Is a US-China Space Race Coming?

Professor Andrew Erickson of the U.S. Naval War College is a top expert in the Chinese space program. Just check out his latest edited volume Chinese Aerospace Power: Evolving Maritime Rules and you will see what I mean. He recently gave an interview with The Diplomat on the prospects of a new space race between the United States and China. I found these sections particularly insightful and fascinating:

Heading to the new battlefield?

Erickson: Despite their differing rhetoric, both the U.S. and China are already able to fight through space and have developed capabilities to fight into space. Neither would benefit significantly from attempting to fight fromspace, and it is in both their interests to avoid fighting in space.

Today, U.S. policy-makers must view space comprehensively as a vital medium, primarily to support peacetime activities and deterrence, but — in a worst-case scenario — to support wartime activities as well. This requires developing and maintaining a complex portfolio of assets with very different roles, strengths, and weaknesses. Survivability and functionality are very different in peacetime and wartime, and “one size fits all” standards and objectives should not be imposed across the board. Not everything needs to be geared to high-intensity conflict with a near-peer; fortunately, this is a low-probability contingency, albeit one whose very possibility casts a penumbra of strategic deterrence. This penumbra makes strategic competition and deterrence matter in peacetime. It makes Sino-American great power relations promising yet often problematic. It makes it necessary to discuss frankly difficult issues like the potential for hostilities in space.

And these passages on the importance of space and how the United States should respond to China’s rise as a space power:

Erickson: Space is expensive to enter and maintain assets in, but has inherent advantages, including in global coverage. This is tremendously important for two reasons. First, there is simply no way to equal such a high level of global coverage by other means without incurring far greater costs and complications; at least, in peacetime, before asset destruction becomes a factor. Second, space is the only one of the four global commons (the others being maritime, air, and cyber) in which China is not currently making active operational efforts to restrict U.S. access and use in peacetime. In the maritime and air domains (which begin 12 nautical miles from a country’s shores) by contrast, China uses policy and operational measures to attempt to limit the actions of U.S. and other militaries’ platforms in areas clearly beyond its territorial waters and airspace. In the cyber domain, China engages constantly in offensive operations beyond Chinese borders. Space is the one medium left in which China isn’t engaging in such restriction based on peacetime policies intended to regulate operations within specific geographic areas. At the same time, China is working to enable such restriction by physical means in the event of conflict, and even in peacetime. Jamming/dazzling from the ground is easy; there is no technological obstacle to China’s denying the U.S. use of the space commons.

To ensure that it can survive temporary or semi-permanent loss of critical space systems, the U.S. should increase its capabilities in other domains, bearing in mind China’s determination and increasing ability to hold at risk platforms operating near in its contested periphery. What needs to be accomplished and how this might be done in different ways should be given careful consideration.

You can find the full interview here.