Benevolent Hegemon

Space capabilities contribute significantly to all aspects of our daily lives, from multi-national banking and urban planning, to worldwide telecommunications and robust materials distribution operations, to tactical and strategic military applications. The data and information from space has become critical to our way of life. Specifically for the United States military, space capabilities are force multipliers to our global warfighters. Therefore, protecting these capabilities is paramount and must be a national priority with a foundation built upon international cooperation and augmented with a few critical passive protection devices. Our national space protection strategy must not follow the historical pattern of problem solving that the United States Air Force and intelligence community have used. The United States Air Force was built upon a foundation of technology superiority. No matter what the problem, we turned to technology for the solution. While this has worked through our limited history, this reliance on technological solutions cannot be the sole influence for our space capability protection. We must first change the lens through which we view space protection by focusing on cooperation, not technology, as our primary method of problem solving. Second, we must take the moral high ground and lead the international community in establishing peaceful rules for space operations.