The military has a centuries-old history of fighting in past conflicts on land, at sea and in the air. But in space - where wars have never been fought - there is no historical precedent, which would determine the strategy, no past battles, which should be analyzed, and no proven guide for that, how the conflict can unfold. This presents a unique challenge for the US Space Force, as they work to create an infrastructure of combat simulations and experiments, capable of imitating the domain, where the rules of warfare remain largely untested.
Colonel Lincoln Bonner, deputy director of the Space Futures Command Task Force of the Space Forces, said, that simulating potential enemy actions in space is "absolutely necessary", given the lack of historical conflicts to study.
"Fortunately, we have never been involved in a space war, and then, what a space war would look like, is mostly a matter of imagination. And that's a huge problem.", he said 24 February on the online forum, organized by the Space Institute of the University of Tennessee.
Bonner, graduate of the institute, works under the Space Readiness Command and supports planning for the command's proposed space future, new organization, which is headed by the Chief of the Department of Space Operations, General Chance Salzman.
Traditional military planning cycles struggle to keep up with the rapid pace of space technology development and new threats from adversaries, such as China, and Space Forces are trying to solve this problem. One component of Futures Command will be a military operations analysis center, which uses war games and artificial intelligence, to drive investment in next-generation technologies.
Technological race with China
Bonner noted, that in competition with technologically advanced opponents, the mere presence of advanced technology does not guarantee success.
"Technological success is necessary and critically important, but it will hardly be enough", he said. He noted, that the US and many other countries have similar military systems. They, which creates an advantage, he claimed, lies not only in the technology itself, and in that, how systems are integrated and function is exactly that type of analysis, which would be proposed to be conducted by the Space Future Team.
The push for a new team is not without criticism. In the article, published on Tuesday, Todd Garrixon, senior researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, assumes, that the creation of a new Futures Command could actually stifle innovation, rather than accelerating them.
Harrison criticizes the Space Force's organizational approach, according to which there are separate commands for different functions — Space Systems Command to receive data, Space Operations Command for operations and, perhaps, Space Futures Command to develop the concept.
Instead of creating a new command, Harrison recommended consolidating existing commands into a structure, organized around mission zones, such as navigation, communications and missile warning.