A competition akin to a new space race is under way between the United States and China, evident in the rush to blanket the earth with thousands of small satellites that provide everything from high-speed communications to high-resolution intelligence. New space-based capabilities will be central to how militaries command and control their forces. Even more than today, future kill chains will flow through space, enabling militaries to distribute the process of understanding, deciding, and acting across large networks of systems rather than depending on single platforms to close the kill chain on their own. The result will be a dramatic expansion of "time-sensitive targeting": the ability to find moving targets, track them, and strike them before they have moved away.

The proliferation of satellites, however, is only the beginning of the new space race. Spacecraft have always been limited by the impracticality of refueling them. They have only as much fuel as they could carry into space, and when it is gone, they cannot actively propel themselves any farther. This has restricted spacecraft to orbiting Earth, but emerging space technologies are changing that.

These technologies are being developed now. In the coming years, it will be possible to service, assemble, and manufacture complex orbital infrastructure in space that would be impractical to launch from Earth. This could include vast space-based solar power arrays to capture more of the sun's energy than is possible on Earth, where our atmosphere absorbs or deflects it. Power-beaming technologies will transfer that energy around space. Space-based mining technologies could extract ice from the moon or asteroids, utilizing the underlying oxygen to fuel rockets and support human life in space. The means of production to support space operations will increasingly shift off Earth and into orbital bases and perhaps onto the moon, where spacecraft and other critical space infrastructure could be produced using 3-D printing and advanced manufacturing. It sounds like fantasy, but it is not.

In time, space will be transformed into a unique warfighting domain, and this will inevitably have military applications. Space operations in the coming decades will come to resemble maritime operations in the nineteenth century, when industrial age great powers built global networks of coaling stations and other infrastructure to project naval power in defense of their expanding commercial interests. A similar dynamic will occur in outer space, and the two states that will most shape humankind's spacefaring future will be China and the United States. It is hard to imagine their strategic and military competition will remain confined to Earth.

Source: The Kill Chain, Defending America in the future of high-tech warfare, Christian Brose, Hachette Books, 2020.