A Debate About Weapons in Space: For U.S. Military Transformation and Weapons in Space

No state relies on space for its military and economic security more than the United States, a reliance that grows daily more precarious. The United States Air Force has been charged with protecting American and allied space assets in peace and in war, and, at the direction of civilian authority, denying access to space to adversaries in times of crisis and conflict. It is a stark reality of international politics that great power shapes the arena in which state interaction takes place, and yet the exercise of power should be neither capricious nor arbitrary. The United States should endeavor at once to establish military supremacy in space, as it has already done at sea and in the air, for the purpose of stabilizing peace and extending into the foreseeable future its ongoing period of liberal hegemony.