About Space Warfare
Because the World has not yet experienced a full-out space war, it is difficult to assess what the likely conditions, battlefield tempo, strategies and tactics would underlay a future space conflict. Nevertheless, it is likely that some potential adversary is currently devoting considerable resources to designing systems that can conduct surprise assaults on strategic space assets of major countries. Due to the distant (up to 36,000 km and more) and un-manned nature of satellite systems, detection of these attacks would be difficult, and currently may only be of the “post-mortem” variety. Even with major resource allocations by nations towards intelligence gathering through all mediums, history is replete with examples of major surprise attacks that should have been detected, but were not [Pearl Harbor, Battle of the Bulge (in spite of 11,000 Ultra message decryptions indicating buildup of major German forces for this attack), Yalu River in Korea, most Israeli-Arab conflicts]. The ability to detect attacks in distant space can only be more difficult and less certain than these terrestrial examples. In addition, there are many historical examples of new weapon technologies that provided considerable advantages to their first user, and fundamentally changed the correlation of offense vs. defense in their respective theaters, at least for a period of time (catapult vs. Greek fortifications, cannon vs. castle walls, crossbow vs. shield, musket vs. body armor, tank vs. machine gun, shaped-charge vs. bunker, airplane vs. battleship, etc.). More than likely the side that first employs offensive weapons against space systems will “win” the space war, and degrade a country's use of space systems to support the terrestrial battlefield, at least over the short duration of any probable future conflict. It is in a country’s interest to pursue multiple approaches to these space warfare concepts, in order to cherry-pick the best of each, so as to insure against an uncertain World.