On 20 July 20, the Wavell Room interviewed Dr Bleddyn Bowen on his recently published book ‘War in Space’. Dr Bowen is a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Leicester and leading thinker on space power.
Dr Bleddyn Bowen Podcast – ‘War in Space’
Andy: [00:00:00] Dr Bowen has just written a book called ‘War in Space’, which has been published by the Edinburgh University Press. And he’s kindly joined the Wavell Room today to talk about that book. So, Bleddyn, why did you write this book?
[00:00:13]Bleddyn Bowen: [00:00:13] Well, this book started as a PhD thesis which I passed in 2016. So that’s, yeah, well over four, four and a half years ago now and, since then, it was always a plan to turn that into a book. The last sort of four years or so has been heavily revising a lot of it taking out a couple of chapters putting in some new ones but the core of the book, and the theory is pretty much from the PhD thesis really and of course in academia, we must publish these days now, so it was very much part of the whole career progression and planning. There’s just so few good books out there about military space and international relations and space. So that was very important, actually, to start adding to that. They’re very sparse shelves on, on any space, security collections anywhere, you know, you, you know, even look at the good section in Shrivenham in the, in the JSCSC library. The space section is the biggest space section I’ve seen in any single library in terms of space, security and policy, but it’s still very, very small relative to everything else that’s held in the library. So there’s a real gap there in terms of having enough weighty pieces of research and writing out there on the subject cause there’s stuff written and articles, you know, all the time, the quality can be all over the place, but also people often don’t remember or notice the stuff that’s published in academic articles as opposed to books.
[00:01:45]Andy: [00:01:45] When I read your book, you kind of opened, with the challenge about, you know, where is the Mahan for, for space theory and, why isn’t there , a theory ,of space power? So your, book has created a new theory of space power, that’s based on seven propositions. Could you , for our listeners who perhaps haven’t had a chance yet to read your book, can you take us through those seven propositions?
[00:02:07]Bleddyn Bowen: [00:02:07] Yes. so, I haven’t got the notes in front of me, so I’m doing this from memory now. So the wording might not be exact, but the first proposition is about the command of space. So space warfare’s waged for the command of space. So for any of your listeners who know their sea power theory, there should be a fairly intuitive proposition to understand where, you know, space warfare’s not something that’ll happen for its own sake it has to make a difference for the influence you can exert in orbit and the services you can get from it, and also deny the same to potential adversaries and that then has to make a difference ultimately to the war as a whole, which is happening on earth and the political objectives of the war. So it’s a way of making tactical actions in space relevant in a political and strategic or grand strategic sense. So it’s not something that happens in a political vacuum.
[00:02:59] The second proposition is infrastructural. And that is a fairly sort of unique aspect of space power, because most of the stuff we talk about in space power is about logistics and infrastructure.
[00:03:12] So Omar Bradley will be very happy to talk about space power, because it’s what professionals do as logistics, the amateurs talk strategy. So, as distinct to a lot of the air power, sea power and, you know, wider strategic studies literature, which, you know, does focus a lot on battles. And there is that element of course, to space warfare, but actually taking out satellites or space infrastructure.
[00:03:38] But you have to start with space power based on the infrastructure and support services that satellites provide. So we have about two and a half thousand satellites and that number is going to go up more and more and more with a lot of these mega constellations now, but those services that different countries can draw on and are essential for military as well as economic and scientific and infrastructure purposes as well. And that proposition also tries to row against that first proposition as well, by saying, whilst there are conceptual similarities between space and earth in terms of how we think about war and strategy. Of course, there are very unique things about space that you need space specialists to understand and to make relevant for the generalist. So I do talk a bit about the generalist, some of the specialists and their relationship in that proposition too.
[00:04:28] Proposition three, the command of space does not equate to the command of earth. This is where I upset a lot of people by basically trying to trash the misuse of the concepts of the high ground or the ultimate high ground in space or the centre of gravity. The centre of gravity is a more defensible concept I think if you use it well, but people overuse those concept and do so in quite a slapdash manner. Not everyone of course, but, it’s, it’s quite a rife concept now, specially the ultimate high ground since, the Trump administration started talking about it in the context of their new space force. And it’s an overly simplistic concept that doesn’t really, I mean, it raises too much expectation of what space power can do by saying, you know, if you control space you control the world. Politicians on this side of the Atlantic do say those things as well, and when they get the brief from the military space and it’s not particularly useful comment. That is based on a lot of analogies from sea power theory that people have done to space, but they think that sea power gave maritime empires control of the world as well, which it didn’t. So a lot of the analogies that other people have made from the seat of space have been based on quite a selective or even erroneous, erroneous reading of a maritime military history. Lots of people make reference to Britain in the 19th century as a hegemon as, as a maritime empire, like, well, in base by many measures, it was the most powerful, state or empire in the 19th century. But it didn’t control the world. It wasn’t this, omnipotent power, continental powers could resist and challenge British influence, especially into the latter parts of the 19th century from 1860s onwards, really, as everyone else was industrialising a lot. So it’s putting into that more refined context of, space is very important, but it’s not the silver bullet. In many ways, that was rubbish for headlines or communicating simple things. But, that is the truth and as an academic I’m mostly interested in truths of various kinds.
[00:06:31] Proposition four is basically about trying to visualise what the command of space is and how you influence the command of space. And it’s based on visualising celestial lines of communication and how satellites form choke points, bottlenecks on their routes of travel, different concentrations of traffic form, how you value positions, or there are bad positions in space if you go into the hazardous radiation belts and your spacecraft is unshielded, things like that.
[00:07:00] So there, there are geographic particularities to space, like you have to know, or at least earth orbit and proposition four is about how do we apply concepts of good and bad terrain. Choke points and efficient ways of commanding space, by visualizing lines of communication and space.
[00:07:19] Proposition five then is where I move on from the more blue water, sea power theory based analogies that characterise propositions one to four, and then look at the continental sea power concepts of practices and experiences that then inform space power.
[00:07:35] So the big arguments that comes from the book is that earth orbit is not really a new ocean, which is quite a common metaphor, both for politicians and academia, but rather space is, or earth orbit rather, is a cosmic coastline. It’s a littoral, it’s a flank, it’s an adjunct. It’s not somewhere that’s distant, far away it’s actually quite nearby, well within line of sight for the most part, most of the time or of somebody’s line of sight at all times. And, continental sea power can inform a lot of our thinking about it because everybody else has just done the Anglo American, blue water, imperial approach to sea power as an, as an island, as opposed to looking at continental land powers who do sea power.
[00:08:22] So the experience of France and Russia, the Soviet Union and India and China are very different to Britain, Japan and the United States. So what they do is they look at well, what if space is a flank, not this medium that you have to project power through to reach your goal. What if you share a land border with your adversary and you both have space assets?
[00:08:48] The blue water thinking doesn’t quite get the same messages across and continental sea power also looks at instrumentalising that adjunct of space into what is primarily an earth war. So land powers don’t really care about the sea that much, they’re very, they’re much more instrumental about it. They really want to know what’s worth doing, and then just put the money to do it , even then many fail to do that.
[00:09:12] But, in Britain, for example, you don’t really have to fight to make the case for the Royal Navy. It’s so ingrained in the strategic culture of a, of a, of, of a state like Britain. In India, the Indian Navy is constantly fighting turf wars with the Indian Army and the Indian Air Force, because Pakistan is the obvious threat. China’s the obvious threat. What’s going to come from the Indian ocean. Ah well, it’s about energy trade routes, so those sort of things. And they’re not a spectacular, they’re not about big battles. Similarly, that’s sort of similar to what’s going on in space. We’re not going to get big spectacular battles that will grab the headlines necessarily. Cause we don’t see it, but also because it’s mostly about support and infrastructure. Trade routes, information routes much more esoteric and subtle stuff.
[00:09:59] So proposition five tries to portray that war, logistical and support realities of space into the theory and into the centre of the theory as well. So space as a coastline where you have to conduct strategic manoeuvres to support the war on earth because everybody who is an earth based power values a space power, or earth based space powers. There is no space-based, space-power yet. We’ll see if the fantasies of the evangelists come through probably not in our lifetimes, but you know, they can dream. And there’s a lot more to it, of course, but I’m already rambling.
[00:10:35] Proposition six then is looking at the cultural elements of that continental sea power theory about when the scholar Theodore Ropp, he called continental navies as the ill-favoured stepchildren, you know, the, the neglected military service, you know, the continental Navies cause it was always the army that got the bulk of resources.
[00:10:55] And similarly, you know, space services or the space elements of military services will always struggle to get the resources and win those big arguments or get the prestige or respect, they think they deserve compared to the other established services. And you still see Air Forces today, having that cultural chip on the shoulder, feeling that they’re not given the same respect as the Army or the Navy? Well, it will be even worse for new Space Forces. And of course the American Space Force already has a TV show that is a complete parody and satire of it before it’s actually done anything much. It’s still setting up. So the U S space force really does have that sort of cultural problem.
[00:11:38]So, so proposition six is about the geo-centrism of space power culture. It will be about what happens on earth and space power really has to make itself relevant to earth. So the space cadets need to make themselves useful and relevant, and also understandable to the people who aren’t space cadets, because most people don’t care about space. And I always upset fellow space enthusiasts when I say that.
[00:12:03] Finally, proposition seven then looks at the hard edge of space power. What does space technology mean on the battlefield? And I use the concept of dispersion to try and have a headline idea of what space infrastructure is doing to the modern battlefield.
[00:12:23] So 250 to 300 years of military practices and technologies have increased the size of the battlefield. And in terms of high intensity the most highly complex styles of warfare from the Napoleonic era to today, you can fit concentrate more fire power, more accurately, more quickly, more intensely whilst dispersing your forces more and more and more. Satellites are just continuing that trend by having more networked forces over greater distances, and still being able to concentrate their fire power in time and place.
[00:12:57] And so satellites are imposing that dispersion on the ground, satellites themselves are also dispersed. So when you’re fighting a high intensity warfare, one of the moving parts we have to think about is, how do we respond to the influence of dispersion from the enemy? Because if they see us, they can shoot at us.
[00:13:16] So we have to disperse, but if we have our own space systems, we can disperse without losing our coherence and our efficiency. So a lot of modern warfare will have to think about how and when do we want to protect our own dispersion influence whilst preventing the enemy from imposing dispersion on us.
[00:13:37] So in the final chapter of the book, I apply that and the other propositions to a Taiwan war scenario. And just look at how disparate, how to think about dispersion and concentration in a Taiwan war scenario, because there will be the drive to concentrate somewhere, somehow because there’s always going to be some objective.
[00:13:56] And you’re going to have to concentrate assets and effort at some point. How do you do that against the dispersion of space power you start harassing enemy space systems in one way or another through harassment or destruction. And so that in a nutshell is the seven propositions of theory and I hope I’ve not put anyone off it yet.
[00:14:17] Andy: [00:14:17] I’m sure not. I just want to kind of dig into two of your propositions a bit more. Because one of the things I, I found really interesting and really new in the book was proposition five, of this idea that, that space isn’t an ocean it’s a coastline cause the kind of traditional conception of space from, you know, Star Trek style, you know, style wars is of a, a huge vast space that has vessels that travel through it and therefore the allegory that’s normally made is from maritime theories about blue water and blue water navies and try and transfer that over to space. Whereas you’ve, you’ve said something new, which is that that’s not how to think about space at all, but space is a, is a celestial coastline. So I wonder if you could sort of talk a little bit more about why you think it’s a coastline, not an ocean. And what the implications of that are for, for war and for military power.
[00:15:16] Bleddyn Bowen: [00:15:16] So I think the general maritime analogy is the better one. That’s the blue water thinking is for interplanetary space, essentially, it’s when your found much, much further away from earth, maybe with the moon. I don’t know but we are totally not there, you know? The moon is strategically irrelevant and economically irrelevant that is purely exploration of science for the foreseeable future. So earth orbit is the coastline rather than all of space. And, I think whilst we’re talking in a planetary scale, so yes, it’s big and earth orbit is a very large volume, but when thinking in sort of geostrategic terms, technology and capability is really important because it’s, it means how efficiently in this case, does information travel and earth orbit has, and utilizing your thought with satellite technology has really shrunk the relative size of earth, in terms of delivering or seeking political and economic and military effects. You know, you can bounce communications off a few satellites around the world, and all of a sudden, you know, your message is on the other side of the planet, you know, just an in a, in a second or two.
[00:16:36] And a satellite and low earth orbit will be circling the earth every 90 minutes. It’s covering a lot of ground in very short time. So the idea of space is a very big place is a bit misleading because it’s about what the technology can do and the information it can gather and how it knits together stuff on earth and everything that is in space is done for the benefit of us on earth, being a very selfish species, very selfish people. And most stuff we put on earth is looking back on ourselves, narcissistic perhaps is the word rather than, you know, you know, building more Hubble space telescopes, you know, flooding earth orbit with those rather than spy satellites that are just pointing down towards us rather than out into the cosmos.
[00:17:18]And so I think, that coastal analogy brings the more restricted space a bit more. And I think it reflects the more contestable nature of earth orbit as well because in maritime history, even weak land powers or relatively weak powers could still use coastal defences to check large naval adversaries.
[00:17:41] Now it doesn’t mean that they could definitely stop them. They could definitely cause problems or at least have some deterrent effect, you know, especially in the late 19th century with the sea mines or, specialised coastal attack craft or coastal guns. And that’s what we see today really is a lot of specialized equipment being based on earth that is specifically designed to harass or attack satellites.
[00:18:03] They’re not based in space, not yet, anyway, not for the most part. And we’re just seeing that projection of power from earth into space. And for me that on the highest conceptual level mirrors how land powers can project onto the sea from the land without needing this big blue water navy, because you don’t need to project very far in space to start causing a mess, especially if you’re a nuclear power and say, now you’re North Korea you could really cause some havoc with just a few missiles or a few nukes, the high altitude nuclear detonation. So, so you, so there’s a difference there between wanting to deny space and control space depending on whether you’re that dependent on space systems and whether you just want to cause havoc, there are options open to smaller powers in a coastal setting that there are not in a blue water setting. If you’re going to fight a blue water campaign, you really need a big navy to compete with the other big navy that’s going on, even if it’s just to do a fleet in being, so I’m not even talking big battle here, just even to be able to intimidate or give the slip to the enemies main fleet you need that big fleet. Coastal operations, you don’t need a big fleet to effectively challenge or harass the operations of an enemy fleet. And of course nobody has a big space fleet anyway. So that very first thing about blue water thinking just isn’t there because the satellites and space, they don’t have weapons on them they’re just nodes providing services and data. So, so the blue water thing really has to wait until, you know, where earth is not the only political, economic node of human civilization, really, if and when will ever happen. I don’t know. So, so the coastal analogy opens up our thinking to a lot of actors beyond the big actors, especially just the United States as well, saying there are many options available to smaller weaker powers and small doesn’t always mean weak either. And it’s not just about the big powers and space is contested and various forms of counter space technologies are spreading to the smaller powers, electronic warfare being a classic example as well.
[00:20:12] The sea space power theory has to be relevant to everyone. And the coastal analogy helps bring in that contested and more, I don’t know if democratic is the right word, but more populated, aspect of space, power.
[00:20:27] Andy: [00:20:27] We’ve talked so far at a very, very theoretical level so now sort of jumping to proposition seven, which you described as the hard edge of space power, and, and just so for the, for the benefits of the soldiers, the sailors and the airman who are listening to this podcast, what, what is that hard edge? What does that mean for them?
[00:20:51] Bleddyn Bowen: [00:20:51] So, for the last 30 years, the Americans of course have mastered the sensor to shooter cycle, with precision weapons, precision bombing, and navigation, timing, coordinated, military operations, across vast distances.
[00:21:04] Anyone who’s familiar with the revolution in military affairs literature will know what I’m on about. So, you know, faster, more efficient, more lethal as some people call it forces. And that depends on space systems and that allows you to network more, be more dispersed on the ground. And yet you don’t lose coherence because everybody’s networked together and everybody is still being commanded and controlled, properly through space systems.
[00:21:27] And of course, if you are definitely able to hit any big and obvious targets, then your enemy will scatter or disperse, in response, unless they can take out your own space systems. Cause if they take out your space systems, then you’ve just got highly dispersed but now fairly inefficient and useless military forces that can no longer hit with one launch, one kill efficiency.
[00:21:48] So they might run out of ammunition very quickly and there’ll be disorganised, they wont know what’s happened to their friends, their allies. And they won’t have any depth either because there’s not many of them. So, I use the example of Israel here, for example, the Israeli Defence Forces, which are very small, but very modernised, very efficient and integrated into largely the American military space infrastructure for their precision, high-speed operations.
[00:22:15] So disposition is a starting point for analysis, really, cause of course you have to concentrate, but, for, anyone who’s read Clausewitz you’ll know that you can’t talk about attack without defence and vice versa. And you can’t talk about dispersion without concentration. You know, they are complimentary concepts.
[00:22:31] So what that means is, in practice is that it isn’t immediately obvious, obvious when you should conduct counterspace operations. There are going to be all sorts of calculations for when you might want to engage in anti-satellite operations or strikes. And I apply that to the Taiwan war scenario where proposition seven does dominate most of the thinking and the space Pearl Harbour fear, pervades a lot of talking about a US -China war. My analysis is restricted to open source English language publications here. But a lot of the analysis, which is mostly American on a Taiwan war scenario, actually ignores what Taiwan would be doing in a Taiwan war.
[00:23:17] It’s about, will China be able to wipe out American space systems at the start of the conflict? And you know, some people say, yes, it will be the first thing to happen the Chinese will take out loads of American space systems, it’ll be a space Pearl Harbour, and then the Americans will struggle to assemble a task force to go to Taiwan.
[00:23:36] Some are less sceptical. Of course, if you ask the cyber warriors, they’ll say the first strikes will actually be in cyberspace. And of course, if you ask the hypersonic people, now they’ll say the first strikes is going to be specifically hypersonics against other hypersonics, even though they, you know, they’re not really proliferated at all yet.
[00:23:55]So everybody has their own pet thing that should go first in war. Maybe there’s a masculinity critique to make there possibly, but, in my analysis I look at other other people who sort of descend from the view and, and it’s not to play down the risk of a space Pearl Harbour it is a legitimate concern if you’re in the United States and trying to plan for such wars, but the Chinese and Taiwanese will have reasons to both do counter space early or to hold off on it until a later date because it all depends on what actually happens on earth in the campaign itself. A lot of the people are talking about these anti-satellite warfare. They don’t actually look at the wider context of the war, which I would say is getting back to dispersion on earth. You have to only launch those anti-satellite weapons if you think it’ll make a difference to actually winning that war in Taiwan, which would be to tip the balance of that dispersion effect in one way or another. We know whichever side you’re on and depending on how things can turn out, there can be reasons to hold off on it until a later stage of the conflict, especially if you’re China and if you can take Taiwan without having to hit American satellites. Maybe it’s worth a try because that would be a massive escalation and you would probably alienate most of the international community as well, because everybody’s going to feel the effect of the loss of a lot of American space infrastructure, not to mention then the wider environmental consequences of debris and other things going wrong in space later down the line.
[00:25:29]So there could be reasons to hold off on that. Maybe take Taiwan and then launch space systems, space attacks against the Americans once the task force is about to arrive in Taiwan, when all those US assets will be nicely concentrating around Taiwan, that has exactly when you’d want to launch a massive satellite offensive.
[00:25:48] And then when they’ve gone dark that is when you launch your massive PGM Salvos against those vulnerable and concentrated US surface assets. So it’s about that push and pull of when to hit first in space and as Clauswitz would say, there’s always that after pressure, after any big first attack or that surprise attack, there’s always that after pressure. And that will stop anyone from just going all in at the start without properly putting in. hedges against it going wrong because surprise attacks can go wrong as well. And, everyone knows what happened to the Japanese ultimately after Pearl Harbour don’t they so, you know, so if you’re gonna use that analogy, it’s like, well, if you’re American, there might be some hope, but at the end of it all possibly.
[00:26:31]Andy: [00:26:31] The UK at the moment is developing its base defence strategy, which we found out from the air and space power conference, is going to be nested within a national space strategy. What, what do you think the UK is doing right. And what is it doing wrong when it comes to space power?
[00:26:49] Bleddyn Bowen: [00:26:49] It’s difficult to, to know exactly what they’re doing right because the strategy documents are usually so broad and vague. I mean, they’re, they’re aspirational documents. That’s not to say that they shouldn’t be written and they’re very good in terms of getting the talking points out to ministers and civil servants and, journalists and the wider public audiences.
[00:27:13] But in terms of trying to understand what the priorities are for any state in these documents, it’s difficult to tell because they’re not actually going to tell you what they’re actually planning to do with any of these documents, because all these decisions are so contingent and sensitive behind closed doors.
[00:27:30]They won’t be actually saying spelling out in black and white, we’re actually going to acquire these systems for these reasons and we are going to reorganise this in this way, for these reasons, they never spelled that out in in those documents. So, so I can’t base a critique on any sort of documents that really come out cause it’s more about tone and aspirations. I mean much was made of the American Defense Space Strategy that came out a few weeks ago and again, the most interesting thing in that is really the tone, not the content, because most of these American space policy and strategy documents, they’re pretty much the same all the time in terms of the substance of what the Americans are building and doing, the rest of it is tone and emphasis really but give, give the Americans a crisis and you don’t know how they’re gonna respond anyway so, so it’s not a guide to action either. And that’s true for, for anyone. You don’t know how anyone is going to respond in a crisis, really. But maybe that’s because I’m not a fan of strategic culture, perhaps, I’m much more individualistic in the way I look at things.
[00:28:31] I wait and see now to see what comes out from the UK state, but it’s a statement of intent and aspiration that they’re doing it at all though because it’s only the last 10 years that Britain’s only started doing any sort of official big documentation on space. So it’s a continued high level interest and recognition that space is a thing, that should be looked at. I’d be quite concerned about the concepts that underline any space policy or space strategy, because it’s like having a sea policy or an air policy. We don’t have those, it’s different to having a space strategy, because that is a military thing.
[00:29:10] So you have the maritime strategy. Okay. Space strategy is fine, but we don’t have a sea policy because space is a place it’s not a policy. And when we talk about a national space policy, it’s like, well, can one policy really do science, commerce, industry, diplomacy and the military and intelligence. Like you can’t fit all that into one coherent policy document because space is where all sorts of things happen.
[00:29:39] So, so unfortunately many countries, and I think they have to have a space policy rather than a space industrial policy. A space, commercial strategy and military space strategy, or a, you know, a space diplomacy strategy. They’re all different discreet things. And, and, you know, we don’t have, we don’t invoke the Royal Navy when we want to do some marine science strategy do we. I mean, why, why do we need to have something that brings in the military security stuff when we also want to talk about space science? Do we need to contaminate those discussions by having it into one single space policy? But that’s me going against the grain of most governments and wanting to have a space policy now, but in terms of top level recognition, you know, it’s, it’s a, it just shows space is still of interest to Whitehall and the political class. So, yeah, in terms of what Britain’s doing, doing right, well we heard about Skynet, of course, so continued investments in, in those areas very good ,and, getting more active in participating in Allied, and integrated military operations with the Americans.
[00:30:47] So, so the, the British, alongside the Australians as well are doing a lot more integrating with space command stuff now with the Americans. So that’s good. That’s one of the real assets for the British really is that we really are integrated to a very high level on the military space side there with the Americans. So continuing, if not, enhancing that, is, is one thing that’s done well and right. So, so in terms of what’s not done well, I guess it’s more about a mission, I suppose, in that I’ve not to date seen much discussion about what exactly come, should we be independent in space or more sovereign or operationally sovereign in much like the nuclear Trident system where we’re operationally sovereign on that, but we’re not strategically sovereign because we rely on the Americans for a lot of the systems that underpin it, but the actual pushing of the button, is actually a British decision in the same way with space, in that with Skynet, it gives the British a lot of operational sovereignty in, in many areas, but the British can’t launch it themselves and they rely on the Americans for the wider space situational awareness that surrounds the safe operations of, of those satellites. Of course their operations are outsourced to Airbus as well so, I’m not sure where the MOD is thinking at the moment on this, but I think if the MOD is serious about doing more itself in space or the government is rather directs the MOD to do that, I think bringing Skynet into some uniformed capacity is definitely something that has to be done because you need to have military specialists who can do space operations if you really want to build proper space culture in the UK. British space culture is really defined by integration dependency with others and I’m not sure how far that memo has gone really. And it’s a point I tried to make in an article in 2018, but of course, as I said, nobody reads those or remembers them.
[00:32:51] So, there, there hasn’t really been a full and frank discussion, at least in public, you know, of course there will have been behind closed doors or I hope there will have been about are these dependencies we have on various friends, reasonable. And are there areas we should be investing more in, on a, on a more unilateral basis to plug certain gaps.
[00:33:13] And that’s not an easy discussion to have, but it’s one I would like to see more of perhaps in public anyway. So I know there’s discussions about those things when the British decided to build Skynet for the first time in the late 1960s. So about having to do the satellite ourselves rather than just buying the services from the Americans, because the sovereign comms system was still worth doing, even if it was launched by the Americans cause it really added value and capability rather than just having another place where the Americans could easily snoop on British communications. So that would be, an area to work on is having a clear idea of what sort of dependencies, and this will be a wholesale review of infrastructure.
[00:33:53] It’s a big project, you know, it’s, it’s not looking at specific individual systems and technologies it’s looking at our entire infrastructural dependencies on space from the military side. So I’d be interested to see a lot of debates on that side. Another side, I think as well is, I’m not sure what the FCO thinks it’s doing at the committee on the peaceful uses of outer space and various space arms control for the UN, like the conference on disarmament. So I’m not sure we’re, it’s something that just isn’t spoken about at all in the British side. So maybe they do have it also sussed out and they know what they’re doing I don’t know, that I don’t see much recognition of or speaking about what Britain is doing at these space diplomacy fora. What is Britain’s diplomatic drives and priorities in space. So be interesting to see if that is something that might come out of these new documents especially as a lot of the space professionals and wonk communities now in, in the beltway in DC are really pushing for like a, an anti satellite, kinetic weapons testing ban.
[00:35:02]You know, what’s the British approach to that? Are we going to support the Americans? Why? Are we going to get anything back for it? So, you know, transactional foreign policy is very much in vogue these days. So what’s our diplomacy, what’s our priorities. And are our positions actually reflective of what we want to do now in space.
[00:35:22]So we might be fine in sort of trying to prohibit more kinetic testing in space, but does that mean we want free reign on electronic warfare?
[00:35:31]Andy: [00:35:31] Final question and it’s a tough one your book took eight years to write and I’m going to ask you to summarise its key themes in one minute.
[00:35:39] Bleddyn Bowen: [00:35:40] Okay. So space is not the ultimate higher ground. It will not win wars for you. It’d be very difficult without space, but space is very useful for everyone in different ways. And you have to try and plan to go without it at various times as well and space is not just for the Americans. It’s for everyone.
[00:36:02] Andy: [00:36:02] Thank you for joining us in the Wavell Room today and talking about your new book ‘War in Space’, which is available from Edinburgh University Press.
[00:36:10] This interview was recorded on the 20th of July and I was talking to Dr Bleddyn Bowen who is currently locked down in Leicester but thank you ever so much Bleddyn for joining us.
[00:36:21] Bleddyn Bowen: [00:36:21] Thank you very much.