VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, California – Gen. David Goldfein, the fighter pilot who now serves as the Air Force's top officer, had an unorthodox priority on his mind when he and the rest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sat down for their first meeting with President Donald Trump on Jan. 27 to outline for the incoming commander in chief their top operational concerns.
"We talked about space more than any other topic," Goldfein recalls from that session in "the Tank," the Pentagon's secure facility for top-level meetings, "because there's this debate going on now, and will go on for the remainder of this year: Where are we headed in the business of space?"
The debate centers on the 73 trillion cubic miles spanning everything from a few hundred miles above the Earth's surface to the farthest reaching satellites 22,000 miles out. It's a domain over which the U.S. claims it must continue to be the principal governing power if space is to remain a peaceful commons. And it involves both protecting orbiting U.S. assets as well as ensuring the safety of the vital military and commercial information they convey to Earth.
Losing U.S. dominance in space could have wide-reaching effects, American officials fear, from limiting the ability to guide ships, foot patrols, manned jets, drones or missiles toward precision targets, to communicating with and saving wounded soldiers in the deep hinterlands of the Afghan Hindu Kush mountains, to more benign matters, like disrupting GPS systems that direct millions of American commuters and support domestic farmers who rely on them to steer combines in perfectly straight lines and maximize their crop yields.
Launch facilities at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California PAUL D. SHINKMAN FOR USN&WR
The question facing the new administration is how far the U.S. should proceed in preparing for military action against either U.S. interests in space or the purpose of those missions, while stopping short of provoking an arms race from countries like Russia and China. They're among other world powers contemplating an alternative future for space, one in which they would have the ability to deny America's free movement and solidify their own positions as global military and economic contenders.
Discussions of war above the atmosphere often lead to breathless predictions about space-age battles. The military is not anticipating – at least in the near future – astronauts fighting cosmonauts with laser guns. But that doesn't mean officials aren't concerned about aggression there.
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