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Space and Defense

Spring 2024

Editor's Note

This issue marks an eager return to the journal’s heritage in space policy and strategy. At the same time, and consistent with our journal founders’ desire to break down artificial, bureaucratically imposed silos, the five peer-reviewed articles featured here speak to other emerging conflict domains such as nuclear—always linked with space strategy and broader concerns of statecraft.

Three of the articles, on i) regulating exploitation of celestial bodies, ii) leveraging principles from the nuclear domain for space arms control, and iii) consulting partners and adversaries to avoid the Kessler Syndrome in the age of satellite constellations, are authored by experts in international space law. The other features, by a former Stanton Fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and a researcher for the recent DOD MINERVA grant on Economic Statecraft, explore, respectively, the significance of gender for foreign policy decision making in emerging domains and the waning effectiveness of American sanctions for preserving national security in space.

Vol. 15, No. 1 includes our usual complement of outstanding student work, this time encompassing clean energy solutions as well as proposals for strengthening space and nuclear deterrence. The Student Voice section concludes with proceedings from the U.S. Air Force Academy’s 64th Academy Assembly, which focused on next-generation ideas for Waging Peace on the Final Frontier.

Academy Assembly, like similar undergraduate symposiums held at sister service academies and leading civilian institutions such as Columbia University, which hosted the first American Assembly under university president Dwight Eisenhower in 1950, offers a golden opportunity for cross-generational dialogue on public affairs. In this issue of , AA64 also supplied material for our senior leader contributors.

Former NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver delivered the Assembly keynote in the form of a fireside chat on the implications of NASA transformation regarding the agency’s relationship with new commercial space (NewSpace) for National Security. Then-deputy commander for USSPACECOM Lt Gen John Shaw, at the Assembly’s culminating event, gave the annual Truman Lecture. Gen Shaw (USAFA ’90) laid out urgent priorities for the newest combatant command as it wages peace in the Third Space Age, amid increasingly savvy, highly capable international competitors in orbit.

Encouraging distinct four-star commands to work together under hostile conditions brought about by growing coordination among U.S. adversaries is the subject of this volume’s lead Senior Essay: “The Unified Command Plan for a New Cold War” by Brigadier General (ret.) and former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs David Stilwell. General Stilwell’s call for flexible, smart boundaries and greater integration among military Areas of Responsibility recalls a touchstone from the first issue of Space & Defense published nearly twenty years ago. In the long run, successful grand strategy rests upon political-economic foundations. This support structure itself demands consistent attention by policy makers and analysts to the integration of new technology across domains, emerging and traditional. These are the very ones we survey with each new issue of our expanded journal.

Damon Coletta

USAFA

June 2024