Capt. Even Rogers had the best job at the first large-scale war games focused on space, conducted by the US military in 2017. He got to be the bad guy.
Most of the military’s work in space had been about maintaining infrastructure in orbit, not reacting to attacks in real time. Worried about deepening tensions with Russia and China in 2016, Congress had asked the Pentagon to up its readiness. Serving in what was then the US Air Force’s 527th Space Aggressor Squadron, Rogers was the Red Team lead — tasked with studying how America’s rivals might fight a war in space and turning those tactics against his comrades to prepare them for potential conflicts.
What Rogers remembers about the first “Space Flag” exercise, modeled after the Air Force exercises that stage aerial combat on a massive scale in Nevada, was that it didn’t reflect the conditions of actual combat as they would have been. To be fair, those conditions would be sitting in front of computer workstations, but these fake workstations weren’t even connected. The US military builds its satellites in siloed programs and hadn’t bothered to ask its contractors for simulators to create realistic combined training scenarios. The joke among participants, Rogers says now, was that they had to cover up the positions of their opponents with sticky notes on a computer screen to avoid cheating.
It would be funnier if the world wasn’t entering a new and more dangerous era of space conflict. The same economic and technological trends that have made smartphones ubiquitous have made access to space cheaper than ever. Thanks largely to low-cost rockets by SpaceX, there were a record 212 launches to orbit in 2023, compared to just 55 in 2005. Government and private investors are spending billions to build new communications and sensor networks in orbit and plotting new activities ranging from in-space manufacturing to tourism. Today, the environment around our planet is teeming with more…
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