Moorman Center for Space Studies Occasional Paper "Redesigning Space Forces for Deterrence and Warfighting"
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According to Chair of the Moorman Center Chris Williams, “This insightful paper places necessary emphasis on ‘getting force design right’. Force design analyses are used to justify major national security space system acquisition, programmatic and budgetary decisions. Therefore, it behooves U.S. leaders to ensure that proper metrics are used to judge various force design options – and Marc’s paper shows the way. This is required reading for those interested in assuring America’s national security space dominance in the face of rapidly growing space threats.”
Berkowitz argues that future space forces must be structured and postured to complicate an adversary’s risk calculus, present a difficult targeting challenge, and enable forces to evade, operate through, degrade gracefully, and prevent attack to enable deterrence by both denial and punishment as well as warfighting across the conflict spectrum. His recommendations for redesigning space forces include:
- Implementing a hybrid design approach that proliferates the number of assets in constellations and overall mission capabilities; diversifies the mix of dedicated national security and contributing commercial and international assets, orbital regimes, spacecraft sizes, passive and active countermeasures, and communications paths; and distributes mission value across orbits, spectrum, hosts, and geography.
- Integrating combinations of passive and active countermeasures into a layered, dynamic, defense-in-depth that will limit damage, delay, or disrupt an attack or compel the adversary to expend a disproportionate amount of scarce resources executing the attack.
- Fielding a mix of sufficiently resilient, protected, defended, and lethal capabilities that can maintain working control over key orbits and lines of communication during conflict.
- Acknowledging the existence of most space force assets for shaping, pre-war deterrence, and reassurance while concealing the existence of selected capabilities until necessary to reveal them for intra-war deterrence, surprise, escalation control, or operational advantage.
- Rapidly adopting new concepts and tactics enabled by emerging technologies including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing, and directed energy.
This timely and informative paper – and the establishment of the Occasional Series – reflects the Moorman Center’s continuing commitment to timely and insightful analysis of national security space topics. Click below to read the full paper.
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Redesigning Space Forces for Deterrence and Warfighting |
NSSA Occasional Paper by Marc Berkowitz
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We thank you and our valued members for your continued support of the NSSA, and the preservation and protection of the national security space community. |
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