Space as a Domain

Satellites are the nervous system of every modern military, and they are also fragile. GPS guides many precision munitions. Communications satellites carry a large share of military traffic. Reconnaissance constellations revisit strategically important locations on cycles measured in hours. Early-warning satellites are a first line of nuclear deterrence, the eyes that watch for a launch. Well over ten thousand active satellites now circle the Earth — close to 13,000 as of 2025 — the majority American and most of those a single constellation, SpaceX's Starlink — and the consequence is stark: an adversary able to disrupt the satellite layer at scale could degrade even the most powerful militaries within 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 almost any buyer, subject to embargoes they impose case by case. 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.