Stephen Kershnar
Space:
The Final Frontier in War
Dunkirk-Fredonia
Observer
March
15, 2021
As
we enter the third decade of the 21st Century, change is
accelerating.
Human
beings will become morally and physically better, and more beautiful, as eugenic
technologies improve. Consider, for example, gene editing and screening.
Companies and governments will increasingly track us. We can glimpse the future
in Big Tech’s collecting data on us, the U.S. government’s collecting massive
amount of data regarding our phone records, and China’s social credit system. People
with low scores in China are prevented from buying plane and rail tickets, they
are excluded from certain jobs, their children are excluded from certain
schools, their mugshots are released, and so on. We will also have a lot more
recreational time as machines increasingly replace workers in areas such as agriculture,
medicine, manufacturing, and transportation.
Similar
to these other changes, how we fight wars will change drastically. Worried
about 21st Century wars, the U.S. recently created the United States
Space Force.
Space
warfare occurs in outer space. It involves ground-to-space, space-to-ground,
and space-to-space violence that kills people and breaks their things. The
violence might involve kinetic weapons (for example, cannon, debris, guns, mines,
and missiles), directed energy weapons (for example, weapons that accelerate
particles or that send out lasers, microwaves, particle beams, or plasma), or
electronic destruction (for example, weapons that jam or destroy
satellite-based communication, positioning, or surveillance systems).
International
law - specifically, the Outer Space Treaty and SALT I - currently bans countries
from putting weapons of mass destruction into space. However, if one country
violates the ban, an arms race will occur. Even if no country puts such weapons
into space, some will develop the capacity to make such weapons and likely induce
others to do so to prevent their being at a disadvantage.
The
importance of winning in space and the speed with which such a war would occur
make it likely that, in the future, war will begin in space. Even if war were
to begin on the land or sea, space would quickly become relevant because of its
centrality to surface-based war. Space war is important because a modern
military’s communication, positioning, surveillance, and targeting systems depend
on satellites. In addition, many civilian industries that support the military
– for example, the energy, food, and weapons industries - depend on satellites.
As a result, satellites would be prime targets.
A
space war would likely occur quickly. This is in part because of the
vulnerability of satellites to cannon, energy beams, missiles, etc. and in part
because of the speed and precision with which these weapons travel through
space. Consider, for example, a laser. Making things worse is the availability
of a low rent way of destroying satellites in some orbits through a cascading
destruction of orbiting objects (see the Kessler syndrome).
The
other reason that a space war will unfold quickly is that in the future,
space-war vehicles will likely be autonomous. That is, robots will run them. Autonomous
machines make better and faster decisions than human beings, operate in more
extreme conditions (consider, for example, cold and g-force), and lack human
needs (consider, for example, companionship, food, and sleep). Because an enemy
can block or hijack ground-based communication, the machines will have to be
autonomous rather than depending on Earth-based signals. Even on Earth, drones
– whether autonomous or remotely piloted – will continue to replace manned
warplanes.
Given
the speed with which such a war will occur, then, a nation feeling threatened might
quickly attack to protect its space assets. This will put everyone on a hair
trigger.
A problem occurs because there is no
answer as to whether, as a moral matter, one country is trespassing on a second
country’s rights when the first jams the second’s signal or when there is a
collision between satellites. This makes it unclear what counts as an act of
war. A country has the right to use a signal of a particular frequency in a
location or be in that location only if it owns that location. The problem is
that, as a moral matter, countries and people do not own locations in outer space.
Even
if a country or people could own a location in outer space, satellites move
and, so, do not occupy a location for very long. This movement in space occurs
whether a satellite moves around the Earth or has a stationary position
relative to the Earth’s surface because the Earth itself is moving around the
sun. Owning a location in outer space is even less plausible than owning a
location in airspace. The former is farther removed from people’s lands.
Countries
that refuse to sign one or more of the relevant treaties do not recognize that
other countries own territories in outer space. Some nations have in fact refused
to sign the Outer Space Treaty. They think countries should own outer space
similar to how they own airspace. Specifically, ownership should extend outward
from the ground. The Treaty does not even make it clear where airspace ends,
and outer space begins. In addition, the Outer Space Treaty allows nations to
withdraw from it, thereby allowing a legal escape hatch.
Ownership
of orbital territories is already problematic because China, Europe, and the
U.S. already occupy significant regions of the low Earth orbit and the equatorial
plane. Over time, other countries will have fewer places to put their
satellites.
Various
nations – for example, China and the US – can threaten or use force to keep
space demilitarized and protect current satellites against encroachment. Perhaps
this is the best that can be done. Still, the US should be wary of getting into
bed with China because of its aggressive posture (consider its threats
regarding the South China Seas and Taiwan), horrendous history (consider Mao’s starving
and killing of tens of millions), abysmal treatment of the Uighurs, and the
solid chance that the countries will someday go to war against one another.
