# New Frontiers, Old Realities  ## Metadata - Author: Everett Carl Dolman - Full Title: New Frontiers, Old Realities - Category: #articles - Document Tags: #china-space-program #politics & society #spst563-w3 - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/361250987 ## Highlights - Geopolitics looks to geographic or Earth-centered physical and spatial characteristics for its explanatory power.3 The unit of analysis is the state. Its location, size, resources, and population are placed in the context of political ideology, sociocultural values, and technology to assess the dominant forms of war in a given time. The manipulation of this knowledge is called *geostrategy* —a state-dominant assessment of the geospatial bases of power in plans or strategies for continuing military, economic, diplomatic, and sociocultural advantage. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5w6haedfaqsq6vy5w96y6mx)) - The essential disconnect between West and East in the conduct of war is in the difference between action and timing.12 The Western strategist too often seeks to force change through positive steps. Analyses focus on the likely response to specific activities and assessments of whether more or less force is necessary to accomplish change. The future is constructed wholly through the effort and interplay of action. To the Eastern strategist, proper war-making is a matter of timing. Balance of force is not a single calculation but a continuing one. Power is a function of capabilities, position, and morale—just as it is in the West but it is also a result of numerous immutable and sometimes unknowable forces. Structure dominates agency. Rather than force a change through positive actions, the Eastern strategist bides time until the moment to strike is ripe. Indeed, the gardening analogy is a strong one in Chinese military writings. No matter how much effort one puts into growing a crop—learning how to garden, preparing the soil, tending the plants there is no benefit in harvesting too early or too late. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5w6q3eegrcbmeb0zjz7ds3t)) - Seizing the initiative and securing low-Earth orbit now, while the United States is dominant in space infrastructure, would do much to stabilize the international system and prevent an arms race in space. The enhanced ability to deny any attempt by another nation to place military assets in space and to readily engage and destroy terrestrial antisatellite capacity would make the possibility of large-scale space war or military space races *less* likely, not more. So long as the controlling state demonstrates a capacity and a will to use force to defend its position, in effect expending a small amount of violence as needed to prevent a greater conflagration in the future, the likelihood of a future war *in* space is remote. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5w8976xakmeg5jv6rxbbr4e)) - Geopolitics is in ascendance because it provides practical blueprints for action to those who perceive the world in realist terms. Halford Mackinder confirmed the primary tenet of geostrategy. To dominate the battlespace, it is necessary to control the most vital positions. If the most vital positions cannot be controlled, then they must be contested. The opponent cannot have uninhibited access. This simple dictum, known by every strategist and tactician but articulated so clearly by Mackinder, is the essence of the geostrategist's logic. Control is desirable, contestation is imperative. This dictum applies to every medium and theater of war. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5w8af4cvx1vwf6gmv4y3bzv)) - The coming war with China will be fought for control of outer space. Although its effects will be widely felt, the conflict itself will not be visible to those looking up into the night sky. It will not be televised. Most will not even be aware it is occurring. It may already have begun. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5w6dreje3y4n7s2cwj04gfm)) - Almost 2,500 years ago, Thucydides foresaw the inevitability of a disastrous Peloponnesian war due to "the rising power of Athens and the fear it caused in Sparta."1 Indeed, whenever an extant international order is challenged by a rising power, the reigning hegemonic authority is obligated to respond. Such conditions are relatively rare in history, but when they occur, the resulting war is not for minor spoils or border modifications, ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5w6efdereeej5jehb5ej5z9)) - The resurrection of geopolitics as a valid body of military theory is in full swing. By applying the tenets and dicta of geopolitics to the current age with a focus on space activities, I hope to contribute to its revival. That classic geopolitical thought should require resurrection means that it has gone through a period of disfavor and decline, a history that will require further examination. For now it is enough to assert that geopolitics collapsed of its own weight, from the misuse and abuse that followers subjected it to by taking its less-defensible precepts to their extreme ends. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5w6gfxkdh6fq30m7ek4gtbr)) - *Geopolitics* describes the sources—the what—of state power; *geostrategy* explains the how. Neither provides the underlying rationale, the why. That requires a broader theoretical perspective. The one that dominated the architects of geopolitical thought clusters under the rubric of realism. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5w6j0mtqahvwp0vpptc1cqy)) - For example, Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that in the modern era, great power required the possession of a navy capable of projecting influence [ 80 ] Strategic S tudies Q uarterly ♦ S pring 2012 globally.7 It was time, he asserted near the end of the nineteenth century, for the United States to develop a maritime force equal to its economic clout, throw off its cloak of isolationism, and take its rightful place at the forefront of nation-states. Mahan was an American nationalist, to be sure, but his theories applied to any state in a similar position. Great power leads to great responsibility, he reasoned, and America was abrogating its obligations by failing to lead. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5w6jzvjd44q19yh8qebh9y2)) - Sea power, Mackinder argued, in ascendance with the development of reliable oceangoing shipping after 1500, was by the beginning of the twentieth century ceding maneuver dominance to mass-force land power as the technology of the railroad created relatively fast and inexpensive internal lines of supply and communication. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5w6kwt3smn5qwr2620kmvkp)) - The essential strategic view that confounds cooperation in space is paradox. The Western mind sees transparency and openness as the surest way [ 82 ] Strategic S tudies Q uarterly ♦ S pring 2012 to peace. When one state can effectively monitor another, fears of surprise attack are mitigated, and the tendency to overestimate a potential opponent's capacities and intentions is minimized. With transparency, the security dilemma is obviated and cooperation is possible.11 But transparency as a confidence-building measure is a purely Western mode of thought. To an Eastern strategist, letting an opponent know precisely one's strengths and weaknesses merely invites attack. The key to stability in this view is uncertainty—not knowing how strong or how weak an opponent is and never, under any circumstances, revealing one's own strengths or weaknesses. The more sure the knowledge, the more crafty the countervailing plan, and the more likely its success. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5w6nzahjsv363avrx04js3b)) - Following the primary dictum of classical geopolitics, if one cannot achieve or sustain control, then it is vital that one's potential adversary cannot achieve or sustain control. This is called *contestation* . ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5w7vs19t88rh6mdp5ywh0e9)) - *Contestation* is the ability to block or deny access to a domain. Critically, contestation does not give the capacity to use a domain; it only inhibits. This is why, to a military strategist, control is a vital concept. Control may be general or limited to specific times and places, but without the ability to get into the domain and operate there, the strategist cannot use the domain to create effects. Thus for every military domain, control is possible only from within the domain. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5w7yhq7dmts5a3pyaxa04kr)) - Where will we get the money for this space weapons capacity? It will not come from school budgets or foreign aid programs. It will not come at the expense of health care reform or corporate bailouts. It will come at the expense of conventional military capabilities on the land and sea and in the air. There will be fewer aircraft carriers and high-dollar fighter aircraft and bombers. If the United States deploys space weapons capable of targeting the earth, relatively slow-moving ships and aircraft will become conceptually obsolete, instantly vulnerable to space weapons. As we scrounge money for space lasers and exotic kinetic-kill satellites, the systems these space weapons make defenseless will be scrapped. More funding will come from current ballistic and antiballistic missile development and deployment, as global ballistic missile defense from space is more cost-effective and practically effective than comprehensive groundor sea-based systems. And most importantly, it will come from personnel reductions—from ground troops currently occupying foreign territory. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5w81pwmzwb5vhe1ef34mjqm)) - These missions do not detract from the primary purpose of the weapons but complement the goal of space control. For example, nuclear-powered space-based lasers could, in theory, clean up debris from high-traffic orbits—good target practice for their operators. Assured access to space provided by a robust space control force could pave the way for clean, permanent nuclear and toxic waste disposal, as such items currently stored on Earth could be sent into the sun. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5w82zkm4e5p7tj5dq6370ks)) - China's ultimate goal appears to be to assert its regional supremacy and achieve coequal (if not dominant) status as a global power. Control of space is a critical step in that direction. Without its eyes and ears in space to provide warning and real-time intelligence, the United States would be in a painfully awkward situation should the PRC put direct military pressure on Taiwan. To those who argue that China is as eager to avoid a damaging war in space as any other space-faring state, especially given its increasing integration into the world economy and dependence on foreign trade for its continuing prosperity; do not discount the capacities of its authoritarian leadership. This is the same regime that embraces the deprivations of government-induced cyclical poverty to spare its populace the moral decadence of capitalist luxury. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5w85zacxq66kab932x76n9a)) - This reasoning does not dispute the fact that US deployment of weapons in outer space would represent the addition of a potent new military capacity, one that would assist in extending the current period of American hegemony well into the future. Clearly this would be threatening, and America must expect severe condemnation and increased competition in peripheral areas. But such an outcome is less threatening than another, particularly illiberal authoritarian state doing so. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5w888kpc52r0fysj3pm2x0t))