The current conflict with Iran is teaching the US Department of Defense some hard lessons. The one the commentariat (this writer included) cannot stop talking about is how drastically the proliferation of low-cost drones, missiles and mines will impact the future of warfare. Put simply, they give a weaker adversary the asymmetric ability to impose military consequences wildly disproportionate to their cost.
The implications are already stark: Iran does not need a navy remotely comparable to the US Navy, in fact no navy at all, to impose intolerable costs on the United States and the global economy. Right now, Iran is demonstrating the ability to disrupt a narrow maritime passage through which nearly a fifth of the world’s oil supply must pass.
A much deeper lesson for space has almost nothing to do with drones or missiles, or even Iran. It is about chokepoints. There is a paradox at work here that runs through business strategy, military doctrine and national security policy alike: The rational pursuit of efficiency in the near term creates profound vulnerabilities over the long term. In warfare, those vulnerabilities can become critical – existential, even.
Resource concentration and repeatability enable economies of scale. Vertical integration reduces costs. A single optimized architecture simplifies operations. Fewer contractors simplify acquisitions. Standardization makes systems easier to manage. But what looks like efficiency to an acquisition official becomes an obvious target to an adversary.
The national security space community may be making the same mistake, but with far more dire consequences. The definition of resilience shouldn’t be complicated: it means being able to accomplish the mission through hostilities. After an adversary has studied our architecture, identified its critical dependencies and attacked them intelligently, can the commander still accomplish the mission? If not, you don’t have resilience. You have a chokepoint.
So, where are the national security space Hormuz chokepoints? In an earlier era, they were what Gen. John Hyten called our “big, fat, juicy targets,” large, exquisite and expensive satellites, most of them in geostationary orbit. In the years that followed, the Space Force wisely moved toward architectures composed of far greater numbers of smaller, low-cost satellites built by multiple suppliers.
That was an important step. But proliferation of small satellites should not be confused with proliferation of dependencies.
Future chokepoints may instead emerge from a single-mission, mega-constellation; a single ground architecture; a single cloud or software environment; or a single critical supplier buried within multiple prime contractors’ supply chains. What’s even worse? A single company controlling several of those layers simultaneously.
Much like Iran not really needing a navy, future adversaries may never need to deploy kinetic anti-satellite systems if they can achieve devastating effect at minuscule cost by mapping our space networks and exploiting their cyberattack surfaces. The future so-called Strait of Hormuz in space may be virtual, buried within a supply chain rather than anywhere in orbit.
The Pentagon grasps half the problem; moving away from a handful of so-called Death Star satellites toward proliferated architectures was the right move, but getting to 1,000 satellites – or even 10,000 – does not equal resilience. If those thousands of satellites ultimately depend upon one operator, one architecture, one software stack, one ground network, one supply chain or one company, we have distributed the hardware without distributing the vulnerability.
A mega-constellation can be enormously proliferated physically while remaining dangerously concentrated operationally. The answer is to measure space resilience not only by how many satellites we have, but also by how many independent ways we have to accomplish the mission even if it’s slightly degraded.
For positioning and navigation, communications, missile warning, surveillance and other critical missions, commanders must have multiple independent paths. That means government systems, multiple commercial providers and allied capabilities working in concert, across different orbital regimes, diverse ground architectures and independent software and network pathways. The objective should not be to make an American space architecture impossible to attack, it must be to make it impossible for an adversary to prevent the mission.
That is also why competition is more than just good acquisition policy. Competition is a key part of resilience. Multiple suppliers ensure different technologies, different supply chains, different software architectures and different failure modes, meaning no single point of attack can bring down the entire architecture. Continuous competition also prevents any single contractor or technology from becoming too entrenched to challenge (another chokepoint). A diverse industrial base in and of itself is a national security asset.
For every critical Space Force mission, program acquisition executives and their program managers must answer some fundamental operational questions. What happens if we lose this constellation? What happens if the ground network is compromised? What happens if a key contractor or supplier fails? What’s the plan when a common software layer is penetrated? What is Plan B? Are we even thinking about a Plan C? If there are no good answers, we have found another Strait of Hormuz.
America’s advantage in space will not come from developing a single architecture so seemingly formidable that no adversary would bother attacking. It can only come from building many that are so distributed, diverse and adaptable that an adversary cannot figure out how to stop it. The best way to defend America’s Strait of Hormuz in Space is to make sure we never build one.
