While a civilian employee of the U.S. Air Force in the 1990s, I participated in Department of Defense (DOD) futures wargames to evaluate potential future technological threats to the national security of the United States and its allies. My area of focus was space technologies.
After several years of participation it was apparent that the growing likelihood of space warfare was not well understood within DOD. To help broaden this understanding, I wrote a fictional space warfare scenario stretching twenty years into the future. It was written as a series of news reports documenting key events that lead up to a successful enemy attack against the United States—a space Pearl Harbor!
The scenario was approved for unlimited public release and was published online in 1995 on a U.S. Air Force website. The title was “Pearl Harbor II”.
With the growing public awareness of the threat of hypersonic weapons, I am republishing this story almost exactly as it was released 27 years ago. A couple of minor changes, noted in the story, were made and new images were added to illustrate the types of systems being discussed.
The story is published as a chained series of pages. The total reading time is under an hour. (For those DOD employees riding the subway to work in DC, it is something to read on the way.)
After reading this, you can decide if the potential for space warfare is being taken seriously within DOD.
For more information, please take a look at: Military Space Forces: The Next Fifty Years.
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James Michael (Mike) Snead is an aerospace Professional Engineer in the United States, an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and a past chair of the AIAA’s Space Logistics Technical Committee. He is the founder and president of the Spacefaring Institute LLC (spacefaringinstitute.net) which is focused on space solar power-generated astroelectricity and the astrologistics infrastructure necessary to enable the spacefaring industrial revolution that will build space solar power energy systems. Mike Snead has been involved in space development since the mid-1980s when he supported the U.S. Air Force Transatmospheric Vehicle (TAV) studies, the National Aerospace Plane program, and the Delta Clipper Experimental (DC-X) project. In 2007, after retiring from civilian employment with the Air Force, he began to study the need for (and politics associated with) undertaking space solar power. Beginning in the late 1980s, he has published numerous papers and articles on various aspects of manned spaceflight, astrologistics, and energy. His technical papers are located at https://www.mikesnead.com and https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mike-Snead/research. His blog is at: https://spacefaringamerica.com. His eBook, Astroelectricity, can be downloaded for free here. He can be contacted through LinkedIn or through email sent to spacefaringinstitute@gmail.com.