The result was a deactivation of many then-orbiting satellites, both American and Soviet. One early test of electronic space warfare, the so-called Starfish Prime test, took place in 1962, when the United States exploded a ground-launched nuclear weapon in space to test the effects of an electromagnetic pulse. Similar planning in the United States took the form of the Blue Gemini project, which consisted of modified Gemini capsules that would be able to deploy weapons and perform surveillance. The history of active space warfare development goes back to the 1960s when the Soviet Union began the Almaz project, a project designed to give them the ability to do on-orbit inspections of satellites and destroy them if needed. ( October 2011) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Įarly efforts to conduct space warfare were directed at space-to-space warfare, as ground-to-space systems were considered to be too slow and too isolated by Earth's atmosphere and gravity to be effective at the time. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources.
This section needs additional citations for verification. In April 2019, the Indian government established the Defence Space Agency, or DSA. In 2019 India conducted a test of the ASAT missile making it the fourth country with that capability. The Russian Space Force, established on August 10, 1992, which became an independent section of the Russian military on June 1, 2001, was replaced by the Russian Aerospace Defence Forces starting December 1, 2011, but was reestablished as a component of the Russian Aerospace Forces on August 1, 2015. International treaties are in place that attempt to regulate conflicts in space and limit the installation of space weapon systems, especially nuclear weapons.įrom 1985 to 2002 there was a United States Space Command, which in 2002 merged with the United States Strategic Command, leaving the United States Space Force (formerly Air Force Space Command until 2019) as the primary American military space force. Space warfare in fiction is thus sub-genre and theme of science fiction, where it is portrayed with a range of realism and plausibility.Īs of 2022, no actual warfare is known to have taken place in space, though a number of tests and demonstrations have been performed. The scope of space warfare therefore includes ground-to-space warfare, such as attacking satellites from the Earth space-to-space warfare, such as satellites attacking satellites and space-to-ground warfare, such as satellites attacking Earth-based targets. This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars of military and strategic studies and to those with an interest in space strategy in particular.Space warfare is hypothetical combat in which one or more belligerents are situated in outer space.
Yet by expanding a naval strategic framework to include maritime activities-which includes the interaction of land and sea-the breadth of issues and concerns regarding space activities and operations can be fully encompassed.Ĭommander John Klein, United States Navy, uses Sir Julian Corbett’s maritime strategy as a strategic springboard, while observing the salient lessons of other strategists-including Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Jomini, and Mao Tse-tung-to show how a space strategy and associated principles of space warfare can be derived to predict concerns, develop ideas, and suggest policy not currently recognized. It examines why both air and naval strategic frameworks actually fail to adequately capture the scope of real-world issues regarding current space operations. Air Force doctrines, the book argues that space-based weapons don’t imbue superiority. This new study considers military space strategy within the context of the land and naval strategies of the past.Įxplaining why and how strategists note the similarities of space operations to those of the air and naval forces, this book shows why many such strategies unintentionally lead to overemphasizing the importance of space-based offensive weaponry and technology.Ĭounter to most U.S.