The myth of the space Pearl Harbor: why space superiority requires staying powerby Matt Isler, Alex Gilbert, Morgan Bazilian, and Jahara Matisek
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| US spacepower rests on a consolidated industrial base and slow acquisition, and future advantage in orbit will turn on building a space industrial base that can sustain launches through a long fight. |
In mid-October, the Russian satellite Cosmos 2612 spent several days shadowing ICEYE-X36, a radar-imaging satellite owned by the US arm of the Finnish firm ICEYE, at times closing to within a few kilometers. ICEYE has been a major supplier of imagery to Ukraine’s military, although it is unclear whether this particular satellite supports Ukrainian operations, and LeoLabs, which tracked the approach, said its data did not establish hostile intent. Read alongside earlier Russian proximity operations near Western satellites and Chinese satellites practicing “dogfighting” in orbit, the episode shows how hard it is to deter or coerce an adversary that can shadow critical systems at little cost.
For a quarter century, since a 2001 congressional commission warned of a “Space Pearl Harbor,” US thinking about space war has centered on a surprise blow that wipes out American space assets and, with them, the US edge in every other domain. That framing misreads how control of space is won. No single kinetic salvo can secure it, because destroying a distributed constellation costs the attacker a great deal and buys only modest military gains. Debris from such strikes could also set off a Kessler cascade, in which fragments from one collision cause others and damage satellites far from the original target.
Lasting space superiority depends on staying power, beginning with an industrial base deep enough to absorb and replace losses and the tactical skill to conduct active defensive counterspace (DCS) operations. It also requires launch infrastructure that is resilient and spread across allied territory, along with the diplomatic skill to manage escalation that crosses domains. Analysts have warned that US spacepower rests on a consolidated industrial base and slow acquisition, and future advantage in orbit will turn on building a space industrial base that can sustain launches through a long fight.
Why the preemptive strike model fails
The case for offensive counterspace holds that preemptive strikes on an adversary’s main space architecture offer the cleanest route to victory. Chinese planners, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency, reason along similar lines and see US dependence on satellites as a weakness to exploit. That logic held when a small cluster of satellites carried most of the load. Proliferated low Earth orbit (pLEO) constellations now spread capability across thousands of spacecraft, so each interceptor imposes a high marginal cost on the attacker while barely denting the network as a whole.
Orbits also cannot be partitioned, since debris from a kinetic strike endangers every spacecraft at that altitude, including the attacker’s own, and narrows its later freedom to maneuver. A space war is therefore more likely to be a drawn-out contest of jamming, countermeasures, and replacement launches than a single exchange of fire. In a long fight, finite interceptor stocks would run down early, as the United States found when it reportedly used about a quarter of its upper-tier missile defense interceptors in a 12-day conflict with Iran, and the side that struck first would be left exposed.
| An “Orbital SEAD” campaign uses jamming, cyber operations and, where needed, lasers that temporarily dazzle imaging sensors to blind parts of an adversary’s kill chain during a strike without creating debris. |
The pursuit of total orbital dominance follows the same logic as Golden Dome, the proposed homeland missile shield whose space-based interceptor layer would cost too much and could not stop a major attack, two missile defense experts recently argued. Trying to make US satellites invulnerable, or to shut every other actor out of the domain, runs into the same limits of cost and physics.
The real target in a space war is a military service, and any single satellite is only one part of the system that service relies on. That system runs from spacecraft through ground stations and data links to the terminals in users’ hands. The Space Force’s 2025 planning framework reflects this by treating attacks on the orbital, link and terrestrial segments as distinct options.
Orbital suppression and adversary adaptation
Counterspace operations are changing because the architectures they target have spread out. Navigation constellations such as Russia’s GLONASS (24 satellites) and China’s BeiDou (37 in service) concentrate capability in a few dozen expensive spacecraft, most of them in medium Earth orbit (MEO) and, in BeiDou’s case, some in geosynchronous orbits. Against systems like these, direct-ascent anti-satellite (DA-ASAT) missiles offered a plausible way to degrade service over a region, and the Defense Intelligence Agency assesses that China probably intends to field ASAT weapons able to reach as high as geosynchronous orbit.
Megaconstellations pose a far harder problem, since SpaceX had more than 11,000 working Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) as of mid-October 2026, according to Jonathan McDowell’s tracking. Spending millions of dollars per kinetic kill vehicle against a network built to route data around lost nodes buys little military effect. As launch grows more responsive, destroyed satellites can be replaced in days or weeks instead of months or years, which makes interceptors a poor investment.
A better historical parallel is the suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. SEAD is judged by the aircraft it keeps alive more than by the radars it destroys, and knocking a radar off the air for a short time was often enough to open a window for a strike package. In space, the equivalent would be an “Orbital SEAD” campaign that uses jamming, cyber operations and, where needed, lasers that temporarily dazzle imaging sensors to blind parts of an adversary’s kill chain during a strike without creating debris. The Space Force’s Meadowlands jammer, accepted for operational use in June 2026, is one tool built for this kind of work.
In practice, Orbital SEAD would go after ground-station downlinks, uplinks, and crosslink relays with jamming and cyber intrusion. Because nothing breaks apart in orbit, the United States and its partners keep the use of the same altitudes once the fighting stops. Ukraine already offers a preview, with Reuters reporting in July 2026 that Russian units had begun fielding jammers against the Starlink terminals Ukrainian crews use to steer long-range drones.
Mitigating reconstitution bottlenecks through allied integration
The line between offensive counterspace (OCS), which seeks to degrade or destroy an adversary’s space capabilities, and active defensive counterspace (DCS), which maneuvers to protect and shield friendly spacecraft, is blurring. A credible US posture should shift investment away from destructive OCS interceptors and toward active DCS and orbital resilience.
| Deeper cooperation with European and Asian commercial launch providers would spread the supply chain across many countries, complicate adversary targeting, and ensure that an adversary cannot freeze US reconstitution simply by threatening Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg. |
Kinetic counterspace stockpiles would also run into hard industrial limits, with solid rocket motor (SRM) production already a well-documented bottleneck. Consolidation between 1995 and 2017 shrank the US SRM base from six firms to two, now Northrop Grumman and L3Harris (through Aerojet Rocketdyne). Newer entrants such as Anduril, Ursa Major, and X-Bow are trying to scale up, but the two incumbents remain stretched by simultaneous demand from tactical missile lines and the Sentinel ICBM program. Every kinetic interceptor would compete for the same casting lines, specialized tooling and propellant chemicals, including ammonium perchlorate, for which American Pacific Corporation is the only US source.
A military cannot claim space superiority if it cannot replace orbital losses under fire, and launch timing works against fast replacement. We call this constraint the “space tyranny of distance.” A rocket headed for a particular orbital plane has to wait until Earth’s rotation carries the launch site under that plane, which can hold a mission on the ground for hours.
American launch also hinges on a single provider, with SpaceX accounting for roughly 90% of all Western launch mass to orbit, according to Ars Technica. Falcon 9 was grounded twice in the summer of 2024 alone, and any fleet-wide grounding would stall the American launch pipeline. The alternatives are in no position to absorb a surge. The Space Force has kept ULA’s Vulcan off national security missions since a solid rocket booster anomaly in February 2026, and a May 2026 explosion destroyed a New Glenn rocket and wrecked Blue Origin’s only operational pad. A 2025 Government Accountability Office report found federal range infrastructure strained by the rising launch rate, and slow pad turnaround at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg Space Force Base, would further limit how quickly the United States could recover in a crisis.
A further option lies in what one of us has defined as the “space littoral,” the band of near-space and very low Earth orbit (VLEO) between roughly 20 and 450 kilometers. In the most recent batch of national security launch orders, SpaceX’s missions averaged about $143 million each and ULA’s about $214 million. Sounding rockets flown from ranges such as Poker Flat in Alaska, White Sands in New Mexico, and Wallops in Virginia can lift sensors through the lower littoral, though each flight is suborbital and lasts only minutes. Higher in the band, small launchers can place inexpensive, short-lived satellites into low orbits on short notice, as the Space Force showed in 2023 when it put its Victus Nox satellite into orbit 27 hours after issuing launch orders. Neither option replaces heavy lift, but both offer a way to restore some sensing and communications while the main ranges are congested.
That logjam makes allied launch integration a strategic necessity, since allied ranges such as Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand, SaxaVord in Scotland and, for suborbital flights, South Australia’s Koonibba Test Range would let the US military work around the geographic limits on launch timing. Deeper cooperation with European and Asian commercial launch providers would spread the supply chain across many countries, complicate adversary targeting, and ensure that an adversary cannot freeze US reconstitution simply by threatening Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg.
The commons, attribution, and strategic action
Outer space is a shared global commons, and reckless behavior there has lasting consequences. China’s 2007 SC-19 test against its own Fengyun-1C weather satellite produced more than 3,000 tracked fragments, and spacecraft including the International Space Station have had to maneuver around the remnants, with US military satellites still dodging them years later. Operating in a domain this crowded requires high-fidelity space domain awareness (SDA), because hostile acts can be disguised as space weather, hardware faults, or accidental collisions. Without fast and reliable attribution, deterrence fails, since an adversary that expects to mask or deny its aggression has little reason to hold back.
| If Washington stays fixated on an orbital Pearl Harbor, it will keep over-investing in fragile offensive counterspace systems at the expense of staying power. |
Deterrence in space depends on clear thresholds and reliable attribution, backed by a mix of denial and punishment capabilities. Reported Russian work on an orbital nuclear anti-satellite weapon shows what is at stake. A nuclear detonation in orbit would damage unhardened satellites in direct line of sight and pump up the Van Allen radiation belts for months, degrading commercial, scientific and neutral countries’ satellites along with military ones. A strike of this kind could trigger a global economic shock without causing a single casualty on Earth.
The United States and its partners need clear norms for maneuvering in orbit, especially as countries including France, Japan, and India develop “bodyguard” satellites that can shield other spacecraft and respond to threats. Any US escorts used for active DCS would need transparency and pre-announced operating thresholds. By convening open talks on reducing space threats, Washington could shape the rules for future conflict in orbit. Clear norms would make it less likely that defensive maneuvers are mistaken for preemptive attacks, lowering the risk of accidental escalation while making it easier to hold aggressive actors publicly accountable.
The first step is for Space Systems Command to diversify its launch partnerships by speeding certification of alternative heavy- and medium-lift providers, including allied international sites, so that no single provider accounts for more than 65 percent of surge capacity by the end of 2028. Second, the Space Force must move research and development funding away from destructive kinetic counterspace projects and toward orbital maneuver, defensive shielding, and on-orbit servicing, with the aim of flying active DCS escorts alongside high-value assets by 2027. Third, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment must invest in domestic SRM production, qualifying a second US source of ammonium perchlorate and expanding automated propellant casting capacity by 2028. Finally, Congress must appropriate dedicated funds to upgrade and automate national launch ranges, cutting pad refurbishment and turnaround times for reconstitution payloads to under 48 hours.
America’s acknowledgment of weapons in orbit makes the quality of its strategy more consequential. The value of those weapons will depend on whether they open real military opportunities while the United States and its allies keep their own ability to operate. If Washington stays fixated on an orbital Pearl Harbor, it will keep over-investing in fragile offensive counterspace systems at the expense of staying power. Space control in practice will come from Orbital SEAD that suppresses adversary systems long enough to open windows of advantage, because permanent ownership of the domain is out of reach. The side that can absorb losses and put new satellites in orbit fastest will hold space superiority, whatever happens in the opening salvo.
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