The Satellite Went Dark
Imagine you're a Space Force commander at the operations center just outside Denver, and one of your missile-warning satellites — the kind that costs several billion dollars to build and launch, sitting more than 22,000 miles above the equator — just goes dark. No warning. No gradual degradation. One minute it's watching for ballistic missile launches threatening the homeland or overseas bases, and the next, it's nothing but silence on your screens.
There are two possibilities here, and neither one is comforting. Maybe a mysterious spacecraft that's been maneuvering nearby finally did something — disabled it, destroyed it, got too close in a way that fried its systems. Or maybe something just broke. Space is unforgiving, and satellites fail. They always have.
But here's where the decision-making gets ugly: how do you tell the difference? Was it an intentional attack, or just another sad piece of hardware giving up the ghost? If it was hostile, who did it and why? And if it's a failure — is there even a way to wake the thing back up?
These aren't hypothetical questions for people who game out disaster scenarios for a living. They're the exact problems that occupied a two-day workshop at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies earlier this year, and the answers — or more accurately, the gaps in the answers — are deeply unsettling.
Fifty Experts, One Problem: Nobody Agrees on What Counts as War
Charles Galbreath, a retired Space Force colonel who now runs the institute's space studies program, pulled together about 50 subject-matter experts for the workshop. Retired Air Force and Space Force officers. People from government offices. Industry folks. Academics. The report came out of it was co-authored by Galbreath, retired Air Force Col. Jennifer Reeves, and Kyle Pumroy.
The whole point was to understand how a conflict in space might actually manifest — and what the US, its allies, and its partners could do to handle it. Not in theory. In practice.
And the first thing they ran into was this: there aren't really widely accepted definitions for what constitutes conflict in space. None that everyone agrees on. So when something happens up there, decision-making gets slower. Less certain. More reactive. That's Reeves's words, and she's not being dramatic about it.
Think about that for a second. In an era where the time between detecting a threat and needing to respond is measured in minutes, ambiguity isn't just an inconvenience — it's a liability. A dangerous one.
The Scenario That Started It All
The workshop facilitators didn't start with nuclear war. They started smaller, which is how these things usually do.
A "show of force" from China: docking one of its satellites with an inoperable European commercial satellite and repositioning it without any prior coordination. Sounds technical. Sounds almost bureaucratic, if you're not paying attention.
But that's exactly the point. These actions live in a gray area — not quite an attack, not quite routine operations. And that ambiguity is where the real danger hides.
From there, the scenarios escalated at predetermined intervals — days 0, 45, 60, 90, and 180 — with hostile activities attributed variously to China, Russia, Iran, and an unidentified actor. Some attacks happened in space. Some on the ground. All of them designed to test how commanders would respond when the domains blur together.
Because here's what makes space conflict so hard to think about: everything is connected. Terrestrial infrastructure enables space operations. Space-based assets support military activities on Earth. An attack on one inevitably affects the other. You can't isolate the domain.
The Attribution Problem
Let's talk about attribution, because it's the central problem in all of this.
Before leaders can choose a credible response, they need confidence about what happened. Who did it. How broad the effects were. Whether those effects were actually intentional.
"This ambiguity creates opportunity for our adversaries," Reeves said. And she's right. When you can't confidently say who did something — or whether it was deliberate at all — you give adversaries exactly the cover they need to keep pushing.
GPS jamming is already happening. Cyberattacks on space-related infrastructure are already happening. Sometimes it's difficult to even figure out who's doing them. And when you can't attribute, you can't respond proportionally. You can't deter.
This is why the workshop kept coming back to one question: where does the threshold live? At what point does an action necessitate some proportional reaction? And who gets to decide?
Boiling the Frog
There's a phrase that kept coming up in the workshop discussions: "boiling the frog dynamic."
It's not a new idea, but hearing it from people who actually have to make these decisions gives it weight. Repeated non-kinetic attacks — jamming, lasing, cyber effects — can gradually normalize hostile behavior if they're not clearly identified and addressed over time. You get used to it. The threshold keeps moving. Before you know it, you're accepting things as routine that would've triggered a crisis response six months ago.
"If pressure is applied slowly and persistently, the threshold for response keeps moving," Reeves said. "We risk seeding initiative to competitors who are shaping the environment before open conflict ever begins."
The core takeaway is almost painfully simple: if we want space superiority in crisis or conflict, we have to think and act earlier in the competition phase. Not when things go dark. Earlier.
But here's what makes it hard: the actions that normalize us to hostility are individually small. Jamming this satellite. Lasing that sensor. A coercive maneuver where an asset gets moved up next to a non-aligned one in orbit and nobody's quite sure why. Individually, they don't feel like war. But collectively? They're reshaping the environment.
When Multiple States Coordinate
The workshop also explored something even more troubling: coordinated behavior by multiple states.
Participants viewed this as significantly more escalatory than isolated actions by a single actor — especially when space-related pressure occurs alongside other regional or global crises. The escalation paths they gamed out were brutal in their logic:
GPS jamming. Then a missile strike in the Middle East. Then an attack on bridges at Cape Canaveral, grinding launch activity to a halt at what's basically the world's busiest spaceport. Each step escalates. Each step makes the next one easier to justify.
"The challenge of maintaining escalation control simply becomes much harder," Reeves said. And that's an understatement. When you're dealing with multiple actors coordinating their pressure across domains, the decision space explodes. You don't know which action to respond to first. You don't know if responding to one will trigger the next.
This is where war games become essential, not just for planning but for building institutional muscle memory. Because the alternative is improvising under fire — and space doesn't give you a second chance to get it right.
What the Report Recommends
The workshop didn't just identify problems. It offered recommendations, and they're worth paying attention to.
First: strategic messaging matters. US officials need to define norms of behavior and set the narrative for future conflict. There needs to be an active campaign about what's acceptable, what isn't, and why space capabilities are critical to national security and daily life.
"Are they just unmanned vehicles, or are they critical elements of our infrastructure that are interwoven to every aspect of our daily lives? I vote for that one," Galbreath said. And he's right.
Second: the Space Force is already moving toward more resilient architectures. Mega-constellations for communications and surveillance. The idea is simple in theory — if our architectures are more survivable and we can reconstitute capability faster than an adversary can degrade it, we reduce any first-mover advantage.
"Legitimacy, capability, resilience, and speed all work together," Reeves said. That's the bottom line.
Third: establish benchmarks for interpreting hostile behavior in space. Eliminate some of the ambiguity and delay in formulating response options. Give commanders clear thresholds so they don't have to guess.
Fourth: continue conducting war games. Enhance protection of US space infrastructure on the ground and in space. Consider improved radiation shielding for satellites in low-Earth orbit to protect against potential nuclear detonation — yes, that's a real recommendation.
Fifth: better define the importance of satellites. Not just as hardware, but as critical infrastructure.
We're Already in the Gray Zone
So where does that leave us?
"It was really one of the clearest takeaways from the workshop that so many people believe we're already there," Reeves said. "We're already in the gray zone because of these hostile actions, and they're genuinely hostile, but they're more isolated. They happen every so often."
Jamming. Lasing. Cyberattacks. Coercive maneuvers where assets get moved next to non-aligned ones in orbit and nobody's quite sure why. Individually, they don't cross the traditional threshold for war. But collectively? They're normalizing behavior that should be unacceptable.
"We're getting used to these things happening," Reeves said. "These actions are being normalized to some extent, so now, where does that line live? Where does the threshold live that an action necessitates some proportional reaction? I think this deserves a lot more conversation on the policy level than we may be giving it. We're just boiling that frog."
The workshop opened with a mysterious spacecraft maneuvering near a missile-warning satellite. It's a vignette — a hypothetical designed to provoke thought. But the reality it points to is already here. The question isn't whether we're in a gray zone. It's whether we'll keep treating it like one until the fog lifts — or until something goes dark for real.