A new report by the Center for American Security says that the United States’ current military strategies are well known by near-peer adversaries and need to be updated. Chris Dougherty, senior fellow at CNAS and co-author of the report, says that domains thought of as ‘sanctuaries’ are rapidly becoming threatened.
“For a very long time, we’ve assumed that nobody will attack in space and we could put our satellites wherever we chose… If you think about wars now against a potential competitor like China or Russia, space will increasingly be contested,” Dougherty said. “It will be a domain of warfighting and so our satellites and our thinking have to reflect that lack of sanctuary. The question is, do we want to fight to regain sanctuary in a place like space in the air or on the sea. Or do we want to accept that against a really competent and capable adversary like China and Russia, attaining the level of sanctuary we had perhaps during the Gulf War really isn’t an attainable goal?”
