The Battle Past: Preventing and Profitable the Coming Struggle in House

Vital text for developing and understanding space warfare
Szymanski and Drew have done something incredible with this text. This book is a critically important work that examines space warfare across the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. Most importantly, It is the first serious attempt at articulating the principals of war and the operational art in the context of space. As many readers in this field have seen, there are several prominent works on space strategy, and many works examining the possible tactical application of various space weapons – but none of these existing works seriously examine the operational art, or tactical actions in the context of actual maneuver. Without an understanding of how operational art bridges strategy and tactics, practitioners of space warfare will be deficient in synchronizing tactical actions in time and depth to achieve strategic aims. This book is a must read text for ANY practitioner of military arts to better understand the emerging field of space warfare.

Space operational art
The book is jam packed with doctrine and best practices of military space operations at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. It is like a joint publication on steroids.

Amazing insighrs
Succinctly written, easy to understand, incredibly insightful, overall 10/10!

Some useful tidbits, but misses the mark
Overall, a decent primer of the intersection between traditional space operations and the science and art of warfare as learned by terrestrial practitioners over the millennia. The authors have clearly put a lot of thought into how traditional joint concepts apply to space, and vice versa.However, I was left scratching my head several times. The authors spend a significant portion of the book proposing additions to joint symbology to better align commanders to the space environment. Another significant chunk is dedicated to tactical and operational concepts and definitions, and how space relates. It’s clear they’ve spent a lot of time considering hundreds of different scenarios and what types of information must be organized, shown succinctly, and communicated across the joint force.But little justification is given for WHY space fits in the way the authors think it does. They start with joint and army doctrine and find space examples that fit. Indeed, as space doctrine takes root, the community should take lessons learned from other domains (and fit into the joint fight). But it would be much more powerful if they started with how space conflict could work, what’s different about it, how technically hard it is, and finally what parallels exist in other domains that help inform it. The book defaults to Army definitions and doctrine when it goes beyond the scope of JP. Couldn’t carrier defense doctrine from the Navy be applicable? Or aircraft strike roles? To paraphrase some USSF officials, “space is not special, but it is unique”.More egregiously, I’m not sure the authors fully understand orbit dynamics. To give a few discrete examples:1) Much attention is given to an altitude vs inclination plot that helps visualize the amount of energy it takes to transit between satellites. The authors often draw boxes around groupings of satellites that are (in terms of energy) close to each other, that may fit within a particular zone (see 2). For example a grouping of sun-synchronous satellites at 600-900 km altitude and 98-99 deg inclination. The argument is made that any satellite in that sun-synchronous zone could reach everything else with “relatively little change in velocity … 300 feet/second of delta-v”. Except that RAAN also exists, which makes the problem 3-dimensional rather than two (putting aside for a second eccentricity and argument of perigee for eccentric orbits), where two objects in that “cluster” could be more than 46,000 ft/s apart if RAAN is off by 180 deg.2) Several definitions are given to help break the space AOR into manageable chunks. This is commendable, as this reader hasn’t seen a good way to break it down that makes sense under geopolitical, military, and orbit dynamic considerations. However, the mark is missed on the orbit dynamic front here. As an example, the “Close Attack Engagement Zone” is defined as an attacking spacecraft to be within “10 kilometers or less or 20 minutes or less from its target”. There is no distinction for orbital regime, as 20 minutes in LEO is ~20% of the period vs ~1% for GEO, or why 20 minutes was chosen at all. Warning timelines should be based on response timelines, but no attention is given to what types of response are possible or on what timelines they could occur. The distance metric also limits the scope to satellites that require very close approaches to complete their attack.3) Beidou 1D is given as an example of a potential “zombie” satellite near GEO that appeared to have been disposed of but was exhibiting odd behavior. As evidence, they cite that the vehicle’s inclination was becoming “more regular”, which is revealed in a plot to mean it was decreasing. Which of course is to be expected, as natural perturbations will cause inclination to decrease when inclination is ~4.6 deg and RAAN is ~280 deg, as part of the ~50 year cycle caused by third body effects.4) An example of a potential “Double the Trouble” attack is one of a direct ascent anti-satellite carrying not one but two kinetic kill vehicles. The second is held in reserve if the first failed to accomplish its mission. This is an intriguing concept, except that the tactic given is to “hid[e] in a debris cloud for a few days”, which would be impossible for a direct ascent ASAT on a ballistic trajectory.5) Very little attention is given to the technical and tactical challenges of RPO (or any other space engagement). In one limited example, a plot gives a “typical” RPO ingress as distances in some undefined xyz reference frame. The authors note that RPOs have a “tendency … to have a first, close approach” that could be meaningful for defense against an attacking satellite, followed by the desired, longer-term close approach RPO distance some time later. Besides the fact that the actual ingress trajectory is not shown, RPO ingress trajectories are almost entirely mutable (although Kepler still gets a vote). If the mission planners wanted to have multiple close approaches, that’s well within the realm of possible. But tactical objectives, timelines, constraints and restraints might drive an ingress without that first close approach.If the intended audience is space professionals who need some help with joint concepts (and who can fit in their own examples of how space applies to those concepts), this book might be useful. For anyone else who wants to know how space fits in to the joint fight, I don’t see the benefit.