Satellites are the nervous system of every modern military, and they are also fragile. GPS guides every precision-guided munition. Communications satellites carry the bulk of military traffic. Reconnaissance satellites image every patch of the planet on cycles measured in hours. Early-warning satellites are the first line of nuclear deterrence, the eyes that watch for a launch. More than 7,000 active satellites now circle the Earth, the majority American and most of those a single constellation — SpaceX's Starlink — and the consequence is stark: whoever can take down the satellite layer can blind the most powerful militaries on Earth in minutes. This is not hypothetical. China (2007), the United States (2008), India (2019), and Russia (2021) have each demonstrated anti-satellite weapons, and several of those tests scattered debris that still threatens other spacecraft.
Space is now contested in ways the 1967 Outer Space Treaty never anticipated. The treaty bans nuclear weapons in orbit and the appropriation of celestial bodies, but it does not adequately govern anti-satellite weapons, satellite-on-satellite proximity operations, jamming, dazzling, or cyber attacks on satellite control systems. Each of these is now happening, mostly in obscurity — Russian and Chinese "inspector" satellites routinely shadow Western ones at close range. The Kessler syndrome — a runaway cascade in which debris from one major collision spawns more collisions until low-Earth orbit becomes unusable for decades — is a tail risk arms-controllers fear but no current treaty addresses. Meanwhile the commercialization of space has democratized access in ways that complicate the strategic picture: SpaceX cut launch costs by an order of magnitude, and imagery firms like Maxar and Planet Labs sell battlefield-quality reconnaissance to anyone. Ukraine's battlefield resilience after February 2022 was substantially enabled by Starlink and by commercial imagery — and a single private CEO, Elon Musk, has at moments held direct strategic veto over Ukrainian operations, reportedly declining to extend coverage for a strike on the Crimean fleet. Strategic capability now runs partly through a corporation's terms of service.
The Space Force (U.S., founded 2019), the PLA Aerospace Force (China, which absorbed the space mission in a 2024 reorganization), and Russia's Aerospace Forces (2015) are all institutionalizing space as a military domain on the same footing as land, sea, air, and cyber. Lunar resource competition — helium-3, water ice at the poles to make fuel, permanent bases — is early but on every major space program's roadmap, and NASA's Artemis Accords and China's rival lunar pact are already drawing the lines. Whether the next decade brings a Space Pearl Harbor (a major satellite shootdown), a serious space arms-control regime, or both, is open. The Outer Space Treaty's silence is no longer sustainable.