Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Book Review: Space and the Warfighter – How Space Technologies Transformed U.S. Military Actions;  Spacehistory101.com Press (2023); 232 pages; softcover; $28.97.

I recently returned from the Space Foundation’s mega-symposium in Colorado Springs, a meeting that highlighted U.S. military space prowess and issues of warfighting.

The reader will greatly benefit by taking a read of this informative volume, one that takes you into the history, background, and evolving U.S. Air Force thinking regarding military conflict in space.

Anchored primarily in past military operations, such as Desert Shield and Desert Shield, and noting the formation of the U.S. Space Force, the book features contributions by leading military historians.

Space has become a vital part of the national defense plan of the United States. The message is that use of space systems for warfare in the past was not as understood, nor appreciated as they are today. Desert Storm did involve the full arsenal of military space systems – the first large-scale integration of space systems in support of warfighting.

This book not only underscores the history of utilizing space for military means, but also the progression and organization of space doctrine and policy.

Image credit: U.S. Air Force/SSgt Vanessa Valentine

I was particularly drawn to what influence the 9/11 attacks in September 2001 had on the application of space systems and also the need for security of those assets. To this point, protection of launch facilities, including at that time space shuttle operations like the mission of STS-108. That flight of Endeavor was the first space shuttle launch following the September 11 attacks.

Space and the Warfighter spotlights military need for early warning, communications, satellite-gleaned weather data, as well as positioning, navigation and timing capabilities. For instance, roughly 100 satellites supported military operations in Afghanistan and the surrounding region; use of the Global Positioning System (GPS) has become omnipresent over time.

In an afterwords section, this fact is flagged: “The two Gulf Wars, and the decade separating them, generated and demonstrated a revolutionary transformation in American warfighting – a transformation in which space-based communications and [Positioning, Navigation and Timing] PNT, among other systems, used capabilities originally conceived and developed for strategic purposes to support theater or tactical operations.”

This has fundamentally changed, the book continues, with the U.S. military now relying heavily on orbiting space systems “in an increasingly congested and contested domain.”

For more information on this book, under the SPACE 3.0 Foundation, go to:

https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_30%3ASpacehistory101.com+Press