The Current Events Room
A Strategic Pivot to Outer Space
Here is an interesting article about the current state of global great power competition. Russia is carving out a power base in the Arctic and is continuing its role in the Middle East and North Africa.
China is militarizing the South China Sea and continuing with its Belt and Road inititive.
The US seems to be trying to challenge Russia and China where they are strong, and the US is relatively weak. How about the US shift focus on a domain it has dominance in: space. If the US can control the high orbitals, it no longer matters about Russia or Chinese strength on land or sea.
Read the rest of the article at the link.In an era of increasingly sharp great power competition, Russia, China, and others are moving aggressively, pivoting to secure new strategic locations in the hopes of carving out exclusive spheres of influence. In this expanded competitive space, Russia is prioritizing military, economic, and strategic development into the Arctic and increasing its presence in the Middle East and Africa via its adventures in Libya. China is moving ahead with its One Belt, One Road project, seeking to connect to South and Central Asia and beyond while continuing its inexorable push to secure the South China Sea. Here, a massive, militarized island-building campaign is solidifying its de facto control of energy reserves and establishing fortified bases from which to defend and control transit routes for oil and gas and project power deep into Southeast Asia to intimidate other claimants.
In response, U.S. military strategy asserts that it, more than any other nation, can expand the competitive space, seizing the initiative to challenge competitors where it has advantages and where adversaries lack strength. For the United States, expanding the competitive space should focus on changing the game by leveraging national strengths and, more importantly, expanding the possibilities available to the world in the same manner that DARPA’s development of the internet set the foundation for the modern global information economy.
However, this call to strategic thinking has mostly gone unheeded, with the U.S. focusing on defeating competitors where they are strong and seeking to project military and strategic power into the teeth of prepared adversary defenses. In a zero-sum view of the world, committing the U.S. to squalid contests over control of certain geography and ever-more-depleted reserves of fossil fuels, U.S. relative decline is not a risk to be managed, but an inevitable consequence of a cramped and static world view. To effectively expand the competitive space, the United States needs its own strategic pivot, but not to defend or seize any particular terrestrial geography.
The new Defense Space Strategy is a good start, setting conditions for U.S. military advantages in space and shaping strategic competition there. However, the impact of space will be far wider. As such, the U.S. should incorporate space development in a comprehensive way, emphasizing industrial presence in outer space for broader economic and strategic purposes. It should initiate and accelerate a decades-long process of relocating heavy industry and energy production off-planet and feeding that industry with resources gathered from deep space. After years of tinkering with information technologies, the U.S. should get back into the business of heavy industry, building an ever-larger off-world economy capable of supporting growing wealth and prosperity on Earth.
Such a pivot would allow the U.S. to counter the small-scale terrestrial land and maritime grabs of China, Russia, and Iran, and disrupt scarcity-based geopolitical competition on Earth.
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