At the same conference, Mike Rogers, a Republican congressman from Alabama, said the U.S. Air Force should create a specialized, independent group to handle military operations in orbit. “We have to acknowledge that the national-security space structure is broken,” he said.

Last week, Navy Vice Admiral Charles Richard, the deputy commander of U.S. Strategic Command, said during a conference in Washington, D.C., that “while we’re not at war in space, I don’t think we can say we’re exactly at peace, either.”

“Major power competition is back on the table in a way that we have not seen in the world for perhaps 15 or 20 years,” he said.

Like Thompson, Richard said the U.S. should appear prepared. “[T]he best way to prevent war is to be prepared for war, and we’re going to make sure that everyone knows we’re going to be prepared to fight and win wars in all domains, to include space,” he said.

Also last week, Air Force General William Shelton, now retired and a former commander of the U.S. Air Force Space Command, said in his written testimony to the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces that “the environment of space has fundamentally shifted from the ethereal sanctuary of the past to the increasingly crowded and contested environment of today.”

“Not surprisingly, nations are now actively testing methods to deny us continued use of space services during conflict,” Shelton said.

And earlier in March, General David Goldfein, the chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, told The Washington Post in an interview that the military branch wants to maintain ensure “space superiority,” which he defined as “freedom from attack and freedom to maneuver.”

Before the Outer Space Treaty banned the placement of weapons of mass destruction in Earth’s orbit in 1967, the U.S. was testing nuclear weapons in space and the Soviet Union was trying out self-detonating spacecraft designed to target American spy satellites. Today, low-Earth orbit is a comparatively peaceful place, but there’s little stopping spacefaring nations from changing that. No comprehensive treaty on the use of space weapons exists, nor have world powers or proposed accords agreed on what, exactly, a space weapon is. Russia and China, have proposed a treaty to ban space weapons, but the U.S. has rejected it. The U.S. wants to use a set of norms created by the European Union to govern weapons in space, but Russia and China don’t. The resistance comes from each country’s desire to keep their competitors in line while also retaining the freedom to do whatever they want.

If war breaks out, it will be fought amongst the hundreds of communications, weather, navigation, and reconnaissance satellites circling Earth. Satellites can be destroyed by ground-based missiles, disabled by lasers, hacked by actors on Earth to knock out transmissions, or stalked and beaten up by spacecraft designed to hunt enemy hardware. There are currently about 1,400 operational satellites orbiting the planet at various altitudes, according to a database maintained by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an American nonprofit group. The U.S. dominates the field with nearly 576 satellites, compared to Russia’s 140 and China’s 181. The U.S. has an edge, but having more assets can mean more vulnerabilities.