Though rarely featured in public demonstrations of military capability, satellites are indispensable to the defense of America and its allies. They offer near-immediate warning of missile launches, enable strategic communications, and provide precise positioning and timing information for navigation and weapon guidance, to name just a few examples.
The Golden Dome for America—a multi-domain, layered missile and air defense architecture that includes satellites for sensing, tracking and countering advanced missile threats—will deepen America’s dependence on space assets for security. Our adversaries, fully aware of the asymmetrical advantages provided by superior space capabilities, have been demonstrating the ability to put critical U.S. assets at risk for the last two decades.
“The visibility, predictability and reconstitution timelines associated with current military space architectures favor the actor that goes on the offense first,” U.S. Space Force Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations, said in March 2023. “This is an unstable condition that works against deterring attacks on space assets. We can’t have that.”
Gen. Saltzman has proposed a space deterrence theory called “Competitive Endurance,” which he describes as the ability to protect U.S. space assets while denying an adversary’s hostile use of its space assets. He listed several features of an architecture capable of achieving Competitive Endurance, including disaggregation, diversification, proliferation and maneuverability.
