Land, sea, and air—those are three environments where wars are waged. That is why the United States, like most countries, has three branches of armed forces: an army, a navy, and an air force. But with the onrush of technology, a new battlefield looms: outer space. So far, no nation stations weapons in space or deploys effective weapons on Earth with the intended purpose of threatening satellites. In the jargon that Mike O’Hanlon understands so well (and, mercifully, avoids in his own prolific writing), while space is not “weaponized” it is militarized. Today the U.S. Department of Defense uses space assets far more than ever before. Satellites, employed primarily in the cold war for strategic communications and for nuclear targeting and arms control monitoring, are now
very much the instrument of the tactical warfighter.
