A new Center for a New American Security report says the U.S. government needs to establish a “flexible” deterrence strategy in order to avert potential attacks on the U.S. satellite architecture and other space assets.
The report titled “From Sanctuary to Battlefield: A Framework for a U.S. Defense and Deterrence Strategy for Space,” by Elbridge Colby notes that the U.S. should work to devise ways on how to limit war in space with potential opponents like China and Russia, CNAS said Wednesday.
“In essence, favorably limiting a war means that the terms of mutual limitation with the adversary allow the U.S. to prosecute the conflict successfully, at least with respect to the necessarily constrained political objectives that such a bounded conflict allows,” said Colby, a Robert M. Gates senior fellow at CNAS.
Colby also suggested two approaches on how to create and implement a “limited war strategy” for space.
“In other words, it means proposing the rules of the fight and then building the assets and strategy to incentivize an adversary’s observance of them,” he noted.
Colby told Dan Lamothe of The Washington Post in a phone interview that he considers space a vulnerable domain.
“Fundamentally, we’re going to have to find ways to persuade or coerce our adversaries not to take full advantage of their abilities to hurt us in space,” he added.