The Evolving United States Space – Enabled Reconnaissance – Strike Complex: Theory, Practice and Challenges

This article explains ways in which robust space capabilities have become an indispensable foundation for success in employing modern airpower. It considers how military space capabilities fit into conceptual models for modern warfare and uses these models to review evolution of the global reconnaissance-strike complex that first emerged in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm. It discusses specific ways space capabilities support each step in the find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess “kill chain” and outlines the many space systems the United States has deployed to modernize and improve these capabilities. The article concludes by addressing critical current space security challenges including growth in orbital debris, increasing worldwide deployment of counterspace capabilities, increasing efficacy of commercial space systems and the role of the billionaire “space barons” that control these systems, the threat of a nuclear detonation in low-Earth orbit, and the prospects and implications of the United States developing and deploying proliferated space-based interceptors capable of boost-phase intercepts as called for in president Trump’s Iron Dome for America Executive Order.