{"id":56282,"date":"2025-11-20T08:21:18","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T16:21:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=56282"},"modified":"2025-11-20T08:21:18","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T16:21:18","slug":"dominating-everywhere-space-yet-another-frontier-for-megalomania","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/20\/dominating-everywhere-space-yet-another-frontier-for-megalomania\/","title":{"rendered":"Dominating Everywhere: Space, Yet Another Frontier for Megalomania"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from Bracing Views<\/a> with the author\u2019s permission.<\/i><\/p>\n

American exceptionalism and megalomania, combined with threat inflation, creates a toxic brew that drives trillion-dollar war budgets and global violence. I was reminded of this as I reread a review I wrote in 2009 about U.S. designs on space dominance. Ambitions to dominate space led to the creation of America\u2019s \u201cSpace Force\u201d by President Trump in 2019. I didn\u2019t predict this, but note below the discussion of space visionaries within the Air Force who aspired to a new armed services branch dedicated to space dominance and exploitation. Indeed, the new service\u2019s symbol took its inspiration from \u201cStar Trek\u201d insignia.<\/p>\n

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When it comes to \u201cnational security,\u201d nothing succeeds like excess. Boldly go!<\/p>\n

Anyway, here are a few thoughts from my review as written in 2009:<\/p>\n

Did you know that in the 1950s and 1960s the U.S. military seriously considered building a base on the moon for nuclear-tipped missiles? In \u201cBeyond the Blue Horizon,\u201d William E. Burrows cites Air Force General Homer A. Boushey\u2019s remark in January 1958 that:<\/p>\n

The moon provides a retaliation base of unequaled advantage. If we had a base on the moon, the Soviets must launch an overwhelming nuclear attack toward the moon from Russia two to two-and-one-half days prior to attacking the continental U.S. \u2013 and such launchings could not escape detection \u2013 or Russia could attack the continental U.S. first, only inevitably to receive, from the moon\u2014some 48 hours later\u2014sure and massive destruction. (27)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Boushey\u2019s vision of the moon as the ultimate U.S. nuclear missile site to safeguard and even to effectuate the policy of MAD, or mutually assured destruction, is only an extreme manifestation of the Air Force\u2019s official policy to \u201cdominate\u201d the realm of space, \u201cthe ultimate high ground.\u201d The belief that we had to arm the moon first, before the Soviets beat us to the lunar high ground, was driven \u201cby the same combination of inadequate intelligence, paranoia, hubris, and consequent political over-reaction that got this country into the current quagmire in Iraq\u201d (33), Burrows concludes.<\/p>\n

Boushey may have been more bellicose than most, but consider this official proclamation \u2013 presented as an uncontestable truism \u2013 by General Lance Lord, Commander of Air Force Space Command, in 2006: \u201cSpace Superiority is the future of warfare. We cannot win a war without controlling the high ground, and the high ground is space.\u201d (15) One might add a coda to Lord\u2019s remark, to the effect that one may also lose<\/em> a war while controlling, and even dominating, the \u201chigh ground\u201d of space.<\/p>\n

Space is most assuredly of vital importance to the United States. The U.S. relies on space for reconnaissance, surveillance, communication, intelligence, targeting, weather, and force application more than any other nation. U.S. exploitation of space enables its military goal of \u201cglobal reach, global power.\u201d In military jargon, U.S. assets in space are essential force multipliers.<\/p>\n

That said, is space truly \u201cthe ultimate high ground,\u201d as the U.S. military claims? Here, I think, analogies and metaphors mislead. Space is neither a ridge line to be seized and held, nor is it an \u201cocean\u201d to be patrolled by starships. Instead, the ancient Greeks had it right when they thought of space as a unique realm, one that is altogether different from the terrestrial sphere.<\/p>\n

As a realm, space is implacably hostile to humans. Therefore, the cost of sending humans into space and keeping them there is enormous, with the ultimate return on investment questionable, even negative. As Alex Roland notes in a provocative paper that concludes this volume, efforts to create and station \u201cspace warriors\u201d in earth orbit would be analogous to producing a new breed of ICBM silo-sitters, the difference being that these space warriors \u201cwill cost ten times as much and they will be sitting ducks [for enemy attack] instead of secure moles.\u201d (221) The most sensible and cost-effective way to safeguard critical space assets is not by militarizing and weaponizing space, Roland argues, but by seeking political solutions with rivals such as Russia and China.<\/p>\n

Taking the polar opposite view is Everett C. Dolman, identified in this volume as \u201cAir University\u2019s first space theorist.\u201d[1]<\/sup> For Dolman, the U.S. must be prepared, physically and doctrinally, \u201cto project violence from and into space.\u201d Command of space means building weapons suited for space and its active exploitation, a position he supports by citing Alfred Thayer Mahan\u2019s theories on control of the seas. Dolman even argues that other nations\u2019 fear \u201cof a space-dominant American military will subside over time.\u201d A hegemonic U.S. would be a pacific U.S., Dolman suggests, leading to a world that would be \u201cless threatened by the specter of a future American empire.\u201d (124)<\/p>\n

One wonders whether Russia or China would be so sanguine as to cede complete space supremacy to a hegemonic U.S. empire. But Dolman is unworried; instead, he implores the U.S. to seize the \u201chigh ground\u201d of low Earth orbit while it is still (mostly) uncontested.<\/p>\n

Yet is it not more likely that aggressive moves by the U.S. to dominate space will only generate countermoves by rivals, leading to an arms race in space? In his insightful Harmon Memorial Lecture that kicks off this volume, Roger Launius identifies a growing bellicosity in recent U.S. space policy.[2]<\/sup> Since 1995, he notes, the U.S. \u201chas been blocking a movement at the United Nations for an official prohibition of weapons in space despite its widespread support in other quarters.\u201d (15) Effective exploitation of space during the Cold War, Launius notes, \u201crested on a doctrine of sanctuary, a disallowance of weapons in space, and the right of all nations to use it [space] without interference. From Eisenhower to President Jimmy Carter, this was an inviolate approach.\u201d (19) But a more aggressive stance came with Ronald Reagan and the Strategic Defense Initiative (\u201cStar Wars\u201d) in the early 1980s, in the context of renewed Cold War competition.<\/p>\n

Yet, even with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. military continued to insist on options to \u201cweaponize\u201d space. The reasons for this are not explicitly explored by this volume but can be read between the lines. One is interservice, and even intraservice, rivalry in the context of Dwight D. Eisenhower\u2019s Military-Industrial Complex. The Air Force has fought a long battle with the U.S. Navy and Army for control of space, a battle the self-styled \u201cAerospace Force\u201d has largely won.[3]<\/sup> It involved the hyping of the space mission as uniquely efficacious for global power projection.<\/p>\n

Even as this battle was being fought, another one was in progress, and is arguably still being contested, within the Air Force itself, as shown in David Spires\u2019 contribution to this volume. Space visionaries within the Air Force always took second fiddle, first to the dominance exercised by Strategic Air Command (SAC) bomber pilots, and later to the dominance exerted by Air Combat Command (ACC) fighter pilots. To compensate for their second-class status, space specialists within the Air Force came to see themselves as a new cadre of Billy Mitchell\u2019s, a visionary yet misunderstood minority at the mercy of a hidebound old-guard. Intra-service competition amplified by feelings of persecution bred hyper-aggressiveness and the concomitant tendency to over-sell an idea, including, in this case, the need to dominate and even to weaponize space to defend and advance vital national interests.[4]<\/sup><\/p>\n

The American military\u2019s need \u201cto harness the heavens\u201d is surely also a byproduct of our cultural fascination with technology and its putative virtues, such as precision, control, even a god-like vision of the world (incorporated in DoD efforts to gain \u201ctotal information awareness\u201d for commanders, and shown with deceptive clarity in recent Hollywood movies like Eagle Eye<\/em> and Body of Lies<\/em>). A more critical discussion of America\u2019s love affair with technology and space, including the U.S. military\u2019s almost psycho-sexual desire always to be on top \u2013 always to \u201cdominate\u201d the high ground \u2013 would have enhanced this volume.<\/p>\n

It has become something of a truism that U.S. efforts to secure and exercise \u201cglobal reach, global power\u201d are ultimately enabled by U.S. space power. Both today and in the future, what that may mean is that those on the receiving end of American power will naturally see U.S. space dominance as something other than benign \u2013 indeed, as something to be challenged and overthrown.<\/p>\n

*The book being reviewed here was \u201cHarnessing the Heavens: National Defense through Space,\u201d edited by Paul Gillespie and Grant Weller, published in 2008.<\/p>\n

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[1]<\/sup> We still await a Jomini, a Clausewitz, or a Douhet of military space theory. The best repository for current Air Force thinking on space is the Air & Space Power Journal <\/em>(http:\/\/www.airpower.au.af.mil\/); the summer of 2004 and 2006 issues of this journal were specifically devoted to space.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/sup> The keynote address at these symposia is known as \u201cThe Harmon Memorial Lecture\u201d (the Harmon is also given in years which lack symposia). The first thirty Harmon lectures are available in The Harmon Memorial Lectures in Military History, 1959-1987<\/em>, ed. Harry R. Borowski (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1988). All extant Harmon lectures are also available on-line at http:\/\/www.usafa.af.mil\/df\/dfh\/harmonmemorial.cfm<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/sup> Within the Air Force, the idea of an \u201caerospace\u201d force dates back to 1958, if not earlier.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/sup> In the mid-1980s, the author served in A.F. Space Command, witnessing this attitude at first-hand. The author also wishes to note that he served at USAFA for six years and worked on three Military History symposia (1990; 1998; 2002).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author\u2019s permission. American exceptionalism and megalomania, combined with threat inflation, creates a toxic brew that drives trillion-dollar war budgets and global violence. I was reminded of this as I reread a review I wrote in 2009 about U.S. designs on space dominance. Ambitions to dominate space led to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[758],"class_list":["post-56282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"0","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56282"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56288,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56282\/revisions\/56288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56282"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=56282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}