could even put short-range defensive technologies on a satellite, perhaps, where it might see an interceptor coming at it and fire its own short-range defensive weapon against the interceptor. But there's a lot of thought going into the technologies of, what's the right answer here? How do we change? We could also use deterrents. And my example of threatening ground stations of another side, we could declare that we see space is so important, we really object to escalation into the space domain. So we could, as a matter of declaratory policy, say, hey, all satellites or certain satellites are off limits. If you attack them, we'll go very hard after your space assets, after your ground stations that service those space assets, or after something else entirely. Now, the problem, of course, is if another country decides to call that bluff, that we may or may not like those consequences. But there are certainly many analysts who say that the problem of defending satellites, which are fragile and move in predictable orbits, that that problem is so difficult, probably the only way to solve it is through deterrence, as opposed to resilience and deterrence by denial. Another thought, and this is looking harder and harder at this point in the game, is simply, we get out front and make sure that the US has total space supremacy, the way that we seek air supremacy in a conflict. Make sure that nobody has the ability to harm our space assets. That would be really ambitious. Because any country that has a civilian commercial space capability really has a military space capability, too. Literally the same rocket that launches people in orbit for SpaceX launches US military satellites. A lot of the underlying technology is very, very similar. So to me, at least it seems hard. If you really wanted space supremacy, that's a very hard thing to do unless you essentially deny every other country in the world a space capability at all, or at least you're prepared to do that. That's a pretty big step. It'd be a very expensive step. Do we blow up launch facilities in other countries preemptively? So we can certainly do more offensively, but it's a race that looks pretty difficult. Finally, maybe we engage in diplomacy. In the Cold War, there were a number of cases, as with the Outer Space Treaty, where we in the Soviets agreed that some technologies or some types of weapons were going to be so destabilizing that we both agreed in advance to stay away from them. We didn't have a formal treaty, but there was pretty much an understanding we're going to leave each other's nuclear missile warning satellites alone. We understand that if we blow up your missile warning satellite, you're probably going to assume we're about to launch a first strike. So we'll both stay away from those. Or there could be opportunities for formal arms control agreements. We might agree to not develop certain types of kinetic anti-space capabilities because of the debris problems that they could create. We might come to some informal agreements about what to target or not to target, but there are certainly many advocates for some additional space arms control. There are people who say, hey, the Outer Space Treaty said space is supposed to be peaceful, so should there be any weapons in space? Again, some possibilities to explore there. It seems difficult at the moment because for Russia or for China, they recognize that if you take space off the table, that's a net advantage for the United States in a conflict. So the problem is what's in it for them. So not an easy situation for our diplomats. Well, finally, to move off of the theory here and talk a little bit about some responses we're actually doing, one thing that we have done is we actually created a new service. First time since 1947 and before that, going to the colonial era, we decided that the challenges that have come up are so severe and require such focused attention that at the end of 2019, Congress approved and then President Trump signed into law the creation of Space Force as a separate service. I was fortunate enough to have the Naval War College's very first Space Force student in my seminar this term. If you're John, if you're watching, good luck, and I'm sure we will be seeing more as time goes on. So this was kind of a big deal. It seemed pretty interesting. What does Space Force actually do? A lot of people seem to have the, so this is going to be like Space Force has astronauts and they go somewhere and they shoot someone, people, bugs, Klingons, I don't know, or space. And you can even find people who support space. I could point you to an article, I think it was a war on the rocks blog piece, essentially saying, yeah, Space Force needs like space battleships like this. We need to be able to maneuver with the technology of how you do that left a little we'll fill in that blank later. If it seems like I'm a bit of a skeptic that Space Force is going to be doing Star Trek or Star Wars stuff anytime soon, I think physics just requires that. So Space Force is not going to be about human crew battleships. It's definitely not going to be about space infantry. What Space Force is going to be about, and at least read the text might be a little bit small for some of you, but the three key missions are Space Domain Awareness, is knowing what's going on out there, which is not an easy problem. Satellites are small objects. If a country launches a satellite and doesn't tell us where it's going to be, they take a few steps to make it less reflective so that it's not as bright. It can be very hard to know where things are. So kind of the first step is improve our ability to know what's happening in orbit around the Earth, even out as far as the moon. Space Force is not looking at Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. We're still a ways from the rest of the solar system mattering. So they're really focused on the Earth to the moon to operate and defend US space systems, US satellites, US launch systems. Day-to-day operation is a lot of what they're doing. If you didn't realize it, GPS is a US military system owned and operated originally by the US Air Force, now by US Space Force. If Space Force doesn't keep GPS running, the whole world will quickly know and suffer, and the mission of defending those satellites. Now, whether that means literally like intercepting an interceptor or through coming up with deterrent strategies, Space Force in cooperation with Space Command, the four-star geographic command that was also created or I guess recreated. We used to have one back in the 1980s and possibly engage in offensive counter space operations. The US does not claim to have any offensive space weapons other than jamming, not to have any that actually destroy adversary satellites. Now, if you have anti-ballistic missile technology, what we used to shoot down a satellite in a test about 15 years ago was actually an ABM standard missile off of a Navy cruiser. If you can shoot down a ballistic missile warhead, you can probably shoot down a satellite, so we could have that technology if we wanted to. But in the near term, this is all stuff that we were already doing. My example of GPS did not come into existence the day Space Force was created. GPS has been around for years. So day to day, Space Force is mostly doing what the US military already did in space, just now reorganized into a new service that focuses on space. Longer term space, one of the reasons for creating it, if those of you who have been through the TSTM or NSDM courses have talked a lot about bureaucratic politics, and one of the reasons that we created a separate service was to have a bureaucratic organization that would focus on space and develop a space aware culture, really know the space domain. So eventually, there probably are likely to think more about offensive space operations. We do also know General Raymond, who has spoken here at the War College a couple of times has made this clear that right now, space is almost ridiculously over classified. There are probably things you learned in a high school physics course that if somebody in the US space community had to put them in front of you, they'd have to put a secret no foreign label on it, even though it's an equation out of a high school physics textbook. General Raymond recognizes if nobody can talk about space, they don't know what you can do with space, they don't know how to think about space, allies especially find it difficult to interoperate with us in space. So bureaucratically, one of the initiatives that I know Space Force leadership is pushing is to try and be more visible and less classified. And I won't go into the whole procurement side, but space has been expensive and slow, and Space Force and the other reorganization is trying to help us do better at being able to acquire space capabilities more affordably, and especially more responsibly faster so that we aren't years behind the competition. And I think it's a little early to know if that's going to work, but that's certainly one of the intents is that a variety of bureaucratic reforms to make the acquisition go better. To broaden back out kind of where we came in talking about actions outside the military, I'll just quickly highlight we are hoping to go back to the moon. The photo that you see on the left, the thing that looks a little like a space shuttle external tank and space shuttle boosters, actually it looks like that because that's more or less what it is. NASA has actually put together the first rocket that they're going to test for the new moon program. Hopefully we'll be launching it early next year. SpaceX will be providing a giant lunar lander, and where this is relevant for national security is where Apollo was all about impressing countries around the world. The new program is all about allies joining us. It's been very deliberately designed to be a tremendously international program. Japan via Toyota will supply the rover. Canada will have astronauts included. We have something like 20 partners at this point, several of whom we've promised seats to go to the moon. So we're really trying to make our allies feel part of this as part of using our diplomatic power. And finally, there's been a big explosion in the commercial space sector. Here you see just in the last two months on the left, William Shatner, Captain Kirk is now officially an astronaut after traveling more than 100 kilometers above the surface of the earth. Or SpaceX capsule carried four non-professional astronauts on a privately funded mission, part of a fundraiser for St. Jude's Hospital. And we're likely to see more of this. Now, what does this mean for the military? Probably not much. I mean, there are people who say maybe Space Force needs to be like the Coast Guard and have rescue astronauts and you know, orbital rescue cutters for search and rescue of space tourists. I think we're quite a ways away from there being enough space tourism to make that worth it. But what the space tourism illustrates are a couple of big trends. I won't say too much about these, but that companies like SpaceX have made getting to space much cheaper and much faster. That helps the military because we can put up our satellites, you know, quickly and more inexpensively, but it's really opened up space to a whole bunch of new uses, including mega constellations where if you add up all the plans for various companies to bring you Wi-Fi from space, there might be 100,000 satellites orbiting the earth in a decade versus about 2,000 today. By the way, if you like stargazing, I would go out and get your fill of that now because in about 10 years, all you're going to see are satellites moving overhead all the time. So, you know, if you want, you know, if you've got kids, you want them to see what constellations are like, do it soon. But there's going to be an explosion of how many satellites are in orbit. And sometimes that, you know, one of the applications that is has a lot of military relevance is we're all being watched by commercial satellites that sell data to the public. You know, spy satellites were those ultra-secret crown jewels. Today, this is an image of Russian SU-57 stealth fighters from a commercial radar satellite, not just one satellite. The company actually has a big network. If you want to reimage a country's military bases, you know, with, you know, side aperture radar every few hours, you can do that or you will be able to soon. And there are players not just on the US side, but from all over the world. So, as these capabilities are growing, we're also facing a situation where, you know, country, you know, companies that the US regulators can't touch, you know, will be growing this capability. Or, you know, as companies think about putting up these hundreds of thousands of satellites, who's in charge of traffic management, who's in charge of making sure that we don't have collisions? Yeah, very unclear. So, the world is becoming bigger and more complicated that way in addition to the specific military national security challenges identified. Well, let me stop there. I will leave you with this hopeful view of Earth from the planet Saturn that a NASA probe took. I would be happy to take questions in person or via the Q&A function in Zoom. And Commander Ross will make sure that we have a good balance and field forward questions to me. So, I'd like to open up the floor here to anybody that has any questions. Any questions here? All right, we're going to move on to Zoom. One question, there are about three questions that were sent in. And thank you very much for sending those in. Can you talk a little bit about our space defense industry industrial base and how it compares to the industrial base of the 1960s? But also considering and how that compares to China, Russia, India, and the EU today. Sure. Big question. There are bright spots and not so bright spots. And actually, the bright spot actually is a similarity to the 1960s. There are a lot of very new, very innovative companies that often have a very young workforce from everything I gather. If you go visit SpaceX, it is full of 25 to 35-year-old engineers who are all happy working 90-hour weeks because they think they're going to move to Mars in a few years. And I actually spoke to a professor at Brown, who was involved in training astronauts for the Apollo missions, said what he sees at SpaceX reminds him of what he saw in those early Apollo days. So, the rise of these new space companies is great. There are parts of the defense industrial base, as is true in a lot of our industrial base, I think seem a little less responsive. And we've seen Boeing have a number. I don't like to pick out by name, but Boeing's craft that competes with SpaceX to take astronauts to orbit have had problems. We've seen a lot of the traditional companies whose roots go back to the 1960s. Decades later, they're often coming in very late and very over budget. And so, part of creating Space Force and the reorganizations around it were to hopefully kind of energize the defense, our space industrial sector. And there are those pockets that I think are doing really well. There are a lot of big companies that seem very comfortable with contracts and they're kind of slow and things are often late. Russia, I would say, looks, the Russian space industry has been having some real challenges. In fact, the Putin recently strongly chastised the head of their civilian space program for poor performance, things coming in late, slash their budget. So, the Russian defense industry, it's not like the 1990s where they collapsed from the Soviet era, but they still have some real inefficiencies. And in China, it's pretty impressive how much they have built in a short time, because China didn't really play the space race game in the Cold War the way Russia did. They really only got into space in the 1990s and have built out a space industry pretty fast. It's still, however, a lot smaller than the US industry, but they too are trying to find a way within their state-controlled system to facilitate creating these small, young, innovative companies that'll come up with new technological breakthroughs. If I had to choose which country's space industry I would want, I would take the US industry, but China is doing some impressive stuff. Great, thank you. And how do you feel about the national workforce in each of those countries? And their interest in participating in their own space industry? Kind of like a nuanced question there. Yeah, it is. In fact, I'm not sure I've got a great answer for, or at least I don't have an informed answer for that for Russia and China. I will, however, talk about it. One thing I will say is that all of the space-involved countries, one of the reasons they do their civilian space activities is because they do think that encourages young people to be interested in science and technology, to be interested in space jobs, and that once somebody realizes they're probably not going to be an astronaut or they're not going to be the lead astrophysicist for the new space telescope, well, maybe being an engineer working on rockets for the military is still pretty close and still pretty cool. Not only to Russia and China see that, but a country that's really interesting, the United Arab Emirates. Actually, they don't have their own rocket program, but they actually have a probe orbiting Mars. They're planning on a lunar lander. And they very self-consciously say, we want to encourage our youth to learn technology. We think space excites kids a lot. And if we build up capability for Mars probes, that's very much defense-related technological expertise as well, which doesn't precisely answer the question. For the U.S., I do think what I hear, at least, I've taught here at the War College for 17 years, I no longer have a finger on the pulse of today's undergraduate college students, but what I hear is that there's a lot of interest in space careers more than there was 10 years ago, as we... It looks like new stuff as opposed to, okay, the space shuttle launched again. All this new stuff, I think, is attracting interest among American youth. And related, do you feel that the U.S.'s ratio of private commercial venture to government venture is at a good place right now for that balance? We've moved away from that since the 1960s, of course, and NASA. In terms of the civilian space program, yeah, I think the rise of the commercial space sector has generally been good. I mean, it's popular to point at Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, billionaires going for joy rides. And I mean, yeah, that's true. But most SpaceX rockets are launching stuff for the U.S. military or for NASA or for... It really is a lot cheaper and easier and faster to go to space today than it was 10 years ago. Or rockets get all the attention, but if you look at the application side, people building satellites, like that example I showed of the company imaging the Russian fighters at a Russian base, there's a huge growing industry of space applications like that. And I think that really is to our benefit. I mean, I know there are some in our intelligence community who are uncomfortable with anybody except the Intel community having any being able to see anything. I think on net, if we're able to really kind of expand, open our minds, I think the U.S. having such amazing commercial capabilities in space is something we really should try and exploit. I've had my own thoughts about Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos now and then, but on balance, yeah, I think we're better off with this growth of a real commercial sector. Great, thank you. And then one specific question about China. What are the capabilities of China currently and how prepared are we to countering it? What are Chinese capabilities currently is probably, I will dodge slightly in that that would probably be a long and classified list to answer that in a very serious way. But I mean, I think that the Chinese have, on the civilian side, which I guess maybe a little easier to talk about, I every now and then get asked by the media, oh, well, China just put this rover on the moon or rover on Mars or their space station, so isn't China ahead of the U.S. in space? I don't think so. I mean, if you compare all the space probes, we have operating at multiple planets now or the capabilities of our international space station or what's going on with commercial space travel in the U.S., China is now clearly the number two country in the world for space. I would still take U.S. space capabilities in a minute over what China has. On the military side, I am pretty darn sure that if the Chinese could trade U.S. space assets for their space assets, they would do that in a heartbeat. That said, we have gotten very accustomed to an adversary having zero space capability, whether to use on their own other than buying commercial satellite images or certainly to challenge us. I wouldn't take China for granted. I mean, I don't think they're a match at all for our capabilities, but I think they absolutely are in a position to really threaten us and especially my analogy of if it's the Chinese Navy trying to take Naval Station San Diego, boy, their space capabilities will be stretched. Given the likely geography, though, you probably don't have to be 50-50 with the U.S. in order to really cause us problems. Thank you, Professor Barak. One last chance for the attendees here in Spurin's auditorium if they have any questions. If not, we are going to... Oh, I'm sorry, there is one question. I'm sorry. Can you use your microphone so that the folks on Zoom can listen in? Does this work? So I just had kind of an elementary question, mostly because I know nothing about this, but you mentioned China building a base in Namibia. I was curious about, and I think maybe Russia and Sweden on your slide previously, could you talk a little bit about the logic of outsourcing space or establishing these satellite locations? Absolutely. It's a matter of just having a line of sight communication with satellites. I think they would prefer to call them tracking stations rather than bases, but given that the Earth is a sphere, if a satellite is not overhead from China, you need a station somewhere else to be able to point an antenna to talk to the satellite. It's been most visible for China on the civilian side, so they daft satellites to talk to their space station. Actually, the U.S., we rely less for our civilian space capabilities. We rely less on that because we actually have a network of geosynchronous satellites that NASA uses. China doesn't have that yet, so they're still kind of like our old days more reliant on ground. The Russians as well have several ground stations. I'm not sure if they both, certainly in the old days, we used to even have ships that would cover some of the gaps. They may do that, but it's a matter just given that the Earth is round, being able to position antennas where you can communicate with satellites located in any part of the sky. Any other questions? I think there's one for the soft science major. One more question in Zoom. For the soft science majors, what books or think tank reports would you recommend to brush up and become more current on space? That's a terrific question. A couple of things. There's a lot of good work coming out of think tanks. One report that I actually, two related reports that I would highlight to get a sense of where, on the security side, the Secure World Foundation and the CSIS, Center for Strategic and International Studies, every year both publish reports on counter space capabilities around the world. I know their authors well and I'm going to feel terrible that I don't have the titles off the top of my head, but Secure World Foundation, Center for Strategic and International Studies, that'll get you up to speed on what other countries are doing. Another think tank that's got a lot of great reports, including some good primers. For example, they have one talking about the very basic physics of Secure, why you won't have battle stations, why we care about orbits, the Aerospace Corporation. It's one of the federally funded research centers like the RAND Corporation. Less famous than RAND perhaps, they didn't get mentioned and Dr. Strangelove the way the RAND Corporation did, but Aerospace Corporation is another very strong think tank on this. And I would also recommend to give a shout out to one of our other War College faculty members. Dr. Joan Johnson-Freeze here at the War College has been one of the most prolific authors on space security for some time. I think her most recent book is Arming the Heavens, which is a very good book on this, or this is getting a little more political sciencey, but I think still pretty readable. One of our speakers at the future Warfighting Symposium, Dr. James Maltz of the Naval Postgraduate School, has a book that I'm going to mess up the title, but Space Security are kind of the key words, which I think does a really nice job of laying out some of these dilemmas in space and why we ended up relatively restrained during the Cold War and some of the possible challenges that will destabilize things in space. All right. Well, thank you very much, Professor Burbach, for an excellent lecture. I'm sure that all of the viewers feel the same way, but thank you very much. Thank you.