The United States National Security Apparatus, Multipolarity, and the Rise of Commercial Space

In 2019, the U.S. national security community crossed a Rubicon by declaring that space was “a war-fighting domain” and undergoing a major reorganization, including the creation of the U.S. Space Force, the first new military branch in over 70 years. Military and intelligence functions had played an important role in the U.S. space enterprise since its earliest days, but these had traditionally been less visible than America’s civil and scientific endeavors led by NASA. However, the tandem forces of a rising commercial space sector and a growing list of other spacefaring nations – especially an increasingly adversarial China – were shifting the space landscape, with potentially dramatic impacts on Earth, in-orbit, and beyond. How should the U.S. military pursue its mission in the progressively more crowded, congested, and contested space domain?