Crisis Stability in Space: China and Other Challenges

Information is the lifeblood of U.S. military strength, making the space assets that transmit this information to distant forces extraordinarily appealing targets—especially when those targets are vulnerable. Space has become a critical component of U.S. security, chiefly through satellites that generate and transmit vital information that dramatically increases the effectiveness of U.S. weaponry and military decision-making. The U.S. economy depends on space information as well. In a crisis, the United States and a space-capable potential adversary such as China would likely face an unstable, high-stakes environment that is neither familiar nor well understood.

Understanding space in the context of crisis stability requires grasping its strategic landscape, including how deterrence functions or fails in a crisis and what factors strengthen or weaken that deterrence. Interdependencies between space and other domains are enormously complicated, and their exploration is essential to understanding twenty-first century strategic crisis dynamics.

Space asset vulnerabilities provide an adversary with dangerously attractive incentives to pre-emptively attack in a crisis. In such a scenario, each side would confront the choice of striking first with all its assets in place, knowing that a conflict is beginning; or ceding the initiative, absorbing a first strike, and making a ragged retaliation against an opponent fully expecting such a response.

In “Space and the Evolving Chinese Military,” Dean Cheng identifies how China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) sees the ability to exploit information as a potentially decisive factor in future conflicts. This stance prioritizes the development of superior abilities to exploit information in battle while disrupting similar utilization by potential adversaries such as the United States. National economic development is China’s top priority, but this objective can only be pursued on a strong foundation of security. Chinese leaders’ explicit enumeration of establishing space dominance as a PLA mission reflects the importance of space in its national security. The PLA considers space to play an important role in the rapid collection, accumulation, and transmission of information, which are all essential tasks in military operations and other areas