Survivability

The fourth major school of thought—survivability—has recently been gaining prominence within U.S. national security space community as a way to deal with a more contested space environment.

The survivability school believes that space systems have fundamental vulnerabilities and will always be at a disadvantage compared to terrestrial forces.

As a result, advocates of the survivability school focus on making significant efforts to reduce both the vulnerability of space systems to attack and overall reliance on space systems. They deemphasize the role of space for force enhancement in favor of a more limited number of support capabilities that degrade gracefully and can be reconstituted quickly.

These include distributed constellations or disaggregated capabilities, cross-links between space-based capabilities and air- and ground-based capabilities and operationally responsive space capabilities.

Although the idea of survivability is not new, it has historically taken a backseat in U.S. national security space policy to other schools of thought. Many U.S. military satellites are designed today with some survivability features in mind, such as hardening against radiation, and jam-resistant radio frequency communications.

These features were largely developed to deal with environmental hazards, such as those created by nuclear detonations in space, and not for direct kinetic attacks on satellites. However, the survivability school’s focus on de-emphasizing the role of space capabilities has consistently lost out to both the strategic value of space systems to the sanctuary school and the warfighting value of space systems to the space control school.

At the same time, the continued high cost of space launch provides an economic and engineering incentive for both reducing the number of launches and packing as much value as possible into a single launch. Those incentives also tend to lead towards a space acquisitions and architecture design philosophy of building large, complicated and expensive satellites.

There is growing recognition that the current strategic situation in space between the U.S. and its potential near-peer adversaries is unstable. At the moment, the United States has the most well-developed space capabilities in the world and is far more reliant on space for national security and the projection of military power than any other country.

The previous dominance of the sanctuary school led the United States to develop national security space capabilities that are extremely vulnerable to a variety of attacks, particularly kinetic attacks. These capabilities are mainly concentrated in a limited number of large and very expensive satellites that take many years to build and launch.

Their importance to U.S. military power gives powerful incentives for potential adversaries to develop ASAT capabilities to take them out and to use those capabilities during conflict.

To many within the U.S. national security space community and Congress, the newly “contested” space domain is a serious problem because it undermines the ability of the United States to win a major engagement with a near-peer adversary.

Although the probability of an actual shooting war with a near-peer adversary is extremely small, there is a growing chorus of voices within the national security community about the need to prepare for a war with China.

Advocates point to the evidence that China is developing operational counterspace capabilities to hold U.S. national security satellites at risk, and potentially testing its ability to target and sink U.S. Navy carriers as evidence of a near-term threat.

They also point to recent actions by China such as the ramming of fishing vessels, and declaring a greatly expanded Air Defense Intercept Zone over disputed islands as the beginning of a Chinese shift towards being a more assertive, and possibly aggressive, regional power.

At some point in the future, the strategic situation may become more stable as a result of a return of the dynamics behind the sanctuary school of thought.

Russia is investing heavily in reconstituting its national security space capabilities. China is rapidly developing a full complement of national security space capabilities of its own, including its own global satellite navigation system and significant space-based ISR capabilities.

Eventually, there may be a new paradigm with multiple countries with the incentives, resources, and knowledge to use space for the full range of military and national security applications. If that happens, many of the same dynamics that led to overall stability in space during the Cold War will again be in place, and we may see a return to a geopolitical environment that is more conducive to a sanctuary approach.

However, even in the most optimistic scenario, it will be decades before these other countries fully develop their space capabilities and become as reliant on space as the United States. The sanctuary model, predicated upon shared reliance on space and strong incentives for stability, will therefore not hold true for some time.

A push for more arms control is also unlikely to be an effective solution to the growing instability due to a deep divide among the various players over what the true threats are in the space domain. Russia and China, along with many of the emerging and developing countries, continue to insist that the potential for an arms race in space is the most pressing security issue.

As a result, they have continued to push for negotiations of their proposed Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space Treaty and have called for states to pledge “no first placement” of weapons in outer space. On Dec. 5, the United Nations General Assembly passed, with 126 affirmative votes, UNGA Resolution 69/32, entitled “no first placement of weapons in outer space.”

The U.S. was one of only four states that voted against it. For the United States, and a number of its allies, the most pressing issues are assured access to space and protecting existing space capabilities from threats—intentional and unintentional.

As a result, the United States has been pushing a range of initiatives aimed at promoting responsible behavior in space, minimizing the likelihood for accidents or misunderstandings and mitigating the threat from space debris.

The United States and its allies on one hand, and Russia and China on the other, are also fundamentally distrustful of each other’s motives and initiatives. The United States sees the PPWT and the no first placement pledge as fundamentally flawed, asserting that they are not verifiable.

Moreover, the proposals would only apply to weapons “placed in orbit,” a category that would include potential U.S. space-based missile defenses or orbital counterspace systems, but would not include the ground- or air-based ASAT capabilities being developed by China and Russia.

Some observers in the U.S. are also suspicious of recent co-orbital rendezvous and proximity operations demonstrations by both China and Russia as being tests of potential co-orbital ASAT capabilities.

As a result, a significant number of people in the U.S. national security space community see recent Russian and Chinese activities to develop and test counterspace capabilities as proof that the PPWT is no more than a political ploy.

At the same time, at least some in Russia and China see U.S. development of advanced on-orbit capabilities—such as the XSS-11 rendezvous and inspection satellite and the X-37B space plane—as nascent space weapons programs themselves.

The situation is made even more complicated by the desire of the United States, and a growing number of its allies, to develop hit-to-kill missile defense capabilities to protect themselves from rogue states such as Iran and North Korea and to field these systems overseas in Europe and Asia, extending their reach.

Russian and Chinese leaders have expressed concern over U.S. efforts to develop improved missile defenses, and perceive them as a strategic threat and potential hit-to-kill ASAT systems in their own right.

The U.S. national security space community eventually decided on a strategy that mixes elements of both the survivability and space control schools together.

On Jan. 19, 2011, the Defense Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published the new National Security Space Strategy that laid out the initial, high-level concepts for how it plans to deal with what it described as an “increasingly congested, contested, and competitive” environment in space.

The strategy proposed the following set of interrelated strategic approaches for meeting U.S. national security space objectives:

Promote responsible, peaceful, and safe use of space; Provide improved U.S. space capabilities; Partner with responsible nations, international organizations, and commercial firms; Prevent and deter aggression against space infrastructure that supports U.S. national security; Prepare to defeat attacks and to operate in a degraded environment.

On Oct. 18, 2012, the Defense Department published an updated space policy that expanded upon the National Security Space Strategy and provided direction on its implementation. The Pentagon’s space policy emphasized the importance of strengthening the safety, sustainability, stability, and security of the space environment.

It also outlined four elements that the United States will use to deter attacks on its own or allied space systems.

Support the development of international norms of responsible behavior that promote the safety, stability, and security of the space domain. Build coalitions to enhance collective security capabilities. Mitigate the benefits to an adversary of attacking U.S. space systems by enhancing the resilience of our space enterprise and by ensuring that U.S. forces can operate effectively even when our space-derived capabilities have been degraded. Possess capabilities, not limited to space, to respond to an attack on United States or allied space systems in an asymmetric manner by using any or all elements of national power.

Since 2012, much of the discussion within the U.S. national security space community has been on what plans, programs and policies will best achieve the objectives of the NSSS—and there has been some limited progress in implementing the Defense Department space policy.

The United States endorsed the recommendations of the United Nations Group of Governmental Experts on Transparency and Confidence Building Measures in Outer Space Activities, and has been actively promoting discussions on the draft International Code of Conduct for Space Activities—ICOC—and the development of voluntary guidelines for the long-term sustainability of space activities as part of promoting the responsible, peaceful and safe use of space.

With respect to improving U.S. space capabilities and building coalitions, the Defense Department has signed bilateral agreements on space situational awareness with the U.K., France, Italy, Japan, Australia, Canada and recently South Korea; and is in the process of negotiating agreements with Germany, Israel and Brazil.

At the same time, the United States has entered into a partnership with Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom on combined space operations.

However, to date there is not much substance, in the form of whole-of-government commitment, behind the norm-building efforts. Although the Obama Administration has publicly supported the ICOC negotiations, there have been several leaks in the press aimed at undermining any negotiations from anonymous defense department officials that are clearly not supportive of the effort.

Moreover, key Republicans in Congress have been consistently distrustful of the ICOC. Part of this distrust is because they perceive it as a treaty in disguise, and labeling it as a voluntary code is an attempt by the Obama Administration bypass the Senate’s authority in ratifying treaties.

In 2012, the Republican-controlled House proposed authorization language that would block funding for implementing any agreement that was not ratified by the Senate, despite the ICOC not being a treaty requiring ratification.

Although that language was not included in the final bill, the 2013 NDAA did include language requiring senior U.S. officials to certify that any agreement would have no impact on U.S. military or intelligence activities in space.

Similarly, there is little publicly-available information on any meaningful progress on increasing U.S. national security space cooperation with international and commercial partners.

While the aforementioned SSA data sharing agreements are much less politically controversial than the ICOC, so far they have done little more than formalize already existing bilateral relationships where the U.S. military provides one-way analytical services to other governments and commercial satellite operators.

They do not appear to be a true partnership where information and data flows in both directions. Part of this can be traced to the technical limitations of the existing IT systems by the U.S. military, but part of it is also due to a cultural distrust of data collected from sources outside of the traditional U.S. military sources.

Efforts to develop a more substantial capability to share data and coordinate space operations between the U.S. and its allies, such as the Combined Space Operations Center exercised at the 2010 Schriever War Game, are making minimal progress.

As of yet there are no concrete plans for the U.S. military to include any of its allies in the development of new satellite systems or utilize allied space capabilities instead of developing its own.

With the notable exception of the Wideband Global satellite communications constellation, it appears that the U.S. military is still following the historical model of developing, funding and delivering space systems all by itself.

There is also scant information available on the progress being made on the third element of the 2011 NSSS, increasing the resilience of U.S. national security space capabilities.

Much of the discussion of how to implement “resilience” has focused on a shift away from having a few large, very expensive, “exquisite” space systems towards constellations of satellites where the overall capability is distributed among many smaller satellites.

The many functions and missions currently accomplished by one large satellite could also be disaggregated among separate platforms, but that would potentially require additional launches to place the systems in orbit. Distribution and disaggregation may even include air and ground systems in addition to space systems, which could significantly increase the complexity in integration and data fusion.

The 2015 budget is reported to contain some aspects of disaggregation. Specifically, the U.S. Air Force says it has delayed purchasing the next two satellites in the Advanced Extremely High Frequency communications constellation in order to examine how it might shift the program towards disaggregation.

The Air Force is also reportedly looking at incorporating disaggregation into the procurement of its new Weather System Follow-On program to replace the aging Defense Meteorological Satellite Program.

However, whether or not these are serious efforts, and can be sustained, remains to be seen. A 2014 Government Accountability Office report found that there are significant challenges to disaggregation that still need to be overcome, including developing metrics for measuring resilience and operational feasibility.

It appears that the development of an overall resilience strategy that would answer those questions is still in the formulation phase. Section 912 of the NDAA for fiscal year 2014 directed the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence to jointly conduct a study, through the National Research Council, on increasing the resilience of U.S. national security space systems.

The initiation of that study was formally announced by the Defense Science Board on Dec. 1, 2014, and it’s likely the study won’t conclude until sometime in mid-2015. That means that any recommendations or outcomes from the study on improving resilience of U.S. national security space systems won’t be incorporated into the budget until 2017 at the earliest, more than six years after the NSSS was announced.