 and welcome to the first panel of CMRC. This is challenges to security and space. So, I am Nicholas Martin. I'll be the moderator today. And before I introduce our panelists, we will, I'll kind of go over the general format for this panel. So, each panelist here will give a short 15 minute presentation on that they've prepared beforehand. And then after that, we will open things up to a Q&A for the audience. So, for audience members, if you look at the bottom, middle bottom of your screen, there's a Q&A section that we can use after all panelists have finished their presentations. So, yeah, our first panel will cover the barriers the U.S. faces with maintaining and expanding current space operations and the importance of securing space-based services. We will also discuss foreign threats to American space operations and their impact on military, commercial, and civil sectors. Our first speaker joining us today is Dr. David Burbach, associate professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. Dr. Burbach's scholarly interests include civil military relations, defense planning, and the relationship between international security and technology, particularly with regards to space and nuclear policy. We are also joined by Dr. Damon Colletta, associate director at U.S. AFA's Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies. Dr. Colletta also edits the Eisenhower peer-reviewed journal Space and Defense and recently completed a book on technology and international security. And our final speaker is Dr. Everett Doleman, professor of comparative military studies at the U.S. Air Force's Air Command and Staff College. Dr. Doleman began his career at the National Security Agency as an intelligence analyst and also has experience at the United States Space Command. So, without further ado, we can go to our first speaker, Dr. Burbach. Okay, we should be on a screen share now. Good morning, everyone, and thank you very much for your interest and for joining the conference today. I'd like to talk a little bit about, and I did watch Mr. Samansky's presentation just before, so I'll try not to cover any of the same ground as him, but I'd like to in some way step back a little bit and just ask what is really new in space security? Why have concerns gone up so much? What's some of the reasons behind creating Space Force? And if you look at some of the U.S. strategic statements, whether from the Obama administration or from the Trump administration, there's been a concern expressed that as our space strategy about just under 10 years ago put it, that space is becoming increasingly congested, contested, and competitive. The Trump administration phrased that as competitors are turning space into a war fighting domain. And what do we mean by that? And what are the implications? Because in some ways, space really isn't all that new. Space is space, we have been operating in space longer than I've been alive, certainly longer than any of you students have been alive. It's been now more than 60 years since the first satellite. In fact, SpaceX just put another, sorry, the United Launch Alliance just put another U.S. military satellite in space yesterday. So there's really nothing new. And even if you go back to the early Cold War, within just a few years after Sputnik, we had spy satellites, we had military navigational satellites, we had anti-satellite weapons operating within just five years after Sputnik was launched. We even tested nuclear weapons in space. So what you see there is not a romantic shot of the moon, but is actually about a one megaton nuclear warhead a few hundred miles away from Hawaii lighting up the skies over Honolulu. So space has been militarized in a sense for a long time, but there are a few things that are causing us to have new concerns and raising the stakes. I would summarize that the two biggest changes from those early Cold War days is that space is now in everything, civil and military. It's in all sorts of civilian and military technologies such that we're dependent upon space in a much deeper way than we were 50 years ago. The other thing that has been a change is geopolitical as opposed to technological. That great power competition has returned as opposed to our focus after the end of the Cold War on relatively weak rogue states like Iraq or Serbia or terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. We're again concerned about competition and potential conflict with countries like Russia or China that are really quite capable across the board, including in space, and the rise of China in particular as a space power has changed things. So what do I mean by spaces in everything? Given our time is limited, I won't try and go through all the ways that it affects your daily lives, but you've all grown up in a world where GPS is widely available. Nobody gets lost, everybody has a map available. In addition to GPS, your cell phones for positioning, your cell phones themselves depend on timing signals from space. If you take out the GPS satellites, the whole cell phone network crashes. It's similar for the banking system, the role of weather satellites, communication satellites, tracking airplanes and ships from space. For all sorts of civilian applications, our modern digital economy relies on our space assets, including government satellites like the GPS constellation. At a military level, that's become even more true, and just as you depend on space-enabled technology for navigating and communicating, so does the military, all the way down to a tactical level. You can marine there on a small satellite phone. Whereas in the 1960s, we needed space for strategic level nuclear operations. We used spy satellites to see where the Russian ICBMs were. Those initial navigation satellites were used so that our nuclear submarines would know where they were when they launched a missile. We now use space in every day, all the way down to the individual soldier, sailor and marine tactical level. The slide you see at the lower left, I'm not going to try and go through that. You saw a slide similar to that from Paul's keynote speech. DoD is full of PowerPoint showing lots of satellites and lines and diagrams, but the general point is our whole way of warfare is enabled by a dense network of communication satellites, reconnaissance and intelligence satellites, imaging satellites, navigational and timing satellites. We've developed a very technological way of warfare in the United States. Across the board, that depends on space technology. The globe that you see there in the lower right is to highlight the fact that in one of the more likely conflicts that we now worry about, if we were to get into a conflict with China in the East China, South China, Xi or otherwise Western Pacific, is that we're operating a long, long way from the United States across huge expanses of water that will absolutely depend on satellite communication, satellite reconnaissance, satellite navigation, whereas the Chinese would be operating much closer to their own shores. You can imagine if the U.S. were fighting a war in the Gulf of Mexico, their communications lines and their ability to know what's going on nearby is not so space dependent. It's certainly, they have their own space assets and it helps, but if we're fighting a war so far away from our own shores, we're going to be absolutely, it'll be absolutely critical to have a space network that supports operating across the Pacific Ocean. Well, and again, as I mentioned, the other big changes we do now imagine that we might need to be able to compete and potentially win wars against China or Russia again, capable space powers. The Russians recently have done some tests, not blowing anything up and creating debris, but tests of an anti-satellite missile system. They've long been a capable power in space. China got a much later start in the Cold War. They were not really very active in space until the 1980s, but they've been catching up quickly. There's now a Chinese equivalent of the GPS constellation. China has military reconnaissance and communication satellites. China has tested an anti-satellite weapon a little over a decade ago, probably has tried to use lasers to blind U.S. reconnaissance satellites, jamming capabilities. They're capable near peer powers in a way that we haven't faced since the end of the Cold War. So, what does that all mean? And here, a concept, some of you may have taken some international relations courses and seen this idea. And Paul Samansky's presentation highlighted this as well, but one worry in space is that it really leads to something we call a security dilemma, where it's very, it's difficult for countries to feel secure, which can lead to incentives, to strike first, to engage in arms races, to be very fearful and unstable. And there are a couple of reasons for that. One is that space technology tends to be extremely dual use. You may know that SpaceX will be launching another human crewed capsule to the International Space Station tomorrow on their Falcon 9. They also use the Falcon 9 to launch U.S. military satellites. It's exactly the same technology. The Chinese used a heavy lift booster that they recently developed to send a probe to Mars this summer. They'll use the same booster to launch heavy military satellites. If you can guide a satellite into orbit, you can guide an ICBM to its destination. You can guide an anti-satellite weapon. If you have learned how to make clever little, and this is the middle graphic you see there, is a concept of a Northrop Drummond satellite docking with a communications satellite to refuel it. Well, if you can dock with a satellite to refuel it, you could also, you know, James Bond style have an arm reach out and cut off the solar panel or spray paint the sensor or just give it a big whack and disable it. Very similar technology or in the bottom you see pointing up the Hubble Space Telescope pointing down a CIA reconnaissance satellite. More or less the same space telescope technology differing in whether they point up or down. So if there's really no way for a country like China or Russia to have good space capabilities and not potentially pose a military threat, let alone the actual military systems we see them developing. And as Paul discussed, it's pretty easy. Whoever strikes first is probably going to win. Satellites are pretty easy to attack. You know where they're going to be. I mean, we can compute weeks in advance when two satellites might collide, something that we've seen happen a few times. They're not very hard to track. You can try to make satellites stealthy, but overall they're up there and their positions are pretty knowable. They're pretty fragile. I mean, you can't make a satellite armored like a tank. It'd be too heavy. You can't have it bristling with defensive weapons systems or as Paul Samanski explained, even if you shoot at an incoming interceptor, the chunks of it are still going to be coming at you at several miles per second and it may not help very much. So it's really hard to defend satellites. And then at a broader level, space itself is surprisingly fragile. We learned from those early Cold War nuclear tests that if you set off a nuclear weapon in space, you fill space with radiation belts. That test over Hawaii actually knocked out the very first test communicate television relay satellite that AT&T had launched a little earlier that year. We learned pretty quickly that if you tried to have a nuclear war in space to take out enemy satellites, you'd kill everybody's satellites pretty quickly. A little less dramatically, a little slower, but if you fill space with debris from blowing up satellites, you also will pose a threat to everyone's satellites pretty quickly. Many of you may have seen the movie Gravity a few years ago. They talked about the Kessler syndrome where one satellite gets destroyed and then that breaks up other satellites and soon debris is killing everything. The movie was kind of was dramatized, but there is actually a real point here. You can see in the lower right, I highlighted the Feng Yun anti-satellite test in 2007. One test of blowing up one satellite caused a massive increase in the total amount of debris in space. So it really wouldn't take much of a space war to render the whole environment unusable. So you put all that together and we have what we call the security dilemma where anybody's space capability can look pretty threatening. Even if their intent is defensive, even if they have mostly civilian capabilities, that leads to a natural counter reaction and then counter counter reactions and pretty soon you're spiraling into a space arms race with a lot of incentive to strike first if you fear that war is coming. The fact that the U.S. has this asymmetric dependence because we're fighting so far away and have such a space-enabled way of warfare, that really increases the stakes both for potential adversaries to want to take out U.S. capabilities. We have to fear that even if we're the clear number one in space, because of that offense dominance, even a number two power in space could take away our space advantages pretty quickly and it'd be very hard to stop that. So that underlies a lot of the worries about this new technology and new geopolitical competition in space. So last slide here, where's this going to lead? And you sometimes see American space leaders saying that we want dominance, we want nobody to be able to threaten us in space. That's going to be almost impossible to achieve. If the standard is nobody should be able to threaten us in space, we would have to blow up everybody's launch sites and everybody's existing satellites first, because it's almost impossible to achieve that kind of invulnerability. So then what do we do? We may try and chase that spiral, that security dilemma and try. The Chinese or the Russians might put us in a position where we don't have much choice. We can learn to live with a certain amount of vulnerability. We can figure out, and this is something we're absolutely doing, how to make our space assets, how to make our way of fighting more resilient. So if we lose some satellites, how do we keep on fighting? Instead of relying on a few big, expensive satellites, maybe we kind of go the SpaceX direction and start launching thousands of small, cheap satellites. And that's a lot harder to take out. In the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviets actually both did come to realize that given all this instability, given how quickly you would degrade the space environment, that we actually both showed some restraint and used space for relatively passive purposes, reconnaissance, communication, navigation. But we stayed away from the worst kind of arms race or worst kind of offensive concepts. And maybe we can achieve that again. But we are now moving out of a period of U.S. dominance and being able to think of space as something of a sanctuary and having to think about what a new era of geopolitical competition with space peers looks like. So let me stop there, stop my screen share. And after we hear from our other two speakers, look forward to any questions. Thank you, Dr. Birbeck. So now we'll be moving on to Dr. Damon Coletta. So if you have any presentation ready, you can go ahead. Well, thank you very much. Thank you for the invitation. I think what I'll do is I'll lay out three questions that we've been seeing at the Eisenhower Center and at the Eternal Four Space and Defense. And it does go along the lines of what Paul Samansky and Dr. Birbeck were talking about. We started this center during the Second Bush administration. So it's been about 15 years. And in the last 10 years, we've had several articles that have nibbled around the edges of questions that are becoming more and more common. Dr. Birbeck just spoke about the security dilemma. And we've had several folks try to unpack the problems of deterrence as they relate to the space domain. So we'd call this first topic, new thinking on deterrence. The old thinking on deterrence comes from the Cold War and nuclear weapons. And if the basic idea there is that you're involved in a game of chicken with the adversary, neither side wants to escalate to a general nuclear exchange, but at the same time, they want to defend their interests. The idea of new thinking on deterrence comes from the fact that the first attack might not even be kinetic. And so the idea that a defender like the United States would respond with some sort of nuclear strike seems disproportionate and not very credible. So if we are still very interested, particularly if the United States is one of the more vulnerable actors in this resurgent great power competition, how do we deter attacks against our assets in space that we've become more upon, which would become more and more dependent? So one of the ideas that's come up is this notion of layered deterrence. And Dr. Samansky had talked about the difficulties with space law. That has come up in the journal and journal articles as well. And the idea is that even if you can't enforce it in every case, having rules of the road, if not space law, confidence building measures and rules of the road, they can act like a plate glass window. So if you can monitor well enough, if you have good enough space situational awareness, that could be the plate glass window so that when the adversary breaks the window, that's a first signal that your relationship is moving into a different place. And then what would be the next layer in layered deterrence? So trying to figure out what would be a proportional response well below the idea of a nuclear exchange. So does it need to be symmetric or could there be an asymmetric response? Do you remember the story that Dr. Samansky was telling you about the Russian response to the attack that he suspected on their satellites? It was a cyber response, it was an asymmetric response. So as you go through these different layers, way before you get to the result of a chicken game or mutual assured destruction, there are many places where you can think about trying to stop the damage and discourage aggression. The other idea that's come out that if anybody who's interested in doing research in these areas is probably going to run into is the notion of cross domain deterrence. And it's related to layer deterrence because you have all these other activities that are involved in delaying an attack on your space assets. The difficulty there is that the governments are set up so that you have specialists in each of these areas, in each of these domains. So you have space force, you have a new bureaucracy which will specialize in the space domain, but they're going to have to work very closely if we're going to attempt layer deterrence or cross domain deterrence, they're going to have to learn how to work very closely with partners. And if you think about the situation in Iraq and the idea of a whole of government approach, you're going to have similar problems just with dealing with space deterrence. So there's a lot of new thinking going on in deterrence, trying to figure this out. The second question that I would like to put on the table for the Q&A is related again to what Dr. Rovak was saying about the resurgence of great power competition. You have, and what he said about spaces and everything, you have the resurgence of great power competition at the same time that you have the opportunity for high levels of cooperation through the provision of public goods. So what do I mean by public goods? These benefit folks who haven't necessarily paid for the goods and it is difficult, let's say, it is difficult to exclude people who haven't paid to play. So an example of public goods or potential public goods would be GPS. Now it is possible to exclude others from GPS, but if there's a norm that other countries and companies that are headquartered in other countries can go ahead and use these services, that approaches the idea of a utility or a public good. So navigation and timing, space situational awareness, which is important for private companies because they have to pay insurance in order to launch and operate their satellites. And so space situational awareness is an important thing, but the capability to provide that is very asymmetric. In fact, the U.S. government is one of the premier providers of that. The idea of manned exploration, manned exploration, manned missions in space are far more expensive because you have to keep the crew alive. So in terms of defraying some of those extra costs, that could be a potential public good. And then in more of the realm of science fiction and movies, talking about protection from asteroids, whether that could be a potential for global cooperation, asteroid mining, which again, in the realm of science fiction, they're thinking about the possibility there, the possibility there, and the idea of energy production from space. So this is technology that's further out, but people are thinking about it, showing the potential for cooperation. Again, you have the potential for public goods and greater cooperation at the same time that you have the resurgence of great power competition. And Dr. Burbach has laid out some of the ideas that we're seeing in the journal on great power competition. The idea of military advantage being independent of military vulnerability. So it's possible to have military advantage at the same time that you are more vulnerable than your adversary. And that does make space dominance a difficult idea. There's been a lot of interest in during this resurgence of great power competition in looking at the strategic culture. So we had an article in the last issue that was looking at the Chinese Communist Party's view of Marxism and how that would influence their strategic culture and their approach to United States assets and United States competition in space. So just like during the Cold War, there was a lot of interest in how the Russians and Russian strategic culture would deal with military problems. We see that same idea coming back in with the resurgence of great power competition. So I've given you two themes so far in the few minutes that I have left. But just to remind you, the new thinking on deterrence is one idea that we're seeing. The other one is this balance between the potential for public goods, a space-based public goods on the one hand, and the resurgence of great power competition on the other. The last thing in honor of allies' tradition that I'd like to lay out there is how will ideas about civil military relations, that's the allies' tradition, how will ideas about civil military relations relate to changes in how we address space, particularly the idea of the new space force. And for this one, we haven't had a whole lot of articles, but you saw at the very end of Dr. Semecki's presentation his concern about whether the space force is prepared to deal with the problems that are coming ahead. They haven't had the experience of being pressed. I might push back a little bit on that. I think the Air Force has had experiences that caused them to learn lessons, formative experiences. I think we could talk about the Berlin Airlift. I think we could talk about the post-Sputnik era, the post-Sputnik year, 1957, 1958, when the United States was behind in the space race. There have been those formative experiences, but I would agree with him that at least at the unclassified level, we haven't had that formative experience for the space force. Those formative experiences may be very important for developing professionalism in a new service. And professionalism in democracy is key to working together with civilian authority, with political authority, because to the extent that the President, under the oversight of Congress, needs to make decisions in a space crisis or in the opening stages of a space war, the professional development of that space force may be very important because they will be responsible for providing full-franc expert advice to the President so that the United States as a democracy can navigate any crisis. So I will stop there. What I put on the table for you, I'll hand it over to Professor Dolman, but the idea of you thinking on deterrence, public goods, the potential for public goods rising at the same time as you have the resurgence of great power competition, and new problems in civil military relations with the professionalization of the space force. Thank you, Dr. Coletta. Now we'll hear from our last panelist, Dr. Everett Dolman. Yeah, well, thank you, Damon and David. I really appreciate that. I'm going to go through this. I built some slides just in case I ran out of things to talk about. I have plenty of stuff on here, but I get to go through it pretty quickly because of the presentations that you've given already. We start with the idea that space is important, that's been going on already. It'll go on for the rest of this meeting, of course, but no nation relies on space more for its physical security and its economic well-being than does the United States. I work for the United States Air Force and the United States Space Force, and so this is what concerns me primarily, is fighting war in space. The first thing that we need to do to make sure that that is understood is to see space not as systems and satellites, things that give us all that we need, but think of space as infrastructure. We've had a lot of people talking here about how much value we get out of it. Let me just get to the, you know, from farming to, just in time supply, supply to Uber and Lyft to secure transactions. Let me get to the apocalyptic for you. If we were to lose space completely, your smartphones would not work. The U.S. military and most modern militaries require space support in order to operate effectively. In fact, today it's over 70% of the weapons that the army uses are space-enabled. That means they don't work effectively or even at all without space support within them. If we were to lose space for the United States military, we would be unable to carry effective missions out abroad. We probably have to go into an immediate defensive approach, and if we could not get space back, we would have to resort to ginning up a Vietnam era, early Vietnam era form of military force, and that could take years. I mentioned being working for the folks that are supposed to defend space. The United States Air Force is responsible for guaranteeing access to space for everyone in times of peace and ensuring no opposing force can access space in conflict and war. This is very similar to the mission that the U.S. Navy has on the open ocean. Space is a common area like that. Up until now, however, the U.S. military has been deprived of using weapons to do that, which makes it a very difficult job. The U.S. military is a martial organization. There are purposes to be prepared and when called upon to fight the nation's battles. Let me go a little bit into domain theory. It's something I've been working on quite a bit as of late. For every area of conflict that has developed historically for land, sea, air, and space, each one has developed based on their operating characteristics a different way of thinking about fighting, whether it's sailing or ramming for the seas, whether it's mustering forces, getting them into the air for long enough at the right time and place for the air or whether it's understanding the importance of orbital mechanics in Delta V or change in maneuver as it is for space and possibly even for cyber at some point with virtual space. When it's recognized that a war fighting domain has come into place, a service organization normally goes into responding for that. Space force is being created now not because it's ready to fight, not because it's proven itself as fighting, but because until you get a space force, no one's going to think about the purpose of military forces in domain and that is the command of the domain is job one. The purpose of military is to control or command a domain and that if you cannot control or command the domain, then you have to ensure that an opponent cannot get command of that domain and that is called contestation. Contestation is possible from an adjacent domain. Command is only possible from within the domain. For example, we've talked a lot about folks targeting space with weaponry from the earth. That means that they can prevent access to that domain. We see it with the army and their ground to air capabilities and missiles that prevents the enemy's air forces from flying over the top, but just because you can prevent someone else from accessing a domain doesn't mean they can't keep you from accessing the domain as well. The only way you can command it is if you can operate in the domain and the reason you need to operate in the domain is to be able to generate military effects from that domain to be able to contest adjacent domain and to use it. You must be prepared if you're looking at it from a military perspective to operate in the domain to fight in the domain and fight from the domain and that means to generate effects from the domain. We generate those effects in the air force. Say for example, humanitarian aid is delivered or a bomb is delivered to a target. Those are effects. That is not the purpose of the air force to do those things. The purpose is to be able to get into the air and then the effects it can generate are limited only by the imagination. For example, bombing a factory is not called economic warfare. Some might call it that, but in a military jargon it is air power having an effect on the ground. We wouldn't call bombing a school educational warfare and we shouldn't be bombing schools anyway. This gives us some real problems, however, with deterrence. One of the things that's happening now is the idea that we can deter nefarious actors from affecting us in the space domain by cross-domain deterrence or by other methods that in fact some would say, hey, if somebody attacks one of our satellites, that's our national sovereignty and we reserve the right to go ahead and drop a bomb on them where they live. But is that really a credible deterrent threat? Would we, the United States or any other country, if a satellite suddenly goes inactive, decide to bomb a person with a nation we thought that had done that? Would we lay down a fire barrage on Shanghai? For example, I doubt it. I doubt it very much and I don't think we should be thinking that way. So when deterrence doesn't work, when deterrence fails, we need to defend those assets and is war in space likely? Probably not. Well, not in the near term. In the long term, the Chinese state is inevitable and the basic reason for that is we consider confidence building measures are not necessarily confidence building measures. We mirror image. For example, in the United States, we think if we have a transparent capability from space that we can see into China, for example, that we can see if they are marshaling, getting ready for an attack, we can see if they're in Russia, if they're abiding by treaties. And this gives us great confidence. It does not give the Chinese great confidence. The idea that we can see what they're doing is very much against the cultural attitude going all the way back and allows that way the enemy can see you and knows what you're doing. They can defeat you in detail. Russians have a very similar attitude that never let the world know how strong or how weak you are because that will hurt you in the long run. We have fought in space and we fought around space. I'm going to just bring up, we've been doing it for a long time or thinking about it. One of those thoughts were the Star Wars or SDI program from the 1980s, which was the idea that we could put a perfect shield over the world with a anti-ballistic missile system. The idea that we could defeat nuclear war from space was one that was brought up in the 1980s. It was a little problematic at the time. The United States and Soviet Union had over 60,000 nuclear warheads between them. And even if a system could be developed, it would defeat 99% of those that are still 600 getting through in life as we know it on this planet, which looks very different if that should happen. The problem was, and this is where deterrence also has a huge issue, and SDI was extended into the Bush administration because the least likely scenario, the least likely thing that was going to happen, was a massive nuclear strike from the Soviet Union to the United States or vice versa. Our ability to have a guaranteed second strike had seemed to be keeping the peace. The problem with deterrence is that when it fails, it fails utterly. And the real problem, too, is there are things that cannot be deterred. The Bush administration's most likely scenarios was that there might be an accidental launch. How do we make sure that an accidental launch doesn't reach its target? A rogue state strike, others have talked about these, terrorist and non-state actors. This is primarily an issue of attribution. Something we call the mad boat captain, the hunt for red October scenario or the Dr. Spangelift Spantenario. And the big one was third party warfare. What if Pakistan were to launch a nuclear India or vice versa, Iran, and Israel, or vice versa, and North Korea launch more that lands in Japan? How could we deter that or stop that? When deterrence fails, we must defend. The idea was we would have 350 or so kinetic kill vehicles circling the earth, each one with about 24 shots on it, to take advantage of the fact that space has a global, it is inherently global by nature. Under the Bush administration, it was estimated that if a system like this could be put into effect, it could stop 100 ballistic missile launches simultaneously from anywhere on the world and that would take care of the most likely smart. It was not developed, it was going to be very, very expensive. But it brings up the idea that when we look at space from a warfighting perspective, we see it not as an open area, an open ocean that everyone can sail upon. We see these orbital characteristics. We see it in gravity wells. In fact, the gravity has only ability to get from here to there. What I'm depicting here is gravity, as it would be in the Earth-Moon system, and that area in red that you see would be what we call low Earth orbit. It looks a lot different when you depict it like this, but the other really important thing to see here is that from the perspective of the solar system, the Earth is a single place. We can launch from different areas, they launch from around the world, but the Earth is actually a single port. It is a launch facility, no matter where they are, can be seen as a pier. The port of New York has different docks and piers. Every single thing going into outer space has to pass through low Earth orbit, and as long as it goes in 1958, we were looking at the idea of if you could seed space with enough weapons, and if you were willing to use them to prevent anyone else from getting to space, you could effectively have a blockade of the Earth. Well, I've just made things a little bit quicker. I'm looking at, that was something I worked with a long time ago as what it was, and today I'm looking at kinetic energy, excuse me, directed energy, primarily lasers, microwaves, and the like, plasma bursts even as a possibility. And this is because the technology of lasers has come a long, long, long way. We can build 15 kilowatt laders from off the shelf parts we get from electronic stores. We can put them on, attach them to an iPhone 6, put some solar panels on them, and get these very small lasers into the air, and they're very, they have a tremendous capability. I'm throwing 15 kilowatts out as just a general idea, because a 15 kilowatt laser with a microsecond burst can penetrate nickel quarter, that type of metal and metal skin, and it wouldn't cause the kind of kinetic damage that would come from a blast, as is projected by many of those who think there'll be a war in space, and it could only be dirty, it would have to create debris. A small level of laser power on solar panels could degrade those panels very quickly, making spacecraft inoperable, it could blind the spacecraft making it inoperable, or it could displace the critical components in a burn through that would not be destructive or cause additional damage. The other great thing about lasers in space is that anything that could be used to clean up space, in other words, take out the debris that we already have, and lasers could push small amounts of debris into the orbit to be burned up, or perhaps out of orbit, or destroy them completely, vaporizing those items, and that would also be great practice, sharp shooting practice for the operators. Now, the way I see this operating today, it's not great that lasers can threaten the surface of the earth. I see them, as I mentioned, massive networks of satellites at low-earth orbit, very small satellites operating connected to each other, and the idea here comes from something I read about in the medical field. In the medical field in 1930s, doctors started experimenting with lasers to defeat cancer. In other words, a laser could sign the beam to defeat cancer, and it would have the effect of destroying the cancer cells inside the body, but the problem is it could also destroy healthy cells on the way in and on the way out. For large directed energy systems like the airborne laser, or the large heavy ground-based lasers, you're going to burn out or destroy things in the path to the target and on the way out. There's a real problem with that. Now, what was happening was we were getting about a 10% survival rate from that sort of effort. Later on someone said, directed energy weapons are 100% additive. That means if I have 250 kilowatt lasers, I have the effect of 30 kilowatts of power. If I have 100, it multiplies by 100 times. The way you do this to kill healthy cells in the body is you have several lasers all around the body, each one of them targeting the unhealthy cells, and where they intersect, these are low-level lasers, but where they intersect, they can have a cell killing effect at that point at the cancer cell without harming the body anywhere else. I'm imagining we can do the same sort of thing in outer space, having hundreds of small, each laser not being able to do much damage at all, but several lasers being targeted on a single place, one laser painting the target, the rest of them simply going after it, and we could get tremendous warfighting capability in space, and this is also the speed of light. When we look at that in an ideal like this, we have something also that gives an advantage from space to the earth that is much like the gravity well advantage that you would get in targets from space and to the earth. And by the way, yes, we know where satellites are, we know where they're going, mostly because of the United States Air Force publishes that data for the rest of the world to see, but that doesn't mean that they're easy to hit. They're traveling at 17,500 miles per hour, and to climb out of the gravity well and get up there creates a very big plume, but what if you use a laser to attack those satellites? Well, if you're willing to attack the laser before it goes operational, maybe that would stop that, but there's a tremendous advantage that you get, and it's based on something called the shower curtain effect. If we look at a laser going from space to the ground, it has a very tight, very close beam as it goes through the vacuum, but in return, let me get back, you can see that a laser going from the ground to space starts to bloom in the atmosphere, gets dispersed, and then that keeps on going in the vacuum station. That's a very, very powerful laser on the earth in order to affect the satellite with catastrophic damage. From space, however, going the other direction on the left, you keep a tight beam until you get to the atmosphere, and then it starts to bloom. You need about 10 times as much power to go from ground to space, that's from space to ground to get the same effect. That gets accelerated if you're not directly above the target as the bloom gets bigger as it goes out, and you can see going from the earth to space, it gets even larger. With this idea in global satellites being part of the equation, you've always got a satellite with a laser at some point over the earth. Now, it can't do a lot of damage, it's not going through any war in space, wouldn't necessarily damage on the ground, but it's an idea that I'm playing with and having some interest in. I get to as a member of the military, I need to and getting paid for thinking about war in space, and we would be derelict in our duty if we didn't think. We don't want to go to war in space, we'd rather not have it, but if we do get a war in space, we'd better have been thinking about how we fight it. That's kind of the way we're looking at it. I've run out of time, I'm going to go ahead and call it at this point, and I'm giving your question. Thank you, Dr. Dolman. Now we can move on to the audience Q&A portion of the panel. So, if you are an audience member, please click on the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen, and you can submit questions for me to read to all the panelists or just one of them, but to start things off, while people think of questions, I'll ask a general question to all three of our panelists. So, space warfare in its current state involves targeting satellites rather than human soldiers. Does the lack of human targets change how actors approach space security? Yeah, I'll go ahead and start on that. I think it does, in that we've seen that there is, if you destroy property as opposed to killing people, that doesn't seem to generate as much of a response. We know last year when the Iranians shot down a U.S. reconnaissance drone over the Persian Gulf, President Trump considered airstrikes, but eventually called it off. And one of the factors that seemed to weigh heavily on him and many others who didn't want to do strikes as well, nobody died. And would we strike back at Iran in a way that would kill people over an uncrewed vehicle being shot down? This comes up with cyber attacks as well. And there's actually been research by a number of political scientists that find that, yeah, if you tell people how much do you want to retaliate against a cyber attack or shooting down an uncrewed drone, it just doesn't generate the same kind of response. So, taking out a satellite that doesn't, the notion, and Professor Dolman alluded to this, would we really strike back in a way that would harm humans because a hunk of solar panels and antennas in space is destroyed? Maybe not. Both the general public and policymakers seem hesitant about that. So, in that sense, I think there are some space relevant lessons we're learning from what we've seen with combat involving uncrewed drones, cyber, etc. Sorry, I would say that links into the idea of new deterrent thinking that we've been talking about. So, when you're not killing people directly, it's difficult to have or threaten a punishment, a severe punishment for that. One of the ideas that we're thinking about is that it might not be a chicken game when you don't have people involved. It may be more like a war of attrition. So, you can get the idea of a frozen conflict where the two sides are, if you think of a biological metaphor, it'd be two stags that are butting each other for competition. They're not trying to kill each other, but they're fighting over something of strategic value and they keep banging and banging and banging. So, one side destroys property on the other side, then there's a response, a similar response. The trouble is that's a plausible scenario, but when you have the asymmetries in space, there's going to be a temptation to have that war of attrition, to have that response in another domain. Again, as Dr. Samansky was illustrating, and I haven't seen in the unclassified level a whole lot of thinking about how a war of attrition would play out across several domains and how you would keep a war of attrition from turning into a much more dangerous game of chicken. Well, you know, it's an international law standard of reciprocity and proportionality. So, if you're taking out someone's machine to take out someone to respond with that with taking out more machines, is proportional and it highlights the problem of deterrence in war. As the more damage you do to these satellites starts to accumulate and it has tremendous effects on both the economy and the military capacity to react, there's going to be a real desire or effort to start moving that into other areas where it can be effective or where you use that deterrent threat of cross domain or other area activities. I like the idea of being able to respond in space and with only into space. The other part of our human targets, of course, without people in space, it's a lot easier, I suppose, to go to war because there is just sort of a cost to the calculation that is pretty safe before. Where we do have humans in the way, and this is the idea of UN peacekeeping efforts. Peacekeepers don't make the peace. When a piece is settled, peacekeepers are sent in to go between the two sides and put themselves in harm's way so that if they do go back to war, there could be some deaths involved and then the states will get involved. We do the same thing with aircraft carriers when we put them in the straits of Taiwan when the Chinese are doing a military exercise where they're practicing taking a large island, for example. If we really wanted to defend Taiwan, we put them about 200 miles on the other side of the island rather than right there on the way, they're there to be sunk in a sense. You take Taiwan and you take it will the United States really go to war with China to go over that? But if you sink a carrier with 6,000 people on board, you bet we will. So that's the kind of ratcheting up that humans do. Now the problem with humans in spaces, they're really, really, really expensive to keep there. But if we're looking at kinetic weapons, blowing things up in space and causing massive amounts of debris, the international space station is probably the most deterring thing that we have up there at the current time. We've got astronauts from all countries up there and they would be in harm's way. The U.S. military, the Air Force thought in the 1950s and early 1960s that manned space bombers and manned space fighters would be the way things go. It's going to be like drone warfare in space. It's all virtual as far as the operators are concerned. And so the more people in space, this is where commerce really comes into play. As Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Richard Branson start doing getting more people into space just even for tourism, it becomes a lot more difficult to start having those dangerous wars that cause debris that might hurt people. And so in a way, they'll have a they'll have a deterring effect, but history also shows that flag follows commerce. Wherever economic value and human beings have gone and that economic value gets great enough, the military is called in to protect that. The military is going to have to go into space to do things like search and rescue, removing obstacles to danger, weather prediction and practice and regulating and making sure that piracy is limited. Piracy mostly works but at this point, but eventually possibly physical. And whether the military wants to go in or not is a good point. It'll be a call from all the people that may be going in there and all the values that we are getting. Can I have another attack because Professor Dolman made me think of something. It's putting people in the way is related to Dr. Burbach's dual use slide. So remember when he was talking about the commercial in the military. So one of the layers in this idea of layer deterrence is this notion of entanglement that if you can't put people in the way, it's not convenient to do that. You can perhaps put commercial technology in the way or you can entangle commercial military technology so that when your asset is destroyed, when the property is destroyed, there are a number of private concerns across the world that care about that. But let me take one attack on that, Damon. If you do that, you put military capabilities on civilian satellites, you technically make them a legitimate target. I don't disagree that that helps in deterrence, but that's one of the problems. Right, but I'm saying not necessarily that. It could be that, but just having military use of commercial technology, just the dual use technology there, if they are going after one of those dual assets, then they're entangled. So you could design your military infrastructure so that it was further entangled so that that asset now when it's disabled, it's affecting commercial entities around the world and not just the military. So I wasn't thinking about aircraft carriers so much as a communication satellite that had dual use. Thanks for your responses. We're starting to get a few audience questions coming in. So I'll pick one of those and hopefully we'll hear your answers and feedback. So one audience member says this one's a long one. International cooperation in space seems to be at an all time high right now when you look at the ISS Artemis lunar gateway and plans to go on to Mars. All this is heavily dependent on cooperation as NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstein repeatedly explains. Why emphasize your realist security dilemma approach so much when you could instead be focused on opportunities for international cooperation? Couldn't the U.S. military end up actually sparking the security dilemma itself? Sure, let me take that and I would even lump in the previous question. Why is it difficult to practice that restraint that we saw during the Cold War? Kind of an unrelated note. Several things there. Maya, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, is correct. There is actually a lot of space diplomacy going on now too. The Artemis Accords is a set of diplomatic agreements that NASA and the State Department are trying to negotiate with other countries on how we would do moon exploration together. So that's absolutely true. It's a somewhat separate track than the security lane and one thing that is important to note about that diplomacy is China and Russia are not involved. In fact, NASA specifically is prohibited from cooperating with China at all to the point that you can't even have a Chinese scientist visit a NASA facility. We're actually not involving them in those Artemis Accords Russia also has not really wanted to be involved and has kind of grumbled, you know, raised some objections to how we're thinking of doing the moon exploration. So we sort of have a parallel track of civilian space diplomacy at the same time that on the military side we are raising these concerns. I don't think that security dilemma, well the dilemma is somewhat inevitable in the sense that it's such an offensive dominant and so dual use. It's hard to get away from that. I would like, I hope that we are able to show some restraint. Now if you look at the Cold War, although we kept ending up back showing some relative restraint and if Paul Samansky were here he may know about some secret ways that we didn't show restraint that I'm not familiar with, but it certainly could have been worse, but we kept as with the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Star Wars Missile Defense that Everett just told you about, we never, the military, you know, militaries aren't comfortable being in that position of we have to accept mutual vulnerability. I mean, militaries want to be able to say we are able to prevent this from happening. We're able to be invulnerable and since the end of the Cold War we've been in a position where we haven't really faced a lot of space threats in a serious way and I think we we're now seeing those threats evolving and are going through an initial phase of well how do we absolutely guarantee that we keep space access and adversaries don't. I think that's going to be very hard to achieve and I think maybe, you know, I think we probably, you know, a good outcome would be that we get to some tacit or even more formal restraint, perhaps some agreements. It's hard to verify arms control agreements in space because, you know, as Samansky explained, it's hard to see exactly what's going on up there. So I hope we are able to get out of this dilemma because I think the goal of we're invulnerable and no other peer powers cannot access space. I think that's a really difficult goal to get to and so I would like to see us avoid kind of the spiraling arms race end point of the security dilemma and instead seek some diplomatic ways or even if it's informal to avoid the worst competition. Well, I'll take a stab at that. I understand your concerns about realism. It's something that we deal with all the time. The idea that comes from strength through peace, peace through strength is the old Roman adage, if you want peace prepared for war and that is a problem that you're preparing for war all the time, you're probably going to get it and I understand that. The other thing is though the military tends to be pretty conservative when it comes to actually wanting to go to war because they're the ones who suffer the hardships of it the most their families, but we don't make the decision to go to war. We prepare and we plan and if called upon then we go to war. International cooperation except international cooperation with other militaries is really not in the purview of what we do. We're sort of at the limit, but we do can do we can influence it by understanding that debris is a common enemy. Planetary defense, comets, asteroids are a common enemy and the ability to deny that to clean it up to stop it generally is going to call to the military. The military is going to be doing other things like search and rescue, which causes potential for a lot of international cooperation. When the outer space treaty was first being negotiated in the early, well in 1959-1960 as early as that, the hope was that we would get a united nation space force sort of a police force for the world that could be operated by all nations whether regardless of their ability to actually participate in that. I'm much in keeping with the idea of the outer space treaty. It's problematic because of the realist notion that sure I like it, but I'm not going to put my forces under anyone else's command and it just sort of falls apart. We're as long as going out into space as nation states and the outer space treaty requires that almost in a sense because it says nation states are responsible for all damages in space. It's going to be tough, but we can look at it from a diplomatic and from an economic way and if we go in that direction the army will military the space force will be told to just keep planning, but don't deploy, don't test. That's not up to my boss. And I guess I can afford to be a little more optimistic because I'm at the pre-commissioning level and part of the professionalization of the space force will be how we educate college age students who are going to be going into the space force or working with the space force. And the journal, the space and defense journal tries to take a political economy approach and when you think about a political economy you think about mixed gains, potential for cooperation as well as conflict and that's where that second point came from, the idea that public goods and your question about international cooperation, the possibilities for cooperation are rising at the same time as great power competition. What Dr. Brubeck said, I think is relevant. If you try to go back to the Cold War and build historical analogies, I think what helped the military be involved in arms control and provide professional advice about arms control was the mutual vulnerability. So it was a recognition mutual assured destruction. You don't have that right now in space, so it does make it very difficult. In fact, based on what I'm reading at the unclassified level, I would estimate that there's asymmetric vulnerability. So we're actually more vulnerable because we're more reliant and this is a offense dominant environment and so it's very difficult then for the military to sign off on cooperation. So you see that when Russia and China put proposals on the table in the United Nations, there's a real reluctance to say, well, how are we going to verify this? How are we going to be better off with this treaty than without it? And one chilling idea to think about is that we may have to go to a point where there is a crisis and there's a real concern and there's a mutual recognition of danger before we can put those cooperative measures in place like as we saw with the salt treaties during the Cold War. One way where we might not have to go there that's more optimistic is again that our adversaries, which are involved in cooperation as well as competition with us, see real value in the public goods that the United States is providing. And so they're just a little more reluctant to destroy US assets because they don't want to lose the public goods, they don't want to lose the services the United States is providing. It may be a while before other countries start to think in those terms. In fact, in some ways they're moving away in that even our allies, the Europeans built their own navigational constellation, not wanting to be completely dependent on US GPS. They built their Galileo network. Russia has blown ass, China now has Baidu. One good news is that these systems are mostly compatible, the advantage you all have is your cell phones and your cars can now rely on a bunch of different country satellites. Even the Europeans didn't want to be in a position where if the US system was turned off or was destroyed, a situation where somebody wants to take away US GPS and not European Galileo, I'm not entirely sure what that would be. But one general point, any great power, I mean in general, great powers like to be autonomous and we absolutely see that in space where what China has been doing has been kind of building out those space capabilities so that it has its own navigation, its own weather satellites, its own communication satellites. The US provides a lot of public goods. We do provide GPS, we've got the best weather data, but countries don't like to, what we see is as countries become capable, they want their own national capabilities and don't like to rely on US public goods. Okay, so I think we have time for potentially one more question. So another attendee asked, does the US, both government and industry, still have a technological advantage in the space domain over China? How are those trend lines changing? I've studied the Chinese program a bit so I'll go, in fact, if any of you want to look up, there's a podcast called Cosmic Controversies that Forbes puts out. I was just a guest on that discussing the Chinese space program. Bottom line is no, China does not have a technological advantage either in government or industry. One thing worth noting is if you follow space at all, you're probably aware of SpaceX. SpaceX has absolutely eaten the Chinese space program's lunch when it comes to the global market for launching satellites. SpaceX is able to do more for less money. And when it comes to technology, the Air Force Secretary Barrett noted that, expressed some, said that the Chinese little rover they have on the moon right now is ominous. I'm not so worried about that. What they have on the moon right now is the equivalent of the Pathfinder rover that we put on Mars 25 years ago. In general, Chinese technology, I would nobody who really knows space would trade what China has for what we have. What is relevant and guess is where that offense dominance comes in is if China is merely a strong number two, that's still enough to threaten us. In a military sense, they also are not as dependent upon space, especially if we were fighting, you know, if China wanted to try and, you know, fight a war in the Gulf of Mexico, they would need a lot of space assets that they don't have and they went that we could threaten. If we are fighting over Taiwan, we're more dependent upon the capabilities that space gives you to fight far away across a big ocean. So I think a better way to think of China is they have moved into the number two position. And they want the world to mean China has no pretensions that they're better than the U.S. in space, but they would like the world to think that they're better than certainly better than the Indians or the Japanese, better than the Russians, you know, better than the Europeans. So, you know, think of China as a strong number two, but we're still ahead, but merely being ahead doesn't necessarily guarantee space safety. And another reason why it doesn't guarantee it is because it's hard to stay ahead. So sometimes it's cheaper to be the follower than the leader. And the other, the other thing is, is that just because you're ahead in many things, even the most important things doesn't mean that you're ahead in everything that matters. So if you go back to historical analogy, the Japanese made some progress that we didn't anticipate and you got Pearl Harbor. So I'm not saying that there's going to be a space Pearl Harbor. I'm just saying that technological leads are not safe in any case, particularly if you have a strong number two, who seems to be a pretty proficient follower. Well, time will tell, that's for sure. We have this with the Russians and it's interesting that they were preparing for a military space program, a war in space. We were preparing for probably not having a war in space. And we both had command economies at the time. And the reason was we didn't want people launching rockets from their backyard or from someplace deep in Texas because it might look like a nuclear strike and we didn't want to start a nuclear war. That's why we don't really get licensing for private space companies until the mid-1990s and beyond because, again, the state is responsible for all actors and supporters. But we've got now, we've unleashed a free market economy onto space and the dot-com billionaires have taken up on it and they are making extraordinary strikes. Command economies are terrific to get exactly what you want in the short term. That's why we go to it in the wartime. But as long as peace continues on, I'm not sure I think the fast follower is as useful as it is for wartime. But as long as peace continues, so as long as we can deter and it looks like, if not deter, at least cooperate, the greater the advantage that they're going to come from that free market system coming up with all sorts of different ideas. And that also will bring in some other issues. One problem, though, and nothing good comes without problems. The question that I worry about is how much of our national security should we rely on business and making war a business is never a good idea. So it's while we're gaining advantages in technology in other areas that I think are going to be extraordinarily useful, the military is looking at those technology advantages, how they can adapt to military needs and uses. I just hate paying private business to do our national security anywhere. At least not more than we're already doing. Okay. Thank you. I think we have time for maybe one more quick question. Another attendee asked, what does the ladder of escalation look like in space warfare? I think you're going to have some disagreement on this panel because they're still trying to figure that out. We don't know what the ladder looks like in limited nuclear warfare in the second nuclear age. And we don't know what it looks like in space. And Professor Dolman was talking about we might have a better sense of it if we had more options to stay in space. What we're seeing at the journal, again, this is at the unclassified level, is that that's at least today, that's not the way they believe it would happen. They think that it would cross domains. And there isn't a lot of evidence that we have, a lot of data that we can rely on to see how that would go. My sense is that there would be reluctance on the part of the great power since they all have nuclear arsenals. There would be a real reluctance to shoot up that ladder very quickly. And I think that there should be more thinking at my level, at the undergraduate and first year graduate level, but also where they're doing the real exercise, the detailed exercise at the classified level, there should be more thinking about what a war of attrition would look like. And that's not exactly a ladder, but that's a long-term competition over something of strategic value. And how do you maintain yourself in that if you don't escalate? That could also, you could have strategic defeats or defeats of strategic significance without ever going up the ladder. So I think we need to think about the problem that your questioner puts on the table, but I'm also worried about this idea of a war of attrition that goes across domains. I would agree that I don't think we have a clear sense of this yet. And one complication to go back to something Paul Samanski said is that in some ways space is a little less like physical airstrikes and more like cyber or more like counterintelligence, in that a lot of stuff can happen secretly. And we've acknowledged in the U.S. we have at least one system designed for jamming enemy satellites. We know the Russians have such systems, cyber attacks, or even if you have quietly have a little satellite come up on a satellite and disable it, as Paul noted, from my perspective, did an adversary just destroy my satellite, or did it just fail because something broke? And I think we, you know, there were likely to see a lot of, you know, either transient interference, jamming cyber attacks or fairly secret attacks, which on the one hand can help slow escalation because there isn't necessarily a big public, oh my God, the other side attacked us. On the other hand, it could lead to problems of false, you know, we also need to be careful. We don't accidentally, you know, conclude there was an attack when a satellite happens to break in the middle of a crisis just because of bad luck. So I, but I think it's important to recognize there is sort of that, you know, secret, quiet, count, you know, intel, counterintel angle, as opposed to sort of, you know, you bombed me. So now I'll, you know, I'll drop two bombs on you in response. It's probably a lot more covert and uncertain than a lot of what we're used to terrestrially. Okay, before Professor Dolman goes, I could I get in one more thing and it ties to the third bullet that I laid out on the table, which is civil military relations in the space force. I think personally, I don't know that there's a lot of background to this, but I guess there's a little bit, the general Raymond's talked a little bit about this, but I think that the space force is going to have to get awfully good at gaming and games to try to try to get a sense of what that escalation ladder looks like, or what that war of attrition looks like. And part of professionalization is figuring out education. I think the education, the professional education of the space force is going to be different. And I think it's going to use gaming. And the question is, do we know how to use gaming very well at that level? Professor Dolman, I'm sorry about that. Oh, no, no, not at all. There's the escalation ladder that I wrote about 20 years ago was to secretly seek space, take over low earth orbit, and it's a pay to complete. And I think that's the holy grail of escalation for space to just get it over with. The problem is that was never realistic back then, and it's not realistic today as more competition has come in. The big thing that a lot of folks here would be worrying about is if we can keep war out of space and it won't filter down onto the terrestrial sphere, the problem is that's not a one way arrow. Every war on the terrestrial sphere has gone up into space. The escalation ladder for space is going to look awful, like the one on the ground, because that's probably where it'll kick off. We are, unfortunately, out of time. But again, I would like to just finish up this panel by again thanking our panelists, Dr. Burbach, Dr. Coletta and Dr. Dolman for donating their time to speak to us today and also answer our questions. And thank you all and audience for coming and listening. Our next panel is at 1.30 p.m. and it'll be regarding the U.S. Space Force. So we look forward to seeing you there.