War In Space: How The Air Force Is Preparing, And What Might Go Wrong (From Forbes)

Faced with rising threats to satellites and space infrastructure, the U.S. Air Force is rethinking its whole approach to military space.  Doctrine is being rewritten, training curricula are being revised, and investment priorities are shifting to emphasize resilience.  Clearly, the time when U.S. warfighters could simply assume the availability of overhead assets has passed, and space is becoming a contested domain.  Achieving resilience will take many years and tens of billions of dollars, and there is no guarantee war will not occur before the transition is accomplished.  As it contemplates how to field more robust space capabilities as soon as possible, the Air Force needs to avoid falling for fashionable but shallow ideas about how readily commercial space concepts can be applied to national security missions.  The private sector measures value much differently than warfighters do, and the one thing all commercial-space systems have in common is that they lack resilience.  I have written a commentary for Forbes here.