Why does the Department of Defense engage in space situational awareness? Simple: to deter conflict.
Loverro similarly asserted that deterrence by denial is the best model. He wondered whether an attacker would risk international condemnation for creating debris in space, in reference to a 2007 event in which China conducted an anti-satellite missile test that caused a great amount of threatening debris. He also rhetorically\u00a0wondered whether adversaries would risk the ire of U.S. partners if they have to attack a French satellite in order to deny the U.S. the ability to image its territory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Denying the benefit of attack \u2014\u00a0while making it politically difficult to wage an attack\u00a0\u2014\u00a0and perhaps utilizing economic sanctions or retaliatory actions at a lower level is a better way to deter attacks in space than completely depending on retaliatory strikes, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The DoD has invested in measures and partnerships for SSA, Hill said, such as radar data to support observations and upgrading command and control systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, the agency can never have enough computational power to understand that data because, simply put, space is really big. Hill noted that there are trillions of cubic miles that are part of this battlespace, highlighting the immense challenge of SSA and thus deterrence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Pentagon engages in space situational awareness to deter conflicts in space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":40045,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":80,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[8,80,39,26],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3268],"class_list":["post-14033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c2-comms","category-satcom","category-satellites","category-special-reports"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"QRHYHFIXQVDDXLCULNRV5PTR2E","arc_canonical_url":"\/special-reports\/satcom\/2017\/03\/08\/why-does-dod-care-about-space-situational-awareness-one-word-deterrence\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n