Space is a Science. Space Strategy is an Art.

Space presents strategists with something of a paradox.

23 February 2021 NASA photograph showing three different spacecraft simultaneously attached to the ISS: a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo freighter, Soyuz MS-17 crew spacecraft, and Progress 77 cargo spacecraft. The whole complex is photographed with Earth below, 261 miles over the Bay of Bengal.

Space presents strategists with something of a paradox.

Few environments are more dependent upon science and technology To reach space requires extraordinary knowledge of physics, mathematics, engineering, materials and communications, embedded into technological packages. The aspiration to advance in space is going to require even more. Clearly, human progress beyond Earth has therefore understandably been narrated through scientific and technological achievements: rockets, satellites, computers, astronauts, Moon landings and, today, reusable launch systems and increasingly ambitious plans for sustained activity beyond Earth. Equally air power dominated interpretation of space history has doubled down on this techosci-babble surroundeing misleadingly all elements of debate on space from policy, to warfare, to exploration.

Yet, this creates a temptation. Because space is understood through science and accessed through technology, we increasingly assume that the strategic problems associated with it can also be solved scientifically or technologically. They cannot. Science helps us understand the environment or even better, the geography of space. Technology provides the means to operate within it but Strategy gives those means purpose.

That distinction matters because strategy has always been an art rather than a science as much as the efforts of some fields have been since the 1960s to say otherwise- yes, I am looking at IR and PS. Its subject is ultimately human beings: their political purposes, ambitions, fears, interests, judgements and mistakes. History teaches this, should you be enlighte4ned enough to not just read history but study it. It must contend with uncertainty, competition, friction and an opponent who is simultaneously attempting to impose their own will. None of those things disappears because the strategist has chosen to depart Earth’s atmosphere.

The false prophets of technological change have appeared before. New technologies have repeatedly produced claims that warfare—and sometimes strategy itself—has fundamentally changed. Aircraft generated extravagant predictions about the ability of strategic bombing to determine wars. Atomic weapons appeared to make conventional forces obsolete. Missiles, precision weapons and computers subsequently generated their own forms of technological determinism. False prophets litter debate on defence, war and military history, problem one of the biggest problems sound thinking on strategy, operations, doctrine and ultimately policy has, one, like an infection that runs deep.

Space is particularly vulnerable to the same problem. The technological barriers to operating there are so considerable that capability can easily become confused with strategy. Discussion consequently gravitates towards satellites, launch systems, weapons, resilience, targeting, orbital manoeuvre and increasingly sophisticated technical solutions. All of this matters, but none of it constitutes a strategy. A revolution (revolution being a word any sound thinker spits their tea or coffee out on hearing) in the means available to the strategist should not be mistaken for a revolution in the nature of strategy.

This is one reason I have increasingly argued that our understanding of space needs to move beyond space warfare. Space is already fundamental to communications, navigation, finance, intelligence, weather forecasting, scientific research, commerce and national infrastructure. States and societies are increasingly dependent upon capabilities operating hundreds or thousands of miles above the people who depend upon them. That dependence is frequently invisible until something goes wrong.

NASA 2021, three cubesats in Orbit near the ISS.

I have called this problem spaceblindness:¹ the failure to recognise and understand the strategic significance of space despite becoming increasingly dependent upon it for security, prosperity and national power.

But recognising dependence is only the beginning. The larger challenge is understanding what kind of strategy such dependence requires. Strategy in space cannot begin and end with preparations for a future space war. Competition occurs before conflict while diplomacy occurs during competition. Commerce, communications, alliances, scientific cooperation and national interests continue during both peace and war. Indeed, much of what will determine the future strategic character of space may occur without a weapon ever being fired, you can find similarities throughout naval and maritime history.

This is where history one again proves its value. Space is not the first hostile environment to humans in which humanity has had to develop strategy for an environment it cannot naturally inhabit, and the richest body of experience for thinking about it comes not from the air or from earlier space efforts, but from the seas and oceans.

Humans had to develop technologies to travel across oceans. They learned to navigate enormous distances. They developed methods of preserving food and sustaining crews during long voyages. Science and exploration preceded and accompanied commerce. Commerce created infrastructure and therefore human dependency on systems. Communications became strategically vital while governments developed laws, institutions and diplomatic arrangements. Military, maritime and naval forces eventually protected national interests, trade and communications of which national and international matters depended.

Technology transformed this maritime world repeatedly. Sail gave way to steam while timber gave way to iron and steel. Industrialisation transformed shipbuilding around the world, weapons became more lethal and logistics went global, beyond anything earlier age of sail Admirals could have imagined. Yet, through every one of those changes, the underlying strategic questions remained essentially unchanged: how to protect what a nation depended upon, how to compete for advantage short of war, and how to convert technological superiority into durable strategic effect.

That is the lesson space strategy has yet to learn. We have spent a generation treating space primarily as a warfighting domain in waiting, and comparatively little time asking what a mature strategy of space competition, dependence and statecraft should actually look like. ² The sea took centuries to develop that maturity, but the direction of travel shows space does not have that long. Spaceblindness will not be cured by better satellites or even space forces. It can be addressed by strategy.

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