Deterrence in Space

Deterrence doesn’t work in any domain that isn’t existential in my opinion. The US kept bombing groups in Syria and Iraq to deter Iran from launching attacks at US troops. It singularly failed to stop the attacks. (The threat of war with the US is existential and so they didn’t escalate.)

Cyber is novel

Cyber is uniquely hard to apply deterrence to, primarily because people think only about states…but states are not the main cyber powers. For example, if you can convince Google to censor results for Tiananmen square then you don’t have to convince the US government to do it … one of those things actually happens inside China.

Cyber is not exceptional

Similarly, although people claim that deterrence does not work in cyber, that’s simply not true. Sony was attacked by DPRK for making a movie about North Korea. That attack was existential in its scope although the actual impact was not.

Except, of course, it was for several people’s jobs. And companies are made of people, many of whom don’t want to lose their jobs. And so the result, effectively, is deterrence. How many movies about DPRK have been produced in Hollywood since 2014? Exactly.

Soft power and deterrence

We could talk about deterrence by funding as well. China funds a lot of movies and all they ask is that China not be the bad guy. Done! (It’s more complex obviously). The point is simply that, if you want to make a movie severely critical of China you’ll have a hard time funding and distributing it. But there is no law that prohibits it. Just states making their wishes known. Through soft power influence.

Space

https://breakingdefense.com/2021/08/pentagon-posed-to-unveil-classified-space-weapon/

https://spacenews.com/dia-report-2021-cislunar-monitoring/

Now we turn to space. It might have been a more… classic deterrence analysis problem before space was democratized. Not that it is completely, but there are now players in space who are not states.

Starlink has altered the calculus of space conflict. The old paradigm involved few large expensive satellites that could be targeted by hunter killer satellites or ground based lasers or whatever. But Starlink has deployed hundreds and thousands of satellites (over 3500 according to Google.)

Because there are non state actors in space, and they’ve already shifted the paradigm, suggests to me that space deterrence is more like movies and cyber than like nukes.

And in particular I expect the analysis of the domain to be a long time catching up with the reality of the dynamics.