 Hello everyone. We'd like to thank you all so much for taking the time out of your weekend to attend the Special Seventh Annual Civil Military Relations Conference. We are obviously aware of the unfortunate circumstances that prevent us from being together in person and force us to cancel the war game component of our conference. But looking on the bright side, this year's online format has enabled us to invite participants from a wider range of universities and service academies than we'd normally be capable of. Never before in the history of Tufts Allies have we had such a geographically diverse set of attendees. We hope that this will be a positive and educational experience for all the participants who are able to make it today. That being said, let us begin. We are Tufts Alliance thinking leaders in education and the services, also known as Allies, a student-led organization at Tufts that initially began as a civil military relations club in 2006 at the very beginning of the surge in Iraq. Since then, we have expanded our role on the Tufts campus to include a broader focus on international security and geopolitics. However, we never bend in our club's roots. This conference seeking to unite students from civilian universities and cadets from service academies remains as a testament to the importance we place on a healthy and functioning civil military relationship. Having covered topics as diverse as climate change, arms sales and cybersecurity, we seek to ensure that undergraduates, whether enrolled in ROTC at a service academy or an involved student, are not styled from each other. As always, we're honored that we are able to consistently bring back so many students from both civilian and military institutions to discuss the issues that face us in the 21st century. We'd also like to extend our deepest appreciation to the Institute for Global Leadership, connecting us with some of our esteemed speakers and for assisting us with the general logistics involved in running this conference. We also extend our warmest gratitude to the speakers who we have gathered today to speak about the emerging security challenges we face in outer space. And last but certainly not least, we want to thank our two directors, Ian Kim and Israel Lee, for being the driving force for this conference. Now join us in a silent and virtual round of applause for everyone who has helped make CMRC 2020 a reality. Without further ado, I welcome the directors to open up the conference. I hope you all have a great time listening to these speakers and return again next year when we'll hopefully be able to return to our previous format. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the top seven civil military relations conference, securing the final frontier. Hi, Mr. This is Ian and we are this year's co-directors. This year, our conference will focus on the emerging security competition in space, along with the new branch of the US military, the Space Force. For millennia, space has captured our imaginations and represented a mythical frontier. But now that we have the ability to go there, the competition over it has intensified. The Cold War saw the beginning stages of conflict in space. And today it is a vital importance to modern society. Satellites are crucial not only to modern military operations, communications, weapons targeting and intelligence collection, but also to the global internet infrastructure relies so heavily on. Should an adversary hack or shoot down a satellite, military forces won't be able to coordinate with each other, nor use their full arsenal. Similar to the growing importance of cyber in defense and foreign policy, space will only become more involved in international affairs and national security, as countries increase their capabilities and enter the space domain. While space has traditionally been dominated by global powers, more and more countries are launching their own assets to orbit and beyond. The UAE sent its first astronaut to the international space station last year, and China is growing its anti-satellite capabilities. Given the expanding access and use of space, recognizing the importance of this domain will be crucial to understanding current conflicts and future wars. We would like to once again thank both the students from all across the United States from attending as well as the distinguished experts who have agreed to share their insights with us in their busy schedules. Thus, without further ado, let us begin by introducing our keynote speaker. Mr. Paul Shemansky has 46 years of experience in all fields related to space control, including policy, strategic planning, surveillance and command and control. He has worked as a consultant for the private sector with regards to space weapon employment strategies and technology, as well as for the services to analyze government policies and international treaties concerning space. The result of his research have been brief to all levels of government, including Congress, the National Security Council and the Department of Defense. Today, he will presenting an introduction to outer space warfare and will provide insights to why space plays an important role in international conflict and security. Over to you, Mr. Shemansky. Yes, good morning to everybody and thanks for coming in and seeing my little cubicle here. Right now, I'm just showing a simulation of global positioning system satellites, their actual orbits, the different rings and the multicolored squares on the ground show the accuracy of the signals that are coming in. And many times, the Air Force optimizes these for particular operations that they're doing that. Let me stop that though and start into the actual briefing. And let me just verify that people can see my briefing slides. Yes, it's good to me. So I have a lot of different pictures here just for user interest. I'll go over some of them. But some of them are, for example, this image here is from the ground. There's various telescopes that can look at lower the orbiting space objects under ideal conditions, where they have all kinds of compensating things like the actual mirrors have thousands of little actuators under them, that deform the mirror based on a laser going up and coming down and looking at atmospheric distortion, so that you can try to get a clearer image. But I will point out one of the kind of strategic political things about spaces, you really don't know what's going on. You really can't image most of what you want to see image it in a timely manner. You cannot identify adversaries, and you're not even sure what happened to your space assets. Many times if a satellite breaks, you can sit there and say, gee, I don't know what happened, and you scratch your head, and you spent several months trying to thank things over. And then you make an assessment of a probability it probably was this or that. But it's not like things happening on the ground where someone drops a bomb is a big smoking hole in the ground, and you can kind of understand and did it. And that has a lot of political international relations implications. For example, I think, let's say if we were at war with China, you know, over Taiwan or something like that, and one of our satellites stops working. So you could sit there and say, well, maybe it just broke, you know, like my computer breaks sometimes. Maybe there were solar flares and increased radiation, and it, you know, messed with the systems. Maybe micrometeory hit it. It's hard to tell. Or maybe the Chinese decided that this satellite was important to our military operations in the Western Pacific and decided to take it out. Trouble is, is maybe it's the Russians trying to stir the pot? You're not really sure. And the indications I'm getting from the, I guess, the White House is that we're really not going to make any counter intact until we understand who did it. And it's not only who did it, it's like, well, why? What is the purpose? Is it just showing resolvent intent? Is it just trying to take out our command and control? Is it trying to degrade our GPS or our weapons aren't as accurate? There's various things that you can, you know, find out. Plus, wasn't intentional. Maybe it was human cause, but it was accidental. So there's a lot of uncertainty there. And I believe that makes space war kind of unstable, that and the fact that I don't think you can defend a satellite. You're talking about hyper velocities at, I think it's 12,000 feet per second. A pound of lead is equivalent to a pound of TNT just in the kinetic energy. And you really can't shield the satellites, you can't really figure out, you can't shoot it down so to speak, because the various pieces will keep coming at you. So I think it could be true that who shoots first wins. And that's a very unstable environment. A little bit about me, I've been playing in this area for a very long time. I started out in my 20s working at the Pentagon for the Secretary of the Air Force. I guess this is on automatic and worked my way down since then to the Space and Missile System Center in LA and the last 26 years going to supporting the Air Force Research Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico. So as a general introduction to space war. And I just, you know, it's nice to have these exciting pictures. Let me go off trying to do this. In that mode. I like some of these quotes, because we have these pretty pictures, all things blowing up and blah, blah, blah. But this quote from Churchill says what if you take the most gallant sailor and the most intrepid airman, or the most audacious soldier, and you put them together in one room, what do you get? And he says the sum of their fears. So space is kind of a psychological warfare. You really don't know what's coming off. You don't know what the intense are. You don't even know maybe who the potential adversaries are. And so it's sort of information is dominant. And it's called space surveillance or space situation awareness or space domain awareness, all these buzzwords, of course, in the military. But it's very hard to understand what is happening. And then what should you do about it? And the other problem with space is, space is mostly information. It's generating information and transmitting that information. So it's generating navigational information from GPS, it's generating information, imagery information, it's weather information, and all this kind of information. And so the problem is, is what's the value of information on the battlefield? If the commander knows this versus not knowing it, how does that affect the battlefield? So if you're really talking about information warfare, when you're talking about space, and your ally, your adversaries might have a different interpretation of the value of space, both to themselves and to us. So for example, they might attack some satellite of ours, and do great effort and takes a lot of effort, you use up a lot of fuel and stuff like that. And then we might sit there and scratch our head and say, Oh, gee, I don't know why they took that out. We weren't particularly using it. It's just scientific satellite, you know, and you're not really sure why they did it. And what's the purpose? What's the intent? And what our response should be? And then ultimately, how do you define winning a space war? The one who killed the most satellites? Probably not. It's conceivable, both sides would think they won the space for afterwards. And then the other problem is, is if you're doing things like blowing things up, you know, in space and all that, I think space is very political, even though the probability of killing someone in space is very low, you're not going to be attacking the International Space Station, all these satellites are just robots, essentially. I think there's a certain political almost instability in people's minds of Oh, my gosh, you had space weapons and you did space war and all that. And there might be large political realignments afterwards, you might lose some allies. If you lose the space war, you, the adversary might gain some of your allies and so forth. So I think, even though you might see tactical engagements in space, oh, we're going to take out this one satellite, because space is global, everything you do there is strategic and global and highly political. So why would you do space war weekend worth? And I think what you, you know, experience tells me and I've, you know, read over the last 50 years, many books on military warfare, I have a personal library of 3000 volumes. And they, I think essentially a war. Well, this is an interest in this quote. And this is from the second century BC, Greek historian says it's not the object of war to annihilate those who have given provocation for it, but to cause them to mend their ways. So it's the best way to influence people. But the whole point is war is between human minds. And I don't care how technological your equipment is, it's still something that your adversary commander, you're trying to influence him, you're trying to work against his knowledge, his experience, his culture, his fears, and so forth. So even though you've got these billion dollar satellites and things like that, you're really talking about reaching out and touching someone else's mind and trying to influence them. And so the way you do that is you employ specific military equipment and soldiers and sailors and Marines and so forth. And you transmit your intent, resolve and will on each other. And I like this other quote from Trotsky. And he's saying, well, you might not be interested in war, but war ultimately is interested in you. So if you sit there and say, Oh, I don't want war in space. Oh, boy, you put your head in the sand. Well, there's all kinds of countries building and I sell weapons, he says, and they're going to bite you sooner or later, whether you want to recognize it or not, war is interested in you, whether it's on the ground or in space. And because of that, and because of potential adversaries are developing all kinds of space weapons and things like that, we can't sit there and do nothing about it. We got to do something about it. And I'll point out that war in space doesn't necessarily mean blowing things up and creating debris. I'll go over some of the other principles, but there's all kinds of ways of messing with your adversary's systems. And I guess one of the biggest techniques is cyber war. Now, I actually have a little bit of a problem about cyber war in that I have this thought experiment. I said, well, you have this soldier on the battlefield in the trench. And this egghead shows up with this small black box with the big red button in the center. And he says, if you push that button, I assure you that tank coming at you will stop. There'll be some sort of cyber war thing that would stop its systems. However, you can either carry this black box or carry a bazooka, but you can't have both. What do you want? And so the soldier is going to be sitting there and say, well, this enemy tank just crushed my friend yesterday. I bet for the big smoking hole in the ground, it's much more satisfying. And I know I got it versus this red button that claims it will stop the tank and maybe it'll reboot and 30 seconds later come crush me. So cyber war sounds great. It sounds relatively clean because even a cyber attack can mess up a satellite to it starts blowing up or something like that. And I got a bunch of other clothes. I don't know if you guys have access to these briefings. You can go through all that. But this is kind of the situation for space. And starting at the very top, there's various ways of satellites to stop working. I mean, much like things stop working on the ground. And you've got solar weather. You can have all kinds of increases in solar storm that sends more particles. And then the satellites stop working or they're intermittent, things like that. And by satellites, I mean, you've got communication satellites, you've got surveillance satellites looking at the ground and that could be visible imagery or radar. These are some of the intelligence things that so you're maybe looking at signals, seeing that Oh, it looks like they're prepping for war. There's increased signals at this depot or something like that. You've got it's called early warning. And that is, oh my gosh, they just launched a bunch of ICBMs at us. We could see the flashes on the ground and track the missiles. So and then you've got the GPS and things like that. And then you've got a whole ground network, controlling the satellites and even starting out at the parts suppliers and satellite manufacturers and things like that. And all of these are vulnerable notes that you can attack the satellite system. It's a whole system, not only the satellite, but the communications on the ground, the controllers. You could maybe insert some cyber code in parts that are going to go into the satellite months later. You can do cyber attacks against command centers and satellite control centers or you could do direct attacks against the satellite itself. So you could have maybe a cyber anti satellite that would inject code into the spacecraft. The latest in thing and everyone on the block has to have them and that is an inspector satellite and the Russians have them, the Chinese have them, we have them. And the thing with inspector satellites is it's really nice to get up and close, you know, with them, maybe a couple hundred meters and see what that satellite really is all about. Does it have hidden war reserve modes, are there doors in it that something comes out, a space mine and things like that? However, while you're there and this is kind of like the maintenance satellite, which, you know, NASA and different companies are developing where, oh, we get really close within inches of a satellite and maybe you're replacing damaged parts and electronic boxes and things like that. Well, while you're there, if you've got a maintenance satellite with manipulator arms, to my mind, this is like having a satellite in a real barrel and in wheeling it into your garage and going at it like, well, let me drill a hole here. Let me cut this wire. Let me saw this off. Let me bend this. Let me paint a sensor and things like that. You can do all kinds of mean little things to the satellite. And then you have other means. You have laser anti satellites. This is mostly from the ground at the moment, though the trouble is with a ground laser, it takes a long time with the satellite to come over. They can't be clouds and rain and things like that. Space space in some sense is better. But I tell you, that's got to be a real humongous laser up there. And that's got to, you know, have a lot of support, you know, fuel and things like that. And then it's a very juicy target for your adversary. So to my knowledge, there's no plans to have some big space base battle laser or something like that. Now, what's the history of space war? Well, it's funny. It goes all the way back to ancient Roman times. Lucien's true history of 175 AD, almost 2000 years ago, had a war on the moon where Roman legions went there. And I guess they had spiders attacking them and things like that. I don't know. I didn't really read it. And then going to the 1950s, you had these concepts of space battle, you know, stars, I guess, attacking satellites. And this, you know, satellites had just been launched a year earlier in 1957. We've had three or four different programs in the 60s of nuclear weapons to attack satellites. Direct hit going all the way to 1980s. That's a program I worked on, the F-15A set, where it actually did blow up the satellite in the test. If you go back to the 1970s, the Russians had an anti-aircraft cannon on their ALMAZ spacecraft. And they actually shot it a few times. And it sounds complicated, but in a sense it's still following the same arcs of gravity that you would on Earth with an artillery shell or something. I'm not sure again if some spacecraft is coming at you and you shoot an anti-tank round or anti-aircraft round at it and then make it into small pieces and then all those small pieces are still essentially coming at you. So I don't know if you've done your job. Another Russian concept was what's called a kinetic kill vehicle, KKV. And essentially, you know that a satellite's coming over you in a few minutes, you launch it beforehand from the ground and it catches up with you and then it blows up all these pellets when it's close by and hopes a few of the pellets hit the satellite. And that was operational for several years. I guess in some sense it's kind of similar to the F-15 A-SAT only this thing was in pellets. It was essentially a coffee can that had a seeker that supposedly was really good at maneuvering and hit the satellite directly. That never went operational as far as I can tell. And then there's various Russian anti-satellite concepts. You can just see those online. Here again is like a space plane attacking a satellite and lasers and so forth. And then there's various means of attacking space systems. And during Desert Storm in 91 there was a bunch of what was called heavy earth terminals. You can imagine these huge dishes that are communicating with satellites. And this one was in Iraq, you know, a very juicy target with the iron bombs to go and take it out in that space warfare. And let me show you another kind of space warfare I guess in the future. Now, what has happened in the past? In the 1960s, and it was like I think the 80s I went to the Laurel Maryland satellite station by the Federal Communications Commission and they monitor interference of satellites, you know, accidental interference. And the head told me about an incident where the commsat satellite was getting jammed for a few days and they maneuvered the satellite back and forth to see the source of the jamming, you know, to see what's the strongest signal. And then it was off the east coast of the United States and they figured it was some Russian trawler jamming it. Not sure why was that accidental or intentional. I would think intentional, but went on for days. Another thing, CSAT satellite that went up in the 1970s to measure sea height, you know, sounds harmless enough. And when I first started my career in my 20s, I had a NASA employee tell me that they got, they were shocked to find out at NASA that when they were measuring sea heights, they noticed that they could see some Marines at operating depth deep in the ocean because even though they were deep, I guess they were disturbing the waves slightly at the surface. I mean, I did analysis of the spot system was the French imagery satellite that we worried about in Desert Storm. It would be able to see the, I knew the head of military intelligence for source cough and he said they purposely put the French forces on the left most of the left hook to be the most in danger so that they would turn off that imagery satellite. And I analyzed it and even though the imagery satellites, the resolution was 10 meters, you can see telephone cables or power cables in Iraq because of even though they're only maybe a few inches wide, they're miles long. And so this is the same thing with CSAT detecting sea height and submarines. Now, oh my gosh, you've just negated one third of the American triad to be able to see where those submarines are and where they're going, just be a line in the ocean. So according to this NASA guy, they purposely turned off the CSAT and fake death because it probably was the most significant satellite in the sky at the time. Later on surveillance types and they do radar imagery of satellites and the radar imagery shows CSAT all messed up. It's all bent out of shape. And it just seems to me, satellites just generally don't get bent out of shape. I think it was attacked and blown up. It was just too sensitive to sailing. I don't know who did it, but it's suspicious, let's say. Another suspicious thing in the 1980s, there was one year where all kinds of launches failed, both American and Russian launches of satellites in space just kept failing one after the other after the other. And it almost looked like a tit for tat. We're taking theirs out, they're taking ours out. And see, that's the thing with space. You can do all kinds of things without the general public knowing you're doing it to show resolve and intent to an adversary. And I'll go over that, what happened later in that. In the 2000 teams, there was a definite space war can't talk about, it's classified. I have a whole briefing on the 2014 over the, well, the Ukrainian conflict. And it appears that suddenly the Russian GLONASS satellites, these are the GPS equivalents stopped working. And I can mathematically prove that we attacked it, that every time a GLONASS satellite came over, Alice Springs in Australia, which is a known NSA listening site, it blanked out. And they started blanking out like at 6.30 in the morning. And I know these guys, come to work at six, get your coffee, do some test runs and at 6.30, start attacking these Russian GLONASS satellites. And they started blanking out in numerical order. If there was several satellites in view at the time of the GLONASS, one, two and three. I mean, it obviously was intentional. And that's a space war that we actually lost. And this is this concept of war is more than just soldiers fighting and things like that. It's a very political kinds of thing. Again, looking at intent, trying to change an adversary's will and so forth. And so the reason we lost it is, it was obvious to me that the American banking system was attacked. And you'll see there was, for about a week, there was in the open press a lot of stories about five major banks in New York City had a cyber attack in millions of bank accounts and stock accounts and all were downloaded. And they said, boy, it looks like it's coming from Russian servers. And then he didn't hear anything about it. And suddenly, President Obama stopped talking negatively about the Russians and the Ukrainian conflict. In a week later, everyone was at the negotiating table. All the players says, okay, we've had enough. The space thing bothered us enough. And let's negotiate kind of a temporary piece. I don't know if it really was a piece, but it's been going on for a few years now. And so the Russians couldn't win in space, but then they won on the ground. And so they attacked the cyber attack on these accounts and nothing happened. The accounts didn't show up online and things like that. Obviously it was an extortion kind of attempt. And we went on with our lives. And there's a whole bunch of other attacks that happened. You know, things like the Russians launched a communication satellite, YML, I think it was, to be able to cover the Eastern Ukraine. And mysteriously, the launch vehicle crashed on a Chinese village when Putin was in China selling space technology. Circumstantially, I can't prove that. Okay, and then the final straw, so to speak, is something really bad happened in the last few years, maybe three to four years. Really bad in space. Several people have told me that. I no longer have clearances because I'm retired, they timed out. But they told me that happened, they couldn't tell me what. But it's obvious to me, being in this field, 46 years, usually there's two, three job announcements a year for these kinds of space warfare jobs. Now there's hundreds, if not thousands. You can see there's like $5.5 billion more on the space warfare budget, the open budget, not even the covert budget. I can tell that the US government is panicking like crazy because they probably really lost another space war. And another indicator of that is the, Congress has been very much divided, as we all know. They can't pass any sort of legislation. But mysteriously, there is bipartisan support for the space force. Nobody complained, they must have been briefed on what happened. Everyone says, jeez, I guess we'd really better do something about this. And suddenly, magically we have the space force. So those are the few wars that I kind of know about and assume and assess. Now I'm getting a little more into the subtleties, into the politics. The military does a lot of thought, both on the ground and hopefully starting to do some thought about space. You just don't go and blow things up. And there's different ways of attacking. And those ways are called disrupt, deny, degrade, destroy, delay, deceive, whatever. They're all deeds. I got like 20 deeds like that. But disrupt means you temporarily and partially impair the system of a satellite. So jamming is temporary. You jam for a few hours, you stop it. You jam only a certain frequency. And so you're only jamming one channel, the communication satellite and letting the other channels through. Because quite frankly, a lot of these satellites carry communications from different countries around the world. They're on a mess with the rest of the world. And then deny is the temporary but full elimination of the whole satellite. So you make it start spinning. And so the intent is not pointed to the earth anymore and it takes some days and not weeks to recover the satellite. The other is the permanent and partial impairment. So permanent means we shot a laser beam right up its sensor. But we only took out a few pixels. We didn't take out the whole sensor. So it's kind of blinded a little bit. It's permanent, but it's partial. Versus, oh, we took a laser and we cut the satellite in half, you know, on that. And then there's various infra-war things. You delay it, you deceive people. You send up false information. Maybe one satellite channel has false information and the good information, you delay that information so the false one gets through. I mean, there's all kinds of things you can play with that. Now, what's unique about space that's kind of different from the ground? And I mentioned before, space is global. Even if you're doing tactical actions against a particular satellite, it has global implications. I mean, if you create a debris field, it could affect 100 other satellites in the same orbit. And then I mentioned before, it's highly political. We haven't really had a space war that people know about, but I think we've had a lot of space wars. I think space is like the Cold War in the 1960s and 70s where you'd have Russian destroyers coming close to our destroyers and somehow at times accidentally hitting them and pushing the envelope and probing and, you know, U-2s aircraft being shot down. And I think that's probably happening now with the inspector satellites and maybe some jamming cyber attacks and things like that sort of probing the defenses. And the other thing is, is you can do a heck of a lot in space. I mean, I mentioned the GLONASS attacks and, you know, people didn't really know about that even though it was publicly announced so the GLONASS stopped working. And we said, oh, yeah, those Russian satellites were there. But a long time later, a GPS satellite failed in the same manner. And I've never seen one fail that way, but it failed the same way that the GLONASS one stood. And people said, oh, yeah, that was just a failure. We knew it was gonna happen. They always can make an excuse and you, since you don't have smoking holes in the ground and, you know, I was a professional liar for 27 years. I did covert systems. And by professional liar, I mean cover stories. And it's called the onion theory. And you have a cover story on one skin of the onion. And if that gets blown, there's another one underneath and another, another. And there's people devoted their whole lives to systems that are just cover stories for the real thing. And so there, well, you could readily imagine governments lie, especially in the security field. And so you never really know what's true and what really happened. And it's very easy to convince the public, oh, yeah, that didn't really happen. So, and I'm mentioning wartime actions have potential peacetime consequences. So I mentioned space debris. Gee, I don't know if we have to rewrite outer space treaties after a war. And just as an aside too, I didn't realize until this year, you know, people talk about the outer space treaty. You're not supposed to have weapons of mass destruction. You know, and I stylized not mass destruction, but they were, you know, in the 1960s when they made this treaty, they're talking nuclear weapons and things like that. And things like, oh, you can't claim ownership of the moon and celestial bodies and all that. Well, there's over 80 countries that never signed the outer space treaty. So if some, let's say, these commercial entrepreneurs that are building launch vehicles, if you would shift your launch vehicle from one of those countries, launch it from there and land on the moon and plan a flag and say, now we own the moon. You know, I'm not enough of a lawyer, but why can I? And the way China operates lately, even though they're a signatory to the treaty, it appears to me that 10 minutes before one of their astronauts land on the moon, they can say, we abrogate the treaty. We don't care about it anymore. Now we own the moon, you know? And so it would just be like the Western hemisphere was discovered by the Spanish, what, 500 years ago or something. And they claimed ownership of the whole thing, but claims are one thing, you know, and military might and colonies and all is another taking over. So for what that's worth. The other thing about space is you can't maneuver much. You have to really figure out where a space war is gonna be, a different region. So going back to my earlier scenario and the West Pacific, we're fighting it out. So satellites that kind of cover the Western Pacific, and I'm talking about maybe geosynchronous orbit, communications, weather satellites, you cannot maneuver satellites from the Atlantic area to the Pacific. I mean, you can, but it's gonna take weeks and months and so forth and take up a lot of fuel. So if you're gonna do a war, in my calculations, our space war is over within 24 hours. If you're gonna do a war, you gotta do it with what you have in hand at the moment in the immediate area. So you have to kind of figure out where that war is gonna be. And also that has international implications for allies. If you've got, oh, the European Union is our ally in space. You know, I don't know if that's true yet, but, you know, they're getting there. Well, they mostly have satellites that are gonna cover Europe, and the satellites covering Europe aren't gonna do you much good in the Pacific. So allies might claim they're on our side, but maybe you're alone, ultimately, when it comes down to just the physics of orbits and maybe international political considerations that they really don't wanna go there, so to speak. The other thing about space is, it's not what you really think and believe in terms of getting from point A to B. The Apollo astronauts, when they were trying to rendezvous with the capsules and things like that, they'd say, well, it's over there, let me step on the gas and go towards it. They increase my velocity. Well, the trouble is, if you increase your velocity, you go higher in orbit. So you actually go away from it. So it's kind of counterintuitive how you maneuver around. And, you know, a lot of people as fantasies, I'm in this space plane and maneuvering around and I've got a steering wheel and all, which is probably BS, because you can't do the calculations to your head of the orbital dynamics. You can't do them fast enough. You're gonna have computers figure out all of that. And there's consequences to that, too. You might have your precious, very valuable satellite in an orbit. And then there's, adversary has another satellite. It's kind of in the same altitude and inclination, but it's on the other side of the earth. And you might think, oh, that's fine. It's not a threat. Oh, no, it is a threat. It's very easy to maneuver if you're already in the same altitude and inclination to just to phase the orbits and come at you. So in the sense of situation math, those two things are very close together. Okay. How much time do I have? I know I'm probably beyond my original allotment of 30 minutes. You have a few more minutes. Do you want me to keep my hands? Probably just a few more minutes to close up. Okay. Okay, let me at least do two more charts. And it goes into how do you attack space systems? Or remember, use this term systems, not necessarily the satellite. There's all kinds of diplomatic and economic needs. You know, some adversary country is starting to develop an anti-satellite program. Well, you can do diplomatic means to try to get them to stop. Like, well, if you do that, you can't join the World Bank or all kinds of things like that. You might do an embargo of technologies and parts that they might be using to build it. So that's space warfare on the ground pre-conflict. I mentioned all kinds of the cyber things where, you know, outright jamming. You can spoof the satellite. You can make it start spinning maybe or you could make it turn all the satellites in order to get rid of heat. There's no air out there. They have to radiate out to the deep space. The radio, the satellite turn around so the radio is pointing towards the sun or something like that and the satellite would overheat and just die. Doesn't blow up necessarily or anything. There's been some thought of maybe, you know, since the satellite is not really an intelligent AI robot, you can hijack it and use it for yourself. Change the codes and access codes and things like that. What I've, going back to the incident in 2014 with the Ukrainian conflict and the attacking the American banking system, one of the banks was Melon Bank and they spend $250 million a year in cyber defense. And the thing goes here is like, well, you have a country attacking a company. The company's always gonna lose, you know? The country has so many assets and they're so much more clever than you would say. The cyber will always get through. And I've seen this and people saying, oh, we're in vulnerable, you know, this is gonna happen and they're fooling themselves, especially in warfare, when you're about to die, you get very clever and there's always a way, one way or the other. You can induce the satellite to burn up its reserve fuel. And let me go over some of these things. This little yellow giant here, it's actually very small, was a high-powered microwave sticky bomb proposed for trestle systems, but it's proposed for satellites. Stick it on, leave it there, maybe, you know, in balance to satellites, maybe leave it in nearby orbit. And when you push a button to satellite poof, there's a lot of ground-based lasers. Here's one that's outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. Not a killer laser, but, you know, could be. There's a little various blinding places. Now blinding it, this is a picture of what a sensor of looking at the ground gets blinded. Of course, it gets blind right there and not necessarily outside the direct laser thing. There's all kinds of, we mentioned laser-A stats and things like that. Awesome, well, thank you so much for the fascinating briefing on space warfare, at least for me, Mr. Samansky, at least for me, one of the interesting points of your presentation was that space warfare is very global and highly political and that even though most of the time the targets are satellites rather than human soldiers, there's still a lot of consequences to one's actions. So we're now going to move on to the Q&A session. And so attendees, if you have a question, you can go to the Q&A box at the bottom right of your screen and type in a question. And so I'm gonna start this Q&A session with a question. And so you're ending with talking about how sort of businesses and commercial systems are affected in a space conflict. And so I was wondering that in a space conflict, it's clear that militaries will try to protect their space assets, but it seems like businesses and commercial assets will be much more vulnerable. Do you think that militaries will be able to protect commercial assets or will these assets mostly be left on their own in a space war? I think I've been to 15 different military exercises and when the commercial operator showed up, they had this fantasy that they'd be protected. But I don't know how, for example, military satellites, some of them go up with anti-jam capabilities. Well, commercial satellites not gonna spend extra money, weight, power, volume to put that in there. And so how is the military supposed to stop somebody jamming their satellites besides, oh, looking, this is where the jammer is, let's drop an iron bomb on it. But that takes hours and maybe days or something. And if you're doing something, the whole point is space is not there for itself, it's there to support the ground. And so it's supporting some sort of conflict happening in the ground. And if you wanna jam a satellite, you wanna deny the ground forces the ability to use it. Now, you wanna deny it for a specific operation happening in the ground for a matter of hours and days. And so even if they take out the jammer ultimately, maybe you've done it your mission, denying that capability. But then you could have 100 different jammers all around the country that go on for a few milliseconds and off and then another one on and off and all. And it's continuously being jammed, but it's hard to track who's doing what. But getting back to commercial, a lot of people don't realize that, for example, the UAVs, the drones that were dropping bombs on in Afghanistan and so forth, they're controlled outside of Las Vegas in the military base there. And they're controlled via satellite. Beam is bounced off from Afghanistan to a satellite at geosynchronous and then bounced back maybe a few times ultimately to this air base, Creech I think it is in Las Vegas. What satellites do they use? They use commercial satellites. They use Intel satellite, at least a few years ago, I know it was Intel satellite, international satellite with all kinds of countries associated with it. Now, I'm not a space lawyer, but it appears to me that Intel satellite and the people and the controllers on the ground, maybe in France or someplace else are part of the kill chain and a legal target. So does that mean some adversary can go blow up a ground station in France over the fact that they're blowing up targets in a rock or somewhere else? And so this is the kind of the international nature of space, you can't just make it one country in one region. Oh, I'm gonna deny an adversary's ability to download images of the battlefield. Well, how do you do it? He could download it in 50 different countries around the world. You're gonna have 50 different jammers and what are those countries gonna think of you jamming where you're at? You're gonna have anti-satellites sitting on a ship outside the country trying to shoot. I mean, I don't know how you do all that. Does that answer the question? Yes, yeah, I think it shows how global it is given how many different steps there are in the supply chain. Right. I have a question from the audience, from Mira who says, you spoke about how existing space trees are easily violated with 80 countries not even signed on. How do you think space law is going to develop in the future? There's a whole world out there. There's two worlds. You go to the labs and they are developing space systems. Moving along and they're kind of a little bit classified. And then there's companies doing that and there's politicians in Congress who are passing budgets for that and there's that whole world. And then that's called the overt world. And then there's the covert world. And space has been very covert for decades. And I've been on programs that routinely violate international treaties and national laws. And they go and they get away with it. So you can have all kinds of treaties that you like and you could get a treaty and say, oh, you're not supposed to have space weapons. Well, what about these maintenance satellites? Are they a space weapon? They can tear apart a satellite. How do we regulate that? What if there's this Russian space cannon deep inside the satellite or something? How do you know that? You can inspect these things. You're gonna have some UN super duper cruiser with all kinds of fuel. It's probably 90% fuel. Going around orbits, taking years, looking at satellites and taking X-rays or something. None of this is practical. And so, okay, it feels good to put these treaties down on paper and people say all kinds of things that, oh, yeah, we don't want weapons in space. At the same time that, yeah, they've been developing for years. So good luck, guys. That's all I could say. Yeah, it seems like any sort of space agreement or treaty would be just so difficult to implement in practice. I have another question from the audience who I have Colin who asks, is there a legitimacy to fears of terrestrial weapons being placed in space and being used in the future? For example, a space-to-earth nuclear launch system or kinetic weapon? The Russians had a fobs, fractional orbital bombardment system. 60s, 70s probably. And the outer space treaty says you can't have weapons of mass destruction and orbit. Well, it only went into partial orbit, didn't go into full orbit. So supposedly it didn't violate treaties. We have all these due, I don't know if it's still early warning systems in the northern part, you know, Alaska and all that to detect missiles coming from Russia over. Well, this came from the south. So those are weapons of mass destruction. I was on, I did some of the original analyses of space-to-earth weapons in the 1980s, went up to the presidential level. And they were very effective. Now, what we were trying to figure was some sort of weapon like you put on an A-10 that kills tanks or something like that. And so it was a wide area, anti-armor munitions, WAM or something like that. And we would put these on, well, it was a Raz-V, resusable aerodynamic space vehicle. So the things that we're starting to see now like with the X-37B, where it takes off from the ground, is in space and then flies back. Well, it could drop off some munitions. And the way we thought about it was they would drop them off to the same initial conditions that an A-10 would have dropped it off. You know, you use a re-entry vehicle, but then you'd be able to be dropping things anywhere on earth, maybe 40 to 60 minutes later. So you had control of the whole earth or something, you know? But of course, we always refight old wars. And back then in the 80s, I was refighting, well, we're looking at a NATO conflict. And it was very effective in that most of our aircraft were destroyed in the ground the first day of the war, but this was inside the United States, this bomber. And it could go there and come back with impunity, so to speak. So a lot of that is very effective. Now, did we actually go and do it? I remember an important space general arbitrarily being transferred to the airframe world. And then we have these stories of Aurora aircraft in California, supersonic, some things and all that we've heard for decades and all. So the Air Force can have all kinds of programs that you're not aware of. So it could be true already. Now, nukes from space, I don't know. Is there an advantage? I had to think about it. I know years ago, they were saying, well, why isn't the military putting bases on the moon and the military says, why would we? It takes days to get back, what's the purpose? So what's the purpose of these kind of nuclear delivery means since we got some pretty good ones already with bombers and missiles and submarines and all that. Is there any real advantage? But for conventional attack, now it's very expensive. Though I saw an analysis a few weeks ago of delivering packages from space, via rockets going up and things like that. I don't know about the economics of that, but many times when you gotta get a bomb someplace, like the Phoenix missiles that we gave to the Shah of Iran, was that 70s? And suddenly the Shah fell and we had these very sensitive missiles. And having this bomber take them out 40 minutes later would have been really nice. So there's some specialized things, I think, for that. I have another question from the audience from Zoe, who says, is NATO prepared to launch multilateral space operations specifically within the context of Article 5, where member countries are expected to come to one another's defense in case of an attack? Yeah, just in the last six months they've been talking about that. They're still scratching their head. I think they've come out with some tepid policy things, but I think they're still working that. Does NATO come to our defense if there's a war over Taiwan? I don't think so. In Africa, maybe. I mean, they've been sending, I don't know if it's NATO people but individual countries have been sending things to the Iran and not Iraq and Afghanistan, weren't they? And also there's some feeling, feelers going out, but I assure you they're way behind the United States in terms of thought processes on space war. And so they're just sort of gearing up the space force inspired them. I would think the French are probably the most ahead and then maybe the Germans when it comes to space warfare thinking. Kind of adding on to that question. Do you know about the capabilities of other NATO members besides the United States? Like you mentioned, France and Germany seem to be more advanced. Do you think that they would have enough capability to actually be helpful or are they not really, do they not really have very many space assets in the first place? France does have a lot of signals, intelligence, satellites. As a matter of fact, anyone can download the satellite catalog that shows where all the space objects are, satellites and dead items. In a few years back, the French complained that we were publishing the locations of their sensitive classified signals, intelligence, satellites. And that if we didn't stop it, they'd start publishing ours. So I think we probably did stop publishing and all that. So they think they're important enough. I mean, signals, intelligence, I would think is very important and could help support. They certainly would help support us for a war in Europe. Elsewhere, again, is there France, oh, we have colonies in Africa and so we'll help in that area, but we don't, well, maybe they care about Vietnam and all but it just depends on their political alignments. And I think, you know, I did a study where I had my Orbal Dynamics software and I took a hundred random objects in space and said, go attack these other hundred random objects. And it calculated all the Delta V fuel and things like that. And 96% of them met the other object in 24 hours. So to me, those were ASAD attacks. You know, they met the same orbit. To me, the war is over within 24 hours. And if we sit there and say, oh, we're not gonna, you know, counter-attack until we know who attacked us and we're gonna get our allies on board and they're gonna scratch your heads as you sure and what exactly happened, maybe it was a meteorite and, you know, they're gonna, I think we're all gonna self deter and the world be over with. You know, it will say, oh, we don't know, we're good guys where more authoritarian regimes don't really care about public opinion, you know? And let me get back to some of the qualities of space. One is attribution. You wanna make sure if you're doing these kinds of attacks it can't be attributed back to you. The other thing is make it so that the adversary doesn't even know he's under attack, maybe. Like the Russian thing, when we attacked the GLONASS it was done kind of stupidly. Why was it done on one location where anyone with orbital dynamics software, which you can download for free, you can download the catalog for free could have done the same thing I did to say, the Russians published the exact date and time that it happened. So you could say, well, where are those satellites at that date and time? Oh, geez, they're all over Australia. Well, these cyberweapons are suitcase size nowadays. They could be in embassies around the world. They could be on ships at sea. You could attack them from five, 10 different locations around the world and no one would have known, except you're trying to send a message. So you wanna make sure they receive the message. So you can't be too obscure about it, I guess. I don't know, if I got an off subject, but. That makes sense. I have another question from the audience who asks, what are the consequences of losing a space war? Yeah, that's important. And you can even back up from that is, how do you define losing a space war? And I have briefings on what are surrender criteria. And the joint chiefs of staff have a joint public five dash zero, which is, this is how you conduct war. And it's actually kind of a genius thing. It says, before you even start thinking about blowing things up, you have to list, what are the surrender criteria to stop the conflict? And then you back it off from there. Well, how do we achieve those surrender criteria? So I can see that both sides might think they won the war because how do you define, I mean, on the ground, on terrestrial systems, let's say Saddam Hussein, okay, we depose them, we gain territory, we destroy the military gear, there's realignments, political, it could have all these kinds of definitions of, yeah, we won, but in space, is there really territory? Do we really have to take out space leaders? Do we define it of, we've reduced his ASAC capabilities 50%, that's good enough, you know? So, okay, it's ill-defined. And then let's say, okay, we defined it and the whole world knows we lost. I think the consequence, well, first of all, there's consequences on the ground. I think the adversary knows enough even from Desert Storm, which supposedly was the first space war, so to speak. They know how important space is to the conduct of our operations. I mean, think about it. You have a naval carrier battle group in the Western Pacific. How does it communicate back to the United States via satellite, you know? It's not, I don't know if they practice triple scatter comm anymore, you know, on things. Okay, they're launching attack aircraft off the deck. What if we don't have GPS? Is it even worth launching them if they can't accurately hit their targets and they're risking their lives and things like that? So the adversaries know space is very important to us. So if they were smart, and I'm sure they are, they would attack our space assets before they even started on the ground. And that's interesting. That's strategic indicators because space is not a continuous kind of thing. You've got a satellite in one orbit and you want to attack a satellite in another orbit. You can't just start thrusting any old time during the orbit. There's only specific times that orbits. You've got to start thrusting. So you have to optimize your attack and you have to place your attacking anti-satellites in certain key choke points. So if an adversary wants to take out a significant portion of our space capabilities before conflict on the ground, he's got to preposition these assets and he's got to start thrusting and it might take hours or even days to get to where he wants to get to. Now, if we had good space intelligence, good radars and optical systems and we were smart, we understood these choke points and things like that, we could detect him setting up for an attack in space. And we might be able to prevent the war from starting on the ground at all by going to the UN and say, hey, you're about to attack us in space. What's up? And frustrate his ability to even take out our space systems and he's gonna say, damn, I'm not gonna even try it on the ground now. So space does have some interesting conflict escalation and treaty implications, but I do believe if we lost, we would have, we might very well lose the war on the ground. And I think they've simulated this in some of the military exercises. They call it a day without space. And so they're all worried about that. I mean, why are we worried about, why do we have a space force? Why are we worried that we're gonna lose our satellites? They must think that's very significant. So we would lose on the ground if they're able to take us out early. And then I think there's a whole implication afterwards of some allies might say, damn, you guys created all this space debris. I don't want to be your ally anymore, you know? Or, well, we thought you asked, you were big and strong, but you really suck. We're going over to China's sphere of influence, especially since they're in our backyard, you know, and you don't have space now to bring those carriers over and think, you know, I think there'd be realignments. I think there'd be a political thing of, oh, we really need new treaties now. We're really mad about what you did. And we're gonna try to restrict this. I think when you're doing war planning in space, you have to set out what are your goals before you even start, and then you have to figure out, well, gee, we're not gonna go wild in space because we have to understand what the consequences are post-conflict. How is the world gonna look like after what we just did in space? And I don't think any of these space force people are thinking any of this stuff. I know these guys. See the trouble with the air forces wins the last time the air war was in doubt in all the wars we've been in. And I would say that be early days of World War II. You know, no one alive today had a really bad time. It really had to think things through and really was under pressure. And we always went in the air. And it's all these air force people who are a space force now. And I just worried about the culture and the attitudes and the thought processes that, you know, you look at strategic air command when they were bombing North Vietnam, they would go in and out in the same routes every time. So the North Vietnamese would just set up their SAMs right along there. I mean, they didn't have the thought of tactical. They were strategic war mentality. You know, we only went in once and dropped the nukes. So really, the services think different and different countries think different. So that's why I think we really ought to have all the other services on early on. Army and Navy and all into the space force before the culture set. And we really ought to have allies coming because they have an entirely different viewpoints. You know, the NATO and Japan and all that, maybe even India to come in on these discussions and bring in their two cents. Cause this is all new guys, who knows? I mean, I've been working this 46 years and I have all my theories, but I don't know, you know, we haven't had really big space wars to see. And again, looking at the attitude, the Air Force develops war fighting doctrine and Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. And I talked to the Colonel once and I said, Hey, you know, I got all this doctrine for space war and all that. It's coming down the line. Do you want it? It's free, here take it. And they says, no, we only do doctrine from past wars. We don't do doctrine for future wars. So in other words, we have to lose a war in order to learn our lessons. Now I'm a little better next time. That was the attitude. Maybe that's different now, I don't know. All right, well, thank you everyone for all of the questions. And thank you again, Mr. Samansky for providing us with those insights on space warfare. Our next panel will be at 1130 and it will be on challenges to security and space. In the chat, there will be links to the next panel as well as the IGL website with all the conference info. So again, thank you for attending and we'll see you then. Thank you.