 Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming and attending to this event. We think it should be pretty interesting and slightly just go issues with the food. My name is Victoria Samson. I'm the Washington Office Director for the Secure World Foundation. The Secure World Foundation is a private operating foundation that promotes cooperative solutions for space sustainability. Our vision is that the secure, sustainable, and peaceful use of outer space that contributes to global stability on Earth. We work with governments, industry, international organizations, and civil society to develop and promote ideas and actions for international collaboration. What we're going to do is have our speakers go down the line and give a brief discussion. And we're going to go and have a moderated panel and then open up for Q&A. But I wanted to give just a little bit of an overview very quickly. And then I feel like this is probably obvious, but the nature of the space domain has changed. There's been a shift in how we approach space. It affects our possibility for space and security. The goal is a stable, predictable space environment that will allow us to enjoy continued benefits from use of and access to space. As more nations depend increasingly on space assets for the national security and socioeconomic development, the loss of these space assets, whether real or theoretical, and actions taken in response to these losses, could spark or escalate conflict on Earth. Moreover, certain types of military actions in space could have long-term negative impacts on the space environment. And the additional change is the role of commercial entities. They're becoming much more prevalent. Space used to be largely in nation states. And now you have a lot more actors as well. And then you have actors getting involved in terms of different domain types. You have small-set operators becoming a huge change. And you have more countries adding launch capabilities and more just having access to the satellites themselves. In terms of looking at resiliency, the interference, even theoretical with space assets, is perceived to be a huge disruptor. And many governments are focusing on how to maintain their ability to receive continued access to their space assets no matter what happens. As space is a crucial part of national security infrastructure, economic, and daily lives. And the US national security community is focused on the resiliency of space assets, I think. Probably resiliency is a key word everyone's heard a million times more today. But looking into the changing attitude for space protection, that's really what we hope this panel will be going digging into deep. One of the issues we're seeing internationally for these discussions is the concept of self-defense in space. Looking at, okay, what is it? Is it allowed? How do we deal with it? How do we do it in a way that's not gonna be automatically escalating crises or making things into a crisis that's not necessarily have to be these? So identifying threats of what the first step can be. The national community can do a lot to mitigate these threats, but the first step is just kind of identifying what those threats are. With that, I will stop since we're short on time and go on to our first. We're gonna basically go down the line. You should have bios of all the speakers in front of you. So our first speaker will be my colleague, Brian Whedon. Thanks, Victoria. So I thought I would start by kind of setting the stage and focus more on what's changed in terms of national security space, why it's a big issue nowadays it's come back as an issue and kind of try and summarize some of the steps that have been taking and some of the unanswered questions that are still out there. I mean, for those that have been paying attention, I would say that space security is cool again. For a while there, it seemed like no one was talking about things that have been talked about decades ago with military activities in space and such a conflict in space. But there's been a significant change in the tone and language used by several of the top leadership across the United States government in the national security world. People are talking openly about the possibility of conflict in space, although usually following it with saying that, well, we need to avoid that. There's talk about space being more threatened than ever, which I think is questionable. It depends how you kind of frame it. And there's also been talk about need to shift towards more of a warfighting culture within the military space operations world, which basically means thinking about when you're conducting space activities and providing space capabilities of the warfighter, you need to be able to be actively thinking about who might be trying to interfere with that and what steps can be done to mitigate that. Which again is not different than what other people when they're pilots flying in a war zone or ships operating, Navy ships that are operating have to think about. So what's driving this? A couple of big, big trends. I would say that space itself in the national security context has gone from mainly being, I would say, a strategic contributor to one that contributes at all levels of national security activities. So throughout much the Cold War, and in fact, some of the early beginnings of national security space, its main focus was strategic in nature. It was providing intelligence to top-level decision-makers. It was verifying arms control treaties. It was nuclear warning and command and control. People talk about the 93 Gulf War as being kind of the first space war. I think it's more accurate to say it was more of an experiment and then it was kind of the first time that space capabilities were used kind of in an operational and tactical context. But really it's been the last 15 years in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere that you've really seen space capabilities be used down to the warfight on the ground and become integrated into everything the US military does. It's very hard to think about how the US military can do the kinds of things it's been doing the last 15 years and project power on the world without having space capabilities. And there's a couple of results of that. One is that much more of the national security community now cares about space. It's not just the space people talking about space. You now have people up to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Defense now talking about space and space security, which I think is a significant change. But at the same time you have these capabilities that were once kind of set aside and were limited to more of a strategic nature. They're now supporting conventional operations. They're now supporting conflict and people in the battle. And that in some ways makes them a bit more of a target because they're being used to actively pursue conventional warfare. So what are some of the trends? Well, there's been quite a lot of talk about how other countries, primarily Russia and China, have been developing counter space capabilities. In some cases these are basically bringing back capabilities that existed during the Cold War. In other cases there's hints that there may be something new that has not necessarily been done before in a military context. They haven't thought about it, but not actually done before. It's hard to tell. There's so many works in the public open source domain. It's kind of hard to tell sometimes what exactly is going on. But there's a decent amount of evidence of both Russia and China testing ground-based direct ascent anti-satellite systems that could be used against low-Earth orbit objects. That is not hugely different from threats that existed in decades past. There's other evidence suggests there may be attempts to develop capabilities that could threaten satellites in higher orbits, maybe out the geostationary orbit. That, if true, would be something that is new, and I think may be part of what's driving increased concern, particularly in the intelligence community. You've seen demonstration of capabilities, particularly rendezvous and proximity operations, that while it's uncertain whether it is specifically an anti-satellite test, they certainly could lead to the development of co-orbital capabilities in the future. And there's always been significant concern about that as a potential threat. So what is it the US has done over the last few years? Well, 2010, the Obama administration released its national space policy. And shortly thereafter in 2011, they released the national security space strategy that was co-signed by both the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense. And then that was followed by 2012 DOD space policy. And all three of these documents kind of reinforced each other, basically successive levels of implementation. And in general, they talked about the importance of norms of behavior in space, building coalitions with allies in industry, increasing the resilience of US space systems, and being able to respond to attacks on US space capabilities, perhaps in other domains. So not necessarily responding to attack on space that attack on space, but perhaps responding in the air domain or the land domain or the sea domain. And then it seems like there was a significant shift around 2013-2014, which I've assessed was probably prompted by Russian and Chinese counter space testing or capabilities demonstrations. And as a result, you saw kind of a rethink of some of these issues. In 2014, the government conductor was known as the space strategic portfolio review, which as far as we know, was finished towards the end of the summer, 2014. The report has not been released, but unofficially it's been talked about as kind of the findings were that the US needs a better job identifying threats in space, being able to withstand aggressive counter space programs and countering adversary space capabilities. Congress has also been gotten into the action on this. The FY 15 National Defense Authorization Act called on the NASCAR space community to present a plan to deter and defeat adversary attacks in US space systems, including the role of offensive space operations and active defense. The 2016 budget request reprogrammed between $5 and $8 billion over five years for space protection. In 2015, the Obama administration created the Joint Space Doctrine and Tactics Forum, which gave a way for the military community to work with the intelligence community on how to respond to attacks on satellites. There was a creation of the Joint Interagency Combined Space Operations Center, or the JICSBOC, which has been explained as a way to experiment with tactics that might eventually be incorporated and implemented at the JSPOC. And the shifting of the role of the Secretary of the Air Force from being the Executive Agent for Space to being what's known as the Principal DoD Space Advisor, and to have a stronger role in kind of having an opinion about the way NASCAR space should go. And then also in 2015, the Office of Secretary of Defense released a white paper on a resilience taxonomy for space domain mission assurance, which tried to, I think, put some more intellectual rigor behind terms like reconstitution, resilience, and protection that had been thrown about and discussed for a long time and what role things like disaggregation and distribution might have in a space protection strategy. And then most recently, in April 2016, the Space Symposium, General Highton unveiled the Space Enterprise Vision, although it's very hard to tell what's part of that because as far as everything about it has been classified, but it seems to focus quite a bit on architectures for NASCAR space and how to update those to deal with all these threats. So I think it's easy to say that there's probably been more interest and activity on this issue within the US government in the last few years than certainly I've seen the last couple of decades. And although much of it is going on internally as government, and it's hard for us on the outside to kind of get a real sense of everything that's going on. And honestly, I think everyone I've talked to has kind of criticized the efforts of the administration, but perhaps for different reasons. Those on the conservative end of the spectrum have criticized the efforts as being too soft or not strong enough and have calling for things like more deterrence through threats or even in Congress calling for bringing back space-based missile defense as a way to counter anti-satellite weapons in some way. On the other side of the spectrum, people have, on the more liberal part of the spectrum, there's been concern about maybe it's time to get serious about arms control and about applying some of the same governance mechanisms that were developed in the nuclear world, the space. And there's been a lot of concern about what it is that the military is doing and is it really trying to deter war or is it just kind of preparing for it? And as Victoria mentioned, kind of the wild card in all this is the changes in the commercial world. The commercial space sector is now growing at a rate that we haven't really seen in the past and has a potential to become kind of the lion's share of space activities. And so how does that relate or interact with what the militaries are doing, the national security community is doing in space? And I wonder, with all the recent focus on the potential hostile threats, what about the environmental threats that haven't gone away? Issues of space weather and space debris, there's been quite a bit of talk about those over the last decade or so. But if you actually look through the budget and you look for actual money allocated to dealing with them or changes to roles and responsibilities, there's not a whole lot to go on. So I'll just close by just kind of some comments on personal comments on the current strategy. I think what we know of the current strategy and its focus on kind of this mix of norms of behavior, on increasing resilience of US space systems, working more closely with the commercial sector and the allies, I think in general those broad strokes are good. It's hard to kind of get a sense of the details because there's either not a lot of detail or the details are not publicly known. I think my biggest concern is that it all seems to be focused almost entirely on what the military is doing and the national security community, which I think is obviously part of the solution but you have to wonder what else is gonna be there to support that. In the academic world and the military world, we talk about strategy as having a diplomatic component, an informational component, a military component, an economic component. And I think we've seen over the last 15 years some of the limitations of a military-centric strategy that does not have good support from political or diplomatic initiatives that can go in and reinforce what the military's done. So my question is kind of, in addition to what the DOD is doing and they're certainly doing quite a bit and they seem to be very focused on this, what else is the US government doing that's gonna support those efforts and kind of give a more well-rounded strategy? So I'll stop there and open any questions once we get to that part. Well, good afternoon. It's a great pleasure to be with you, surface dwellers this afternoon. And I'm very happy to be here and see so many old friends. I'd like to explicitly thank Victoria and Brian for this opportunity. And I very much look forward to our discussion about this important topic as we go forward. Of course, I have to foot-stomp my standard disclaimer that I'm not speaking on behalf of anybody and no organization would endorse this now. So I would like to just go back to a couple of things that Brian and Victoria mentioned because I think there's some really good stuff that the Department of Defense has put out recently. In particular, I would call your attention to that space domain mission assurance, a resilience taxonomy piece that was published in September of last year by the Office of the Secretary of Defense. So as you may be aware, one of the key implementation actions for the 2011 National Security Space Strategy was to develop a more comprehensive and robust definition of what this resilience thing is and how one might accomplish it. So it took a while, but the Department of Defense now does have such a document and I would commend that to you. I think it's a very thoughtful piece and I am hopeful that the Department will be using it as will others in their quest to improve the mission assurance of our space systems. So that's one. Second, I'll just really emphasize a couple of things that Brian said. I thought his introductory comments were brilliant and I think you could find no better illustration of the fact that our senior leaders find this of great importance than to consider that Deputy Secretary worked spent two days down at the Schriever War Games and Maxwell Air Force Base. During that time, he met with senior leaders from all the participating states. So there's just no question that this is very high on the agenda and in the minds of our senior leaders and there are probably some pretty good reasons for that. And the final thing I would just like to footstomp again based on what Brian mentioned is that while it is probably true that the Department of Defense has moved out finally on a lot of areas, the area that in my judgment is really lacking is the rest of those dime components. So the diplomatic informational economic pieces that probably are at least as important as the military dimension of this problem. And in my humble opinion, the United States government does not have a good process for integrating those things and ensuring that they are comprehensively considered as a part of the mix when trying to address any of these. So really there's just two things I'd like to footstomp. I mean, as you probably gather, I am a big fan of the N-Triple-S. I think it's a really significant document. I would not advocate that we need a new one at this juncture. I think it's striking the right tone and it is a permissive general comprehensive policy that or strategy that enables a lot of other activity. I would call your attention to though that the difference between the 2010 national space policy and the 2011 national security space strategy is significant. And the thing that I can't discuss that's even more significant is where the United States government has gone since the 2011 national security space strategy. But what I would in particular call your attention to is if you think of where President Obama was when he came into office and what he was trying to do with his 2010 national space policy versus where we are today. Or think of it in terms of Secretary Carter. When Secretary Carter came into the government working for the office of technology assessment for Congress back in the 1980s would have been very hard to find any military or strategic defense system that he was a big fan of. Today it's extremely hard to find any space system in particular that he isn't a big fan of. In fact, if you want to point to one individual that is really driving this train in the most significant fashion, it is one of each. I shouldn't be Carter, so. Okay, so my two things, what do we need to do differently and better? We need more transparency, okay? I can't talk about this stuff. It's highly significant. The United States government has done a lot of good stuff but for whatever reasons it has chosen not to make those public. So I understand sources and methods. I had the privilege of working at the Office of the Director of Natural Intelligence for three years. I think I understand that a lot. We don't want to give away sources of methods of obtaining information. I understand the concerns about not incentivizing other states to develop counter space capabilities. So in particular, we don't want to give the Indians for example, develop those kind of capabilities. But folks, let's face it, that ship has sailed about 20 or 30 years ago. But we're kidding ourselves when we say, oh, we don't want to create incentives for them to do this. They've already done it. So the idea that we're somehow imposing constraint by what we say about it is really kind of, I'm not saying there's no utility to that but let's think this through a little bit more carefully here folks. And in particular, if the Obama administration and it is a settled policy on the part of the Obama administration that we're gonna go forward with a significant shift, they want to make that an enduring and sustainable policy shift, guess what? They're gonna have to talk about it more because playing this trust me card over and over gets old, particularly with Congress and the American public or international publics. So that's my number one thing that the United States government needs to work on is transparency. Unfortunately, that Secretary Carter I mentioned before, he has publicly said that he believes much of what the United States does in space or what it talks about in space is over classified. So there is an ongoing effort on the part of the Department of Defense and the intelligence classification restrictions and talk about this more. As someone in the trenches trying to do that, I can tell you that it is extremely difficult. All position of all government agencies with respect to those type of issues is that, how dare you even bring that up? And then they should, very difficult but that really needs to be done. That's my number one thing. Okay, so second thing, just real briefly, how can we incentivize? How can the United States government incentivize all those commercial things that we would like to see more of? So largely that devolves to an issue of regulation and licensing of those activities, as well as the government's responsibilities under the Outer Space Treaty to have a continuing supervision over those activities. In that regard, I would suggest that the United States government needs to do a kind of zero base review of its basic policies and strategies towards commercial activity in space. As you know, the Outer Space Treaty was written in 1967, commercial activities were not really even afterthought in that given the state of commercial activity at the time. So if there's anything that needs to be advanced in respect to international space law and domestic legal regulation and so how does this manifest itself? Well, almost anything commercial entities want to do in space is looked at skeptically from the position of the United States government because they don't really have well-developed and comprehensive policies to regulate it or license it. So that's what I'm really suggesting is the United States government needs to do fundamental reevaluation of those. Think through its basic goals, one of which I would strongly recommend is to incentivize growth in this industry. More of this that is done by the United States, the better it is for us in building that more resilient architecture that can ensure. Just one other specific thing I can raise with respect to that is many things that commercial actors are interested in doing, there just basically is no process for regulating. Bad news is the US is the world's leader in licensing and regulating things. So it's a difficult challenge and again, the US government needs to think more broadly and creatively about that. We can't keep treating everything like it's a remote sensing system. Want to do on-orbit servicing, that's remote sensing. If you want to do rendezvous and proximity operations, remote sensing. Maybe debris removal, remote sensing. So you get the picture. So again, the government needs to think more creatively and comprehensively about that and think through what it is that it's trying to accomplish. And hopefully in the fullness of time, create some policies that could actually incentivize growth and more consistency and predictability on the part of industry and wanting to take on investments in this area. I very much look forward to our discussion here in a... I'm Todd Harrison, senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And I want to thank both Brian and Victoria for having us here today for this great discussion. So I'll start by disagreeing a little with what Peter said, only on one point. I think it is time to update the national security space strategy probably in about a year when we've got a new administration in office. And it's not that I think that there's anything so bad with the current NSSS. Too many answers. It's not that there's anything that bad with it. I think it's actually pretty good, but I think we could make it even better. And as times change, we just need to update things. And so I've got three basic areas that I think where we could improve on the existing space strategy. Number one is I think we actually need to give NASA a greater role. Maybe I should rephrase that. We need to give NASA a role. If you look in the current national security space strategy, it never mentions NASA by name. You know, why is that? Now we don't normally think of NASA as being national security related, but I think NASA actually could be an important part of our space strategy because we can use NASA to engage with some non-traditional partners, nations that might even be military competitors. Why would we want to do this? Well, number one, to increase transparency. So we can have a better idea of what they're doing if we're engaged with them. And you know what? Transparency works both ways. They would also have a better idea of what our intentions are in space. And I think that can only be a good thing into our advantage. And the second reason is we want to encourage norms of conduct or norms of behavior in space. And NASA is a perfect place to do that. The current space strategy says we should lead by example. I think NASA is probably the best example we have for the world and how we intend to use space peacefully. And you know, final point here on NASA. We talk about the diplomatic component to our strategy. I think we ought to explicitly give that role to NASA because NASA has a vast network of international partnerships. And it is a source of national power. Who doesn't want to work with NASA? NASA has a great brand image around the world. And so our space strategy should leverage that. Second thing, I think it could be improved in the current space strategy is how it addresses commercial industry and how that's gonna fit into our space strategy. So specifically, I think it ought to include a sourcing strategy as part of the overall space strategy. So what I mean by that is thinking through what is it we need from industry and what kind of US industry do we wanna create and help foster? I shouldn't actually say create because we're not in the business of creating this industry anymore. What do we want to encourage and what do we wanna foster in the US space industry? A good example would be, I think it's in our national security strategic interest to have more than one launch vehicle for military launches from more than one company. Why not say that? Why not be specific about that, that that's part of our strategy. And then follow through on it as well. Oh, I thought you took crazy. Yeah, I know, I know. You blew it down for me. And we should also, this gets a little more difficult but we should also address when we want to buy things as a service and buy them as a product. And that is changing. I think it has changed since 2011. For things that aren't unique to the military, for things where there is a roughly equivalent commercial market, we ought to be seriously looking more and more at buying things as a service. So here I'm thinking of launch, SATCOM, imagery, some types of imagery, some types of SATCOM, not all. Weather information, there are a lot of things that we could be buying as a service rather than trying to build and launch and operate our own satellites for these things. I think we're already headed in that direction but I think that should be incorporated into our space strategy. Final area I think that needs some more improvement and I will be the first to admit I don't have the answers here is we need to address in more explicit detail how we think about escalation and deterrence in space. Specifically how are we gonna manage escalation? We like to compare deterrence in space with nuclear deterrence. I think on one level that works really great in the sense that just like with nuclear weapons we have to find a stable deterrence posture because the use of nuclear weapons is just not acceptable. We don't wanna see that in the world ever. So we've gotta have a stable deterrence posture there. I think the same is true when it comes to kinetic, ASAP weapons in space is just not acceptable to see them being used. We don't wanna be in a position where they are used. I'm afraid though that our current situation is not stable. We don't have a stable deterrence posture in space when it comes to kinetic weapons but we've got to get there. I think anything less is just simply unacceptable. Right now I think the space strategy and part of this I'm sure is due to classification issues. It doesn't say a lot in terms of specifics. It says that basically we wanna work to discourage bad things and we wanna encourage good behavior and we wanna do that by working with our partners. Well that's great but strategy's about ends, ways and means. We've got the ends, we know what we want in terms of the end space here but we need more details on the ways and the means. How are we gonna do it? It needs to be in enough detail that DOD can craft clear and unclassified rules of engagement in space. Now there can also be classified version, that's fine. But I say a clear unclassified set of rules of engagement for space because it's a way of communicating to other people. That's how we can set up a space deterrence posture that might actually work. Of course a key part of deterrence is making sure that potential adversaries know what actions will trigger a response, what range of consequences there might be and those consequences actually have to be credible. And so we've gotta think through that and again I don't have the answers here but that's what we need to do if we want to make sure in space. I think right now the way we would respond, the things that would trigger a response, they're just not clear. And it's leading to a situation where we've got a dangerous kind of wild west mentality in space where people are willing to try things just to see what will happen. And that's not where we want to be, we need to move past that. And so I think an update to the space strategy will help get us to where we need to be. Thank you, John Sheldon. I'm the chairman of Thor Group and also the publisher of State Minds. These are my own views that don't represent the views of my country. What I agree with with my fellow panelists and there's some actually that I will, I also, my remarks are gonna conclude with the basic fact that I at least understand it. Strategy, I'm not saying it's a bad document, I'm not saying it's necessarily a harmful document, I'm just saying if it didn't exist it wouldn't necessarily, current administration is approaching these things. First off on context I agree with pretty much everything that my panelists have said, except to say also we should add to the context that current drive by the administration to develop a response to these, necessarily just an institutional response. Understanding is that the president was a certain amount of intelligence where it became clear that we actually questioned the joint chiefs. They hadn't really thought about it and he encouraged them to think about it. Essentially what we're seeing now is, at least from an administration's point of view, the culmination of that personal interest. The president himself, it's my understanding has taken an interest in me. Why is that important? Well it's important because, and you might gather from my accent, I'm from Central Alabama and you know, I don't really, but as someone who is essentially politically neutral here in the US, I'm a British conservative so I'm not really sure these days what that makes me in the US, but I'm a small C conservative at that, but they're probably an old blue dog Democrat I guess, I don't know, but one thing I will say is this, is that as a student of American politics since I was having taught, may I add US government in Alabama, hence the Alabama joke, where they thought I was from Vermont, that's not a joke, they really did. I'd like to say I'm not an expert on American government constitution, but at least I like to think I understand it, but what I do understand about American politics are the third rails of American politics, there are the cultural wars and all these sort of things. Let's be clear, when it comes to things to do with military space, it's traditionally been a Republican domain and it's usually been lumped together with family values and all these kind of things. You're not living with family values, you obviously believe in Star Wars, Death Stars and all these kind of things. It's all nonsense, of course, and if you're a Democrat, it was peace and space and never the 20th century. Reality, of course, was far much more complex, but that's always has been presented politically. So the reason why it's important that President Obama himself has taken a personal interest in this and has driven this policy through this person. But here you have, in every other respect, a progressive Democrat actually changing the status quo politically, an engaged approach to national security space. It doesn't necessarily fall within the normal. I think that's important, that's actually significant. And may I also add, it's also been noticed. In other words, if a Republican administration were to do this, well, they would do that, wouldn't they? So for a Democrat like President Obama to do that, that actually is quite significant. And I also think that that's also part of this narrative you're hearing from some quarters, primarily from the liberal quarters, which is captured by the, those sort of arguments fashioned. They're very minor. Away from this is that President Obama's interest actually signifies that maybe there's something to this idea that there are threats out there. Now, in some cases, I believe some of the threats are taken out of context, or maybe even Russian threats, which at the moment China threat, I think is more substantial. But we need to keep this context. There are problems, of course, with the national security space strategy as it's currently constituted. Diplomatic emphasis, which is actually the very first point that the NSSS discusses, is nowhere to be found. I'll counter right now to the, sorry, the Russian and Chinese proposal for the prevention. And any kind of track two or track one or track 1.5 international find that the Russians and the Chinese have made great inroads with third party, haven't necessarily been good. When I say weird, not just the United States, but also fronts on promoting the code of conduct. There's certainly a blame to go around, but I think it's no secret now that the State Department is walking away from the code of conduct. It's whoever wins the election in November, confident that one party will address it in an adequate manner. And that's not a criticism candidate of that particular party, who I have plenty of criticism of on a personal point of view. But that particular party has, for the past several decades, had a rather unfortunate view, how diplomacy works and how it should be used. I agree with what Pete said whereby there had been, I come from a government culture, I used to work for the British Foreign Office where there was very close liaison between the British Foreign Office and a variety of issues where it wasn't diplomacy versus military. I don't see much evidence of that happening here in the United States right now. That's not a particular administration's point of view problem or fault. That's unfortunately a cultural fault. That's the effects my talking has. I'm actually a secret cyber warfare, I don't want to use space to turn it on. I can't even read my own notes right now. So without this larger diplomatic strategy right now, the U.S. is left to basically doing bilateral discussions. It's all very good. In fact, Frank Rose announced that he'll be doing good stuff. We're probably going from especially as these governments. So international partners, here's the other aspect. Well, we're doing good on the bilateral aspect of Doug Laverro and OSD has pointed out we do have a slight policy problem whereby, yes, it's good to get international partners. We have a particular problem which is there is a fear that by cooperating in the United States, you become entangled with fights that the United States all with that you as a particular country, for example, think of the current crisis we're seeing right now. But let's say we have agreements where we can use French satellites in the event of an emergency. France and Germany feel about becoming involved or standoff in the South China Sea. Orcish as ours is, or at least not necessarily as a nuanced approach to our position. It's an argument that many people in Europe would rather stay out of by using satellites from those countries. For example, it could become problematic. Doug Laverro is quite rightly asked for the U.S. side. There needs to be much more detail than using U.S. satellites as deterrents. I have a slightly different take on this than Todd. Todd's right, of course. There needs to be more clarity. I think also, though, that in a wider sense, not just in terms of space, U.S. is a lot more complex than, I think, many ideas of a multi-layered approach to deterrents, for example. They read it and... Confusion. Let me give you an example, and it's not necessary to say that what I used to do... I used to use my bouncing stories all the time, and I haven't done it for a while, but I will in this sense. When I dealt with some bad guys, and believe me, I dealt with some pretty bad guys. There was one guy called Ivor Levine. He ran a protection racket in Edinburgh. The way of dealing with anybody who didn't pay up was to, basically, eventually arrest it for attempted murder. Seriously, bad dude. I had some run-ins with this guy. When I had run-ins with this guy, what I didn't say is, either, I'm going to deter you. I will find ways of deterring you from doing bad things. No, I basically... And I'll not use the salty landing on you all the time, but basically, I'm going to find ways of messing you up. That's the problem, okay? So, when we're dealing with, for example, do it whereby there's going to be a waste of effort for this, that fails. We're going to mess you up. We're not going to go around. At least, I would argue, we shouldn't go around saying, this is going to be very controversial, because that means, yes, there should be a basic approach whereby, from a military perspective, we can at least demonstrate capability whereby we can say, if bad things happen, this is how we're going to achieve it. That doesn't necessarily mean it's going to happen in space. I'm not saying that. We have the means whereby we can achieve it. That would eventually, hopefully, deter... The other thing, we can also all do all these things and still not deter an adversary. We talk about deterrence in the DoD as if, somehow, by merely saying it, the adversary is deterred. It's a psychological relationship. We're trying to end it. We're trying to threaten somebody. That's what deterrence is, by the way. It's become a euphemism in and of itself like collateral damage. Now, deterrence is about threatening violence. And if you're going to threaten violence, you at least have to be credible. I was bigger than I was in Laveen. I could threaten violence. He walked away thinking maybe he could... I'm not sure we're necessarily doing that. So I get the impression when I speak with officials that deterrence is, well, times are tight in terms of the budget. We'll talk about deterrence because that somehow... Initially, I've heard this. And I think, I suspect many of you have also heard this same thing. And I'm sorry, I don't understand that. And I'm not saying I'm the smartest guy in the room, but I worked half of my career. I'm dealing with Air Force students used to present their findings and their opinions and power points. And I would say... Not only defining where the escalation ladder is and what we would be prepared to do and not do, but also we need to get a better understanding of it. That's not just in space because it's so integrated now in space in terms of how to do that. That deterrence is going to be much more than what we do in and handle on that right now. But also, I argue that we're not necessarily prepared to deal with the greater transparency of national security culture. And Pete's alluded to this. And I've come across... By the way, I used to work for the USA Air Force. I'm not sure that we still have a national security culture where any... And also a culture, especially in the national security space establishment right now, management level, that looks at commercial space as some sort of lesson. Current state of commercial space AC has pointed out broadcasting the Super Bowl. Writing on my satellites, being able to broadcast that Super Bowl. So we still come across that... Then lastly, there still has to be this debate. It's happening in an osmotic way, but not necessarily in an express... Or at least explicit way, which is what role must the government... And by that, I also include... What role must the government absolutely play in space? What does it they absolutely have to do that no one else has done from a military perspective? I personally believe only the US Air Force can provide ballistic missiles and the fundamental responsibility of the US Air Force. Let's have a debate here. Does the Air Force really need its own weather satellites? I've heard the arguments for why, but I'm still not convinced that we need to spend, actually blow the money that we've been blowing on it, for what can only be a marginal capability at best. So we're still not having that explicit debate. What is it that the US government must absolutely do and then why is it not a strategy? Well, my definition of strategy, strategy is the art and science policy intent done by the policy, not expressed in a document. If it's a document, it's a snapshot of a particular... All the instruments you have at your disposal from a strategic point of view change every day. For example, the NSSS articulates that diplomacy is a very important aspect towards this, and yet let's see the rest, but the diplomatic side is found wanting. What we really need, basically, a much more coordinated approach to how we do strategy. Strategy is an action. It's not a much more... Find a much more coordinated approach to do this, but of course the US system is currently constituted, has been on this, there's a dire national security emergency. I'm afraid in the end we're just going to do... I hate to be the buzzkill, but I'm not terribly a strategy. No matter how good it is at the time. Okay, before I open up for questions, I had a few... I want to get the thoughts of the panelists and some issues that were raised during the talk. First, I'd like to pull on something that John brought up at the beginning where you talked about how the current response to this government is largely being driven from the top. Whether or not you agree with that, that brings up an issue. Of course, there's an election coming up. Where are we going from here? Will there be a big change? I ask because we're having internal discussions, which Brian will probably bring up. We don't know. So I'm curious to hear what you guys think about that. Yeah, so I have a copy of the Trump space strategy, if anyone... Just kidding. Believe me, it's going to be great. Yeah, it's going to be great. We're going to win in space. Yeah, it's unbelievable. It's going to be the best space strategy ever. Beyond platitudes, this is going to be an election issue, really, unless something unthinkable were to happen between now and November. It's probably not going to be discussed at all. There'll probably be some thought put to it during the transition. But I imagine it will be this time next year before the new team really gets any kind of traction going and thinking about space strategy. And it is always pretty safe to say on these things that we will see more continuity than change, regardless of who wins. That has been the tradition when it comes to defense strategy is even on vastly different defense strategies, when it comes to governing, there is often much more continuity than change. So, without being able to say anything specific because no one's really saying anything about it in the campaign, I wouldn't expect any kind of huge abrupt changes with the next administration. I agree. I would add that word in the street is if you're part of the Trump team, you're having a very hard time right now that form depends on who that transition team is and who they're made up of. Certainly, my gut tells me whether it's Hillary or Sanders were to somehow find a way of defeating him. I can't really add anything with respect to the likely candidates. But what I can say is it's amazing to me that this administration at some level chosen to make space security. I can't talk about is extremely detailed. That's really the big news. Our administration is trying to set. Well, I'll agree with the theme of more continuity than change. I would just add that I would hope to see a renewed focus on something that came up a couple of times, which is kind of a broader look at space policy in general. There's a lot of the stuff we can talk about now is kind of focused on national security side. And there's certainly been much more focus on national security policy. And there's usually a little bit of focus on what NASA does. But I would hope that whoever the next administration is, kind of takes a step back and does what a couple have talked about and kind of look more holistically at space policy across the board. I don't think it's really been done a lot. And I would like to say that because it's, you know, we all use it much more now than ever before. The military uses it more, the commercial sector is getting more involved into it. Society relies on it much more. I think it deserves a more holistic attention from a public policy standpoint than what most administrations have given to it in the past. But I'm not sure if that'll actually happen or not. Everyone brought up the idea of bringing in the commercial players. You don't want to drive industry. There are ways in which, I mean, you say, okay, we're going to make, we're going to provide so that RPO activities can be done in a non-threatening manner. Well, I'll say two things that I can think, good place to start. One, and Pete hinted at that, is that there's not a lot of certainty right now if you are a commercial company or looking to become a commercial company and you want to do something that is, doesn't fit easily into a pre-existing box, right? If you're going to go build a satellite to take visible imagery, there's a pretty nice box that you can then go get all your licenses and go do. But if you're doing something that doesn't fit nicely into that spot, that box, like you're going to take imagery outside of the visible spectrum or you're going to do other kinds of remote sensing or you're going to do something that's not remote sensing, there's not a well-defined process. And that is, in my mind, a big disincentive and it is a cost of business and it's deterring some of the innovation that I think could be happening. So I think having a more clear process for how a wide range of commercial activities could be done is a big part of it. The other one I'll mention is the default right now, somebody characterized it as, we basically say no slowly. And that's like the worst of all worlds, right? You know, the instinct is if it's something new, particularly if it's something that the DOD likes to call its own or likes to do itself, the default is no. And I would prefer a system that kind of changes that around and the default is yes, with certain exceptions. I would just say those are the two ways I would say to address that. The part you left out, Brian, is it's no, but we can't tell you why. Well, okay, yes, no slowly and we can't tell you what. Okay, so you know what I would really recommend along the lines of what the panelists have said is, you know, if the US government could just come up with a list of what it thinks it has to do in space, that there's really no commercial market or it's some inherently governmental activity that must be done by only the United States government for our national security. If we could come up with a great list like that, I think a lot of these other things are gonna sort out. I don't recommend it's viable, but if we can just say these things are gonna be done for the future by the United States government because it has to be done by the government and it's important to our security, then everything else really could be opened up to commercial activity. Some of those things will be commercially viable, some won't, but again, if the US creates a predictable environment with respect to that, it creates prospects for those things becoming better. Provide a little better forecast and be more reliable in terms of demand of what it will want in the future. You know, you can't just say, geez, you know, I wish we could lease more commercial bonders for SATCOM in the frequency bands that we already used. And then a company like, I think it was Xstar comes along with Xband satellite and then they don't buy it. You know, that reverberates throughout the market and then now everyone else is gonna say, geez, even if they say they want it, I'm not sure that they really will follow through on it. And it's not just in SATCOM, it's in things like imagery, whether... There are a lot of things that if you were saying, put together the list of here are the things the military is gonna do itself for whatever reasons. And then here are the other things that we are willing to do out of contract with other people to do and the terms in which we're willing to do it. Long-term leases buying things as a service are part 12 versus part 15. You know, put it out there and then follow through on it in the future. You can't necessarily control how much money you're gonna have, you can't control your acquisition strategy. And so I think DoD could be a better customer in that respect. We are in the eighth ring of hell. We have some intractable problems here as well. Maybe I'm being... That's how I see it. I had one thing to that that made me think of it. I completely agree. There's another aspect of this outreach to Silicon Valley and let's just expand it more generally innovative sectors that have traditionally not participated in defense. And that you gotta be concerned about something. And in the defense industry, there's a common saying that over time you start to mirror your customer. And that is true in many of our big defense primes. If you look at the way they're structured, you look at the way they're managed, you look at the way they operate, it mirrors the acquisition side of the US military. And that's not good. And that's what has led us at this point where we don't see a lot of innovation coming out of industry because we don't have it within our own structure within the military. The danger here is if we're successful at actually reaching out to these small startups in Silicon Valley, we could ruin them because they could start mirroring us again. So before we do that, we need to get our own house in order and we need to reform the personnel system within the military. I'm talking military personnel system and the civil service system. We need to reform that so it is a culture that actually fosters and welcomes innovation. And that is a hard task, but I think we've got to get our house, our internal house in order before we go out and expect to engage effectively with these smaller innovative startup firms. Can I just add here? They're even worse. So actually we're okay. That note, maybe I should open this up to questions from the audience since we're getting, starting up. If you guys could just A, wait for the mic. B, please identify yourself and your affiliation. Thank you. Hi, I'm Teresa Hitchens and I'm a senior research scholar at the Center for International Security Studies at the University of Maryland. And I have a macro question in a way. One of the serious problems that seems to have affected national security, space policy and strategy for many years is the disconnect and that is putting it politely between the black community and the white community in space. And this, if you follow reform measures, the creation of NSSL, the uncreation of NSSL, the things are together with STRACOM. They're not together with STRACOM. There have been recently this new assignment of the Air Force Secretary. We've seen all these permutations and structure that seem to be designed to somehow overcome these barriers and they never seem to do so. The Jixbuck is the latest one. But that disconnect is, if you follow this stuff, a lot of what happens in policies actually what happens in process. And if the process is broken, then we have a problem in implementing policy. So I would like to ask the panel, do you think that there have been changes or that the culture is starting to change or that there's hope for this? Because I don't see a strategy that includes engagement, for example, with commercial partners and allied partners. Right now, SSL is a big question. I don't see that engagement strategy working if you can't get over the problems that you have there. I'll start. I wouldn't necessarily characterize it as a problem between unclassified, white and classified black. I would say that there are longstanding differences between the military space community and the intelligence space community. That's not just in the space world and that happens kind of more broadly in general. I think you have seen, I think I have seen a fundamental change in the last couple of years towards starting to close that gap. I mean, I personally lived through the creation of the JSPOC and frankly, the intel community didn't come play. It ended up being just the military doing its military command and control. But that has changed and with the joint tactics form that I mentioned in the JSPOC, I think we've seen externally more evidence that the intel community is suddenly concerned or more concerned about these issues and is trying to engage more with the military community and which may then lead to a more coherent cooperation between the two. But there are still challenges and one of them might be, for example, legal challenges. They operate under different authorities within the US code and there are things the intel community can do that the military can't do in vice versa. And so that's a real difficult issue to work through. And I'm not sure how to resolve that, but I think at least as institutions, there is more, at least more willingness to kind of work together and collaborate than I've seen in the past. Well, I appreciate your question and it's certainly near and dear to my heart. So I'm definitely biased on this, but I believe the PDSA structure has as good a chance to be a success other structure that we provide. And it's interesting because right before I came here, I received the draft copy of a GAO report that was up-suppositioned. So, you know, this is a continuing churn in the government and there is no optimal way to organize these things. So my opinion, however the United States government chooses to structure things, it needs to be given an adequate amount of time to either show progress or lack thereof and you can't just cycle through these, in some cases, pretty significant changes without giving them any opportunity to make a difference. Having said that, those of you who know me also know that I'm a big fan of the 2001 Rumsfeld Space Commission report. Organizational structure recommended there is the best one that has ever been laid out. What's quite tragic is that Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defense, didn't mention his own report or implement it, but many important parts of it, at least. So in particular, the part that I think was most important and left undone was creating an undersecretary defense for space information intelligence. So as you know, all they created was an undersecretary defense intelligence and Steve Sanbone was always Donald Rumsfeld's go-to person for space, so that was not an enduring organizational structure when those people left office. So, and actually the structure they recommended was a bit more specific than that because it was not just an undersecretary of defense, but it was a principal deputy director of national intelligence for space information. And at that level, complete control of acquisition and policy for national security. Having said that again, and living through what DOD has done in terms of organization, Pfizer is a very good approach, has very good prospects for success, but I will tell, and the next administration will. Senator McCain will as well, I'm sure. Speaking of Senator McCain, you know, one of the big pushes this year by Senator McCain has been on a reorganization. They're talking, yeah, they're calling it Goldwater-Nickels reform 2.0. And, you know, looking at the draft proposals that have come out, I mean, space is largely left out of it. And so yeah, this would have been a good opportunity, but I'm afraid it's a missed opportunity for doing something like creating that, or re-elevating space command. But, you know, right now I don't think the policy community on the pill, I don't think they're focused that much on, you know, enterprise, national security space enterprise. And, you know, I think it's a shame because this was a chance to do that. There are some logical, sensible reforms like outlined from 2001 that could have been implemented and satisfied a lot of the hunger for Goldwater-Nickels reform, but instead they're going off and breaking up AT&L. Analysts on the many of the issues, I think there are some that actually can be useful. So in the end, we have to remember the military and the intelligence team. What I have noticed, and I notice this, like, seriously through the students I've talked to, that when they were deployed in places like Iraq and Afghanistan before they went, don't talk to, found that the contingency they're involved in was, well, we have to. So they would ignore the boss's advice back home. They'd walk across the compounds of the NSA tents or whatever and say, hey, we have a problem, we need to work together. So you had this form of entrepreneurism that was happening among these field-grade officers well, where they were actually working together on the ground even back home in headquarters that would have been frowned upon if not punished. And that entrepreneurialism has basically worn through. I think we're seeing a much more healthier relationship between, but there's also a problem, though, within the intelligence community right now, and this applies to space as much as back to that role, policy priority. Hi, Talal Okaise with the UAE embassies trade and commercial office. I also direct US UAE space affairs. So thank you for putting the panel together and a great discussion. A two-part question, not necessarily both related, but I'm interested in the perspective you have on a country like the UAE who just, you know, like you rightfully said, signed an SSA agreement that can play the role that we could play in ensuring space resiliency and space security with partner countries like the US. And, you know, it's not every day you find a country that has the luxury of starting from scratch in terms of a policy that we're putting together, et cetera. And that pauses, you know, a lot of challenges, but as well as a lot of opportunities to start by learning from others who have gone through the experience of establishing things from scratch in the past. And then the second part of the question is on the, you know, ramifications of the deal with Iran right now and the potential aspirations they might have space-wise and the ability for them to then start procuring particular space assets to help build on those aspirations and what type of, you know, facilities within the US government will be in place from an expert control perspective. Will we see something similar to what we've seen with qualitative military edge requirements on the defense side where friendly allies or allies who have been partners with the US for a much longer period get certain preferential treatment or capabilities in that sense? And I think related to both those questions, when you look at the context overall of the joint operations that the UAE has taken part in with our air force and our military from Afghanistan to Kosovo to Syria right now and obviously the operations in Yemen, we are very dependent on space assets and any type of impact on either our commercial assets with the telecommunication satellites that we have or the GPS satellites we depend on for precision guided ammunition to minimize collateral damage are extremely of importance to us. So I'm interested in your thoughts on both topics. But this is a topic I know nothing about being the publisher of Space Wash Middle East. So to answer your questions, there is a lot of UAE you can do and I think, for example, the UAE on forces relying on finding some sort of interoperable mechanism whereby the data could be shared. It's my understanding the UAE in the US are discussing ITAR issues, certainly in things like, for example, they argue they even done it. I mean, that theory has not been discussed. The way I argue is doing a lot of things on a number of fronts. UAE's approach to these things in terms of how I would offer from what I have understood about things is that I don't know the answer to that and I think what lessons can be learned will depend on what that answers. Hands on how Iran goes about is economic reform. At the moment they look to be rather slow on and the economic reforms, if they were to happen, I think would spur demand. I would reply there are some things which I would say to the Iranians who seem to be living in such a kind of relationships with the Russian space industry. Good luck to you. So I think in that respect, UAE probably would be. I would say that I think in general, a good way for a nation to be cooperating, especially on military space activities is actually through the use of hosted payload. So I could envision a scenario where the UAE makes space available, satellites, for the US military to put some hosted payloads. And the hosted payloads I think would be of common interest, would be things like infrared payloads, looking at perhaps a GPS M code, a hosted payload, which would provide more jam resistant GPS coverage in our constellation. There are a number of things. Protected comms could be another hosted payload idea where we could partner with the UAE and that would help build out both of our capabilities, benefits the US by making our systems that much more resilient in space, just having more payloads of different places. It also ties us together more closely. It's good and bad, but if they're our ally, they should be our ally. And so having co-use of these space systems, I think in the long run would benefit the relationship. And it's not that expensive of a way to be involved, but also beyond military, looking at a closer involvement on civil space exploration as well. More into the club of responsible nations using space. And so partnering with NASA could be a way of doing that as well, particularly for building out the space infrastructure that will need to go to Mars one day, which I think is your share of things. And so, I think there are a lot of opportunities there to start to operate and deepen our collaboration. I don't have anything to add on Iran, but the advice I'd offer UAE is the same I'd offer to any country in your position just to think about where your long-term comparative advantages might lie and pursue your own interests. The US is kind of mercurial on several of these issues. So things that are in your long-term and space systems from the time you conceptualize them until the end of life is at least 30 years. Second thing I'd just bring up is, I talked about the need for lower classification levels and declassification of things. So internationally, the United States has the five eyes arrangement with one of the things as the United States government thinks about ways to broaden that up is ways you guys can get into that club, that very interesting dynamics within, that's another very specific challenge with respect to that. To reinforce two things, I absolutely agree with John's comments about the interagency. I mean, the interagency process is both a blessing and a curse, but my experience, many countries suffer because they don't have that process the US has to bring together the different agencies and at least talk through different perspectives and try and coordinate some sort of gun position even though it's very difficult to do so. That I think would be something that I would recommend. Competitive advantage, absolutely. Figure out what it is that the UAE can or wants to do better than anyone else. And your competitive advantage may be geographic position and maybe the relationships you have and maybe a certain sector or certain technology, whatever that happens to be, do that, do it well and the US wanna work with you. Don't try and come up with something you think the US might want to do because as other mentioned, we're kind of fickle. Daniel. Hi, Daniel Poros, attorney for LMI Advisors. There was some discussion about developing responses for kinetic anti-satellite capability technology use. I'm wondering, do you have any ideas on what some of those responses should be and what would that response be if there is a test from an ally, say like India? Yeah, you know, my basic point, and I prefer this, I will point out by saying I didn't have the answers, but we need to have some sort of formulation, some sort of rules and responses that could draw from the US and they need to be actual credible responses, not just that we can do it, that we actually would do it and it doesn't have to be in space. And so, you know, it could be everything, a low end response could be, we will levy some economic sanctions if you do a kinetic test in space and we need to be willing to follow through on it even with a country like India. Say, we're serious about this, we're not gonna do it, we expect you not to do it either. And so, there could be a whole range of responses. If it's actual war fighting and someone takes it to space, then you need to step up the consequences and that it could be everything from striking something of theirs in space, which I would not recommend kinetically because then we're just adding to the debris, but it could be striking a target on the ground. You know, if we clearly communicate that if you knock something of ours out in space, then we reserve the right to knock something of yours out on the ground. And to date, we really haven't been effective in communicating that, so I think that has led other countries to at least be confused, that there could be some ambiguity here, that they might be able to do something to us in space without any consequences and we don't wanna be in that situation. On the war fighting consequences, down by not thinking through any way. The moment, the way we talk about it is, well, satellites are something completely separate, there are no sons and daughters to the right letters. Satellite enables this UAE, the US, the Italian and all these kind of things. By the way, we take the whole thing as one system. And that might actually provide a bit of clarity to potential adversaries. Satellite, then necessarily gonna give you a case, it's gonna be, well, we've actually... It's trickier if you start thinking about non-Connectic attacks, right? Where it won't necessarily be visible and attribution won't necessarily be clear. But if it's a cyber attack, what if another country uses a laser to dazzle or blind an imaging satellite? Then they know they tried to do it, we would know if it was effective. If we say something about it, then we've given them battle damage assessment. So now they know it was effective, but they may just assume it's effective. But no one else would know at all. No other countries would know that this even took place. That's a bad situation to be in. We've got to think through, okay, what are the responses that we're going to have that will de-escalate that situation and contribute to stability and deterrence? The other aspect also is in terms of, yes, the reaction in that space, but for us, most of the contingencies we're looking at are, let's say we find ourselves, God forbid, in the limited world of China, I would say Taiwan. Right away, we have struck the mainland of China. Then it becomes, okay, then we deny them the use of satellite tracking facilities in Namibia, to which the Chinese say it's great. So yeah, the actual permutations we have to go through are going to be much more complex and we haven't really done the exercise, at least as far as I'm aware, there may be some classifying. No, it's raising a lot of key challenges. I mean, these are hard issues. They're very difficult. I mean, if it was easy, in my personal opinion, a good place to start is in two areas. And on debris creating among the many issues is the fact that it's kind of blocking the barn door after the cow has left the barn. So who's that really affecting now? But at least it would help with the debris. Talk about what altitude and, you know, there's, a second thing is, you know, the code of conduct was a pretty lame document, okay? But the one thing about it that I actually liked and I think would be useful, having some standing body whose job it is to interpret what it is that we're signing up to do. To promote responsible behavior in space. So if you don't have some standing body who's charged with that responsibility, I don't know that you're ever gonna get there. I mean, we can't do this unilaterally. We can't share everything. We've demonstrated this huge unwillingness to do that over decades about what we know. So it's gonna have to be a part of the mix in terms of how does the international community know what can they attribute, what's the voluntary things that are already obligations in international law. So that's really interesting. But people don't go back to that and there is no standing body. Finalize and settle on the interpretation of that. So I would try and advance in those two areas. I have one more complication of the mix. The one substantive area of the code that really met challenges was the issue of self-defense in space, right? Most of the parts of the code, there was no challenge of the substance. It was mostly how was done or who was involved. But that was the one substantive area that had a lot of challenges. And it basically came down to there were some countries who felt important to have that included, even though it's already part of the UN Charter. There were a range of countries that basically felt that it should not be included because, ideologically, they're opposed to any military activity in space, so therefore there's no need to talk about self-defense, which ignores the fact that military has always been part of space. But I think it was a much broader spark of the countries that were uncertain what that meant, right? There are other domains. There's a better idea, I think, of what self-defense means in the context of air operations or ground operations or sea operations. There's still debates, obviously, but there's a much stronger discussion about it. But there's been virtually no discussion of what that means in the context of space. And can you really trade a satellite for a ground center or is it really the moral option to take out the satellite versus taking out something that's full of people? And that's something great for a lower-bound conflict. So I think there needs to be a broader discussion, both within the US government on the law of armed conflict issue, but also internationally. Like we do in all these other domains, that to date has not existed in space. We've got a time, I think, time for one last question. Guy Thomas, I've been working in the Electronic Warfare Intelligence Business since 1968. And from 2003 until 2012, I was the science advisor for maritime surveillance. And from September of 2009 until June of 2010, I worked on the national space policy and about 15% of it was my words. We did make that list, John, that you mentioned. We made that list when we started out as to what capabilities were military and what could be civilian. And Robbie Manuel gave us a tasking memo that basically said, I want you to do three things. One, protect our technical means of intelligence, our space systems, and both make sure that they stayed preeminent and make sure that they were safe. That was a subcomponent. Two, strengthen our industry. And three, figure out a way that we could use space to have everybody in the world join hands and sing kumbaya, basically. And that was the policy interestingly enough that I worked on. I worked on that because I'd written a paper saying, if we all got together and worked on the maritime domain to solve the maritime surveillance problem, which is a global problem, it would be a good thing. We're still working on that. That's actually the name of my company, Collaboration in Space International Global Maritime Awareness. But do you guys see any evidence that we have ever gotten action three done? It appears to me we have focused on the space security aspects of it, not the other two. I think part of it, and Todd alluded to this, there's a lot of distrust in the National Security Council. That's largely a presidential problem. And there's always been a presidential problem. I think it's a reflection on how much the president is able to express an interest in terms of the coherence of the approach. If the president is engaged, then he's unable to engage because I think in the end the problem is structural. I understand of presidential history and it's involved in the space program. The worst thing that could have happened to the space program is president John may disagree with that. But my conclusion is that actually it's a curse rather than there are other reasons why NASA isn't the president itself. I mean Congress, Congress has more. So if your point was about space situation awareness and broader space domain awareness and national cooperation, I think it's gotten better, but I'm not sure that it was anything the U.S. government did. For the first few years of that effort, I mean my sense is that the National Security Community really resisted that effort, right? Because there was an intent, we want everything to go through us. There we can control the data and so forth. But I think despite those efforts you have seen much more interest internationally in SSA from a wide range of companies. And the unknown thing that happened was the commercial sector. There's now a private sector activities in SSA and capabilities that are being developed that rival and in my opinion in some cases surpass what the U.S. government can do. And then the big question becomes how does this government take advantage of that? And to stifle it. That's certainly a tool that we have neglected. Well it sounds like this conversation can keep on going. However, I think probably people's schedules require they return from this discussion. So please join me in thanking this panel for what's been a very interesting discussion.