Some 21 years ago I started work at Defense News, working for their brand new editor. Today, the redoubtable Theresa Hitchens, space pundit, NATO and nuclear war expert, former UN diplomat, and my longtime colleague joins Breaking Defense to report on space. Theresa will add the rest of Air Force under her wing over the… Keep reading →

Much of the debris will burn up in the atmosphere in weeks — but the potential for a global arms race in space won’t disappear so soon.

WASHINGTON: Yesterday was what we’ll call Space Day for the Trump Administration, with perhaps the most national attention ever paid to military and intelligence space in public by the senior officials of a White House and the military. Here’s a summary of the news from the meeting of the reborn Space Council and a later… Keep reading →

SPACE SYMPOSIUM: Offensive war in space is one of the truly hot button defense policy issues. Advocates say it is inevitable. Opponents say it violates the ideal of a cosmos marked for exploration and peaceful coexistence. Some say war in space would violate the Outer Space Treaty, which bars nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass… Keep reading →

    Star Wars it ain’t, but the Pentagon is increasingly anxious over threats to its satellites, as we’ve reported frequently in recent years. But in this op-ed, scholars Joan Johnson-Freese and Theresa Hitchens argue that war in space is dangerously overhyped. — the editors In the last two years, we’ve seen rising hysteria over… Keep reading →

The next administration must do a “strategic rebalancing” of means to achieve what have been consistent national space security ends (goals): stability, sustainability and freedom of access. But a significant challenge to both reaffirming ends, and determining and implementing means, is structure, as we point out in a recent Strategy Paper for the Atlantic Council. While space is… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Air Force Space Command has created a blueprint for fighting and winning wars in space, known by the innocuous title of the Space Enterprise Vision. The existence of the plan is not classified but many of its working elements are. The SEV is “an all-encompassing look at all the things we need to do to create… Keep reading →

COLORADO SPRINGS: The United States has tripled its spending on offensive space control and “active defense” weaponry since 2013 in the last two years. It plans to spend “a majority” of  $150-plus million pool of funding on them over the next five years, part of a broad and fast-moving shift in US space priorities. The relevant budget line rose from $9.5… Keep reading →

COLORADO SPRINGS: Citing “increasing threats” against America’s satellites,  Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work said here today that the US military “must be able to respond in an integrated, coordinated fashion” to attacks on US space assets and he used the charged term “space control” in making his argument. “While we rely heavily on space capabilities,… Keep reading →