"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 36

In this episode: Yes, the United States has a Space Force. Stop Laughing.

January 8, 2024

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 36

Episode 36: Yes, the United States has a Space Force. Stop Laughing.

Meet the newest branch of the American military and learn how life as you know it could stop if it fails to do its job.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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I had an odd experience recently when a bunch of people in the U.S. military and the Pentagon all started telling me to read the same book. I found it odd because the book was fiction. I don’t tend to think of the U.S. Department of Defense as a hotspot for recommending contemporary novels. Yet the book they all mentioned was definitely fiction, sort of a near-future techno-thriller. The story's got sex and violence and international intrigue and lots of popcorn, beach-read-ey kind of stuff in it.

But the novel also got reviewed by the CIA's professional journal Studies in Intelligence, and the book ended up on reading lists assembled for the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army... and at one point Foreign Policy magazine said that "every Army officer should read it." Officials at several U.S. government agencies even invited the authors to give briefings about their novel.

Peter Singer: We were invited to brief everywhere from the White House Situation Room, to the deck of aircraft carriers.

That’s one of the authors of the novel, Peter Singer, who happens to be a colleague of mine at the research institution, New America.

Peter Singer: There were three different U.S. government investigations launched to keep things that happened in the book from ever coming true.

The novel is called Ghost Fleet, and it tells the story of a war in the near future between the United States and China. For most of the story, America took a pretty serious beating from China. It's one of those works of fiction that's rooted very firmly in facts, and it's got a whole appendix full of carefully researched footnotes. There's lots of informed and entertaining speculation in there about how China might defeat U.S. forces in the air and sea, on land, and online.

But the reason the novel kept coming up in connection with this episode was the opening battle of the fictional war begins with China launching a successful surprise attack... in outer space.

Peter Singer: There's a line for the advertising for the old movie Alien, and it said in space, no one can hear you scream. And we start with the idea that the opening battles of World War III will be silent.

[MUSIC FLOURISHES]

Silent but potentially devastating. The scenario that Singer and his co-author August Cole envisioned was China destroying pretty much all of the most important satellites the U.S. currently has in orbit. The attack in the story crippled a shocking amount of the space-based technology that you, I, and the U.S. military use every day. All kinds of information and communications systems that bounce signals off satellites suddenly stopped working.

[MUSIC STOPS]

Peter Singer: It throws people back to the way it was, you know, whether it's in 1980 or even 1945.

James Smith: It's not just plausible. It's a reality in terms of a threat. Just about everything you do from the moment you wake up has some connection to space.

[THEME MUSIC PICKS UP]

That second voice is one of the top officers in charge of the United States Space Force, the part of the U.S. military tasked with protecting space. In a few minutes you'll join a conversation with him, along with a former Pentagon and White House policy advisor who helped create his job. You'll hear her firsthand account of the bizarre origin story of this newest branch of the American armed forces.

Audrey Schaffer: I do remember thinking in the days that followed, like, wait, what? Are we really doing this?

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: Space is a war-fighting domain. We have the Air Force. We'll have the Space Force. So think of that! Space Force!

And you'll learn about just how much modern militaries — and modern life itself — depends on surprisingly vulnerable assets floating above you, out in space.

Audrey Schaffer: We depend on space every single day in our lives.

I'm Peter Bergen, and this is In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES. TRIUMPHAL MUSIC PICKS UP]

[SOUNDS OF LIGHTSABERS]

The notion that there might be warfighting in space — like, real wars that don't involve people named Luke Skywalker — that idea burst into American media in a big way back in March of 2018. All because of this guy:

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: My new national strategy for space recognizes that Space is a warfighting domain, just like the land, air, and sea.

President Donald Trump was giving a speech to a group of U.S. Marines at Air Station Miramar in San Diego, California, when suddenly he seemed to wander a bit off script.

[TRIUMPHAL MUSIC SOURS, FADES]

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: We may even have a Space Force. Develop another one. Space Force. We have the Air Force. We'll have the Space Force… You know, I was saying it the other day, ‘cause we're doing a tremendous amount of work in space. I said, maybe we need a new force. We'll call it the Space Force. And I was not really serious. And then I said, what a great idea. Maybe we'll have to do that. That could happen. That could be the big breaking story. Look at all those people back there. Look at that. Oh that fake news! [CROWD LAUGHS, APPLAUDS]

At this point, Trump jabbed his finger at the journalists filming at the back of the venue, who would be presumably turning his remarks into a story.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: So think of that! Space Force!

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

He was right about his riff being a big story. There were plenty of headlines. And then came the punchlines.

ARCHIVAL James Corden: Space Force. It sounds like what my grandma calls Star Wars.

It didn't help that the name chosen for Space Force personnel — Guardians — Sounded a hell of a lot like a more well-known group of Marvel superheroes:

ARCHIVAL Guardians of the Galaxy: Welcome to the frickin' Guardians of the Galaxy.

And the razzing reached new heights when Netflix put out a space force comedy series, starring Steve Carell.

ARCHIVAL Netflix’s Space Force: Voice 1: You have to go ahead to attack the Chinese base. How do you want to do it?

ARCHIVAL Netflix’s Space Force: Voice 2: Our lead suggestion from the focus group would be to shaving cream the shit out of them, and possibly graffiti the side of their base with ‘China sucks.’

The Late Show host, Stephen Colbert, seemed to take a particularly bombastic delight in mocking the whole thing.

ARCHIVAL Stephen Colbert: Tonight, there's big news about... Space Force! [APPLAUSE AND LAUGHTER]

My favorite Colbert moment came when the famously telegenic astro-physicist, Neil Degrasse Tyson, appeared on his show.

ARCHIVAL Stephen Colbert: Donald Trump is very excited about Space Force. People make fun of it. I, among them.

ARCHIVAL Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah.

ARCHIVAL Stephen Colbert: Why do we need the Space Force? What don't we understand about it, cause you say you're on board.

ARCHIVAL Neil deGrasse Tyson: Well, I just, just cause it came out of Trump's mouth, doesn't require that it then be a crazy thing. Just, I'm just saying.

I love this moment because Tyson wasn't the only person "just saying." It turns out there were a bunch of people in the Pentagon who'd been saying the same thing for years.

Audrey Schaffer: I do remember thinking in the days that followed, like, wait, what? Are we really doing this? Because we had been studying these concepts for several years, and they... really weren't gaining any traction within the Department of Defense.

That's Audrey Schaffer. She was the Pentagon's Director of Space Strategy and Plans before and during Trump's presidency. And she later served as a top space policy advisor in the Biden White House. Schaffer has since left government for a job with a private space company. But she's been working in the space “space” ever since getting an internship with NASA as a college kid during a summer off from MIT. That internship happened not long after the U.S. space shuttle program was canceled in the wake of the fatal Columbia shuttle crash in 2003.

Audrey Schaffer: And I remember this sense from the engineers and the scientists and the program managers down at NASA, that, 'Oh, it's those guys in Washington that are preventing us from returning to flight. You know, they have all the power and we're just stuck here waiting for orders to be able to go back to space.' and I thought, ‘Huh, well, I want to be one of those people in Washington.’

So, that's what she did. She graduated with her degree in aerospace engineering, started working in the Pentagon, and became one of those people in Washington.

Audrey Schaffer: I spent most of my time working in what we would call policy roles, which is overseeing at a very high level what the strategic direction of our military space program should look like. So questions like what kind of satellites, rockets, ground stations, should the United States be acquiring? How should we be thinking about using those capabilities during peacetime, as well as crisis and in conflict? And how does that fit into a broader national strategy for the role of space in advancing America's interests?

By the 1980s, a growing constellation of American military and civilian satellites were orbiting the Earth. And the Pentagon started looking to space as a kind of high ground for national defense.

Audrey Schaffer: The different ways that we use satellites to support military operations is to understand what's happening on the earth and to send information between different places on the earth. So I'll give you some examples. You know, you can collect pretty exquisite imagery from space. You can also think about how a satellite, which is watching the earth, could see heat signatures, for example. So think of a missile being launched that creates a lot of heat, a lot of fire. So if you can track that heat as the missile starts to fly, you can predict where the missile might land and provide warning to your troops. The other piece is sending information from one part of the earth to another. So, the same kinds of satellites that enable you to watch direct TV at your home…

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: …Raf Sanchez joins us now from Israel with the latest. Now walk us through…

Audrey Schaffer: …or that enable a journalist in a remote area to send information back to their news network…

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Aaron joining us now from the White House…

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: Omar Villafranca is in Las Vegas.ARCHIVAL Newscaster 4: James Longman in Tel Aviv for us…ARCHIVAL Newscaster 5: Chris Van Cleave joins us now from Miami.

Audrey Schaffer: …are the same kinds of satellites that can pass information between military commanders and forces in the field.

And the U.S. military had come to rely on space — and the new imaging and communication powers delivered by satellites in space — long before Donald Trump had come anywhere near the White House.

Audrey Schaffer: The first Gulf War is pretty widely known as the first space war. It's known as the first space war because it was the first time that space-enabled military capabilities were used on the battlefield. So think like precision bombs. Think satellite communications to connect forces in the field with commanders back in the United States.

The first Gulf War was also broadcast continuously on CNN.

ARCHIVAL 1990s CNN Newscaster: We've just received, um, some news from Nic Robertson, CNN's, uh, chief satellite engineer here in Baghdad. He's been to the television station in an effort to get some videotape fed out to you.

CNN was, at that point, a relatively new cable network that owed its very existence to satellite technology. As did the American satellite targeting of its “smart bombs” that kept showing up in the news coverage.

ARCHIVAL 1990s CNN Newscaster: And once the air surveillance aircraft, the satellites, once all of the targets have been, uh, identified, then it's relatively easy for the sophisticated computer technology in these U.S. fighter bombers to go ahead and direct the missiles, the bombs to the specific locations, the specific targets…

A word about those smart bombs. Their targets were pinpointed with GPS, or the global positioning system. Back then, it was a brand new group of U.S. military satellites carrying ultra-precise atomic clocks. When some device on the earth’s surface pings several of those satellites, triangulating those timing signals helps determine the device’s precise location on Earth.

ARCHIVAL 1990s CNN Newscaster: We might be getting our first look at some combat video a bit later today. The warplanes involved in Desert Storm were all equipped with cameras to record their assaults. This material will be satellited back here to the Pentagon…

And whether they realized it or not, the civilians watching this “satellited” footage in 1991 were already living in a world that relied on space in even more ways. Commercial GPS units were very expensive back then but lots of everyday information was being delivered via satellite, from their television signals, to long-distance calls to, of course, the weather forecasts.

And in 2007 the world learned that this orbiting infrastructure was pretty vulnerable.

Audrey Schaffer: January 2007 was when China tested a direct ascent anti-satellite missile. And basically, you can think of it as a missile that flies up into space and hits a satellite and causes it to break up into thousands, if not millions, of pieces.

China fired a missile at one of its defunct weather satellites, and many observers took this as a very public message.

Audrey Schaffer: This test that the Chinese did not only was highly visible to the whole world, and demonstrated that China in particular was looking to counter America's advantages in space. It was also pretty seminal in terms of the amount of space debris that it created.

When the Chinese missile blew apart that satellite, the explosion created what's been described as the largest cloud of space junk in history.

Audrey Schaffer: So, you know, if you throw a baseball against a window. If you throw it kind of slow, it might just bounce off and it'll be fine. But if you throw a baseball really hard at your window, it's almost certainly going to break.And so you think about that applied to space and space debris and when things are moving at thousands and thousands of miles per hour even a small little paint fleck is enough to cause damage to a satellite. And so deliberately destroying a satellite and creating thousands of new pieces of space debris in an orbit by the way which is used by the International Space Station. It just creates unnecessary risk.

After a similar anti-satellite missile test by Russia a couple of years ago, astronauts inside the International Space Station were forced to take shelter inside escape vehicles until it was clear that the new debris cloud wouldn't hit the station.

And that earlier Chinese anti-satellite — or ASAT — test was the first time a U.S. rival had really put this risk on the map.

Audrey Schaffer: The Chinese did the test, and it created all this debris in an orbit where these pieces weren't going to reenter for hundreds, if not thousands of years. So it polluted the space environment as well, so I think that was the first moment when people said, you know, we really should be paying more attention to space and its implications for national security. It was a real wake-up call, it did spawn conversations at the highest levels of government about what are we doing to counter this threat from China? Now, I would say there are many people who say it was a wake-up call that we pushed the snooze button on.

The Pentagon may have hit the snooze button, but the U.S. military hadn't stopped relying on satellite-enabled mapping, imagery, and communications. Neither had you or I. As the 2000s went on, GPS satellites and their ultra-accurate clocks became an increasingly crucial system not only for knowing where something was, but also for when something was happening. GPS may be the planet’s biggest and most precise clock. GPS helps the power grid know when to release electricity to your house. GPS helps cell phone towers time the routing of calls. And — crucially — GPS is the source for precise timestamps that enable financial transactions ranging from giant stock trades on Wall Street to millions of little ATM withdrawals across the world.

And since at least 2001, some voices inside the Pentagon were saying GPS and other space systems used by separate U.S. military branches should be put under one umbrella, and be better defended. China had shown how vulnerable satellites could be. But the Pentagon is one of the largest bureaucracies on earth, and change comes slowly. At least it does in normal times.

Audrey Schaffer: To have public policy change you need three factors to line up. You need experts to agree on a solution. You need there to be a general recognition that there's a problem. And then you need the political will to actually go do something about it. And I would argue that in the Space Force, what happened, what changed was you had all three of those factors line up. For years, we've been studying this issue, and I think most experts would agree that the separate military service was the right answer.

Audrey Schaffer: I think, because of that Chinese ASAT test that we talked about earlier, and because of the growing recognition of the role that space plays in military activities, as well as our economic prosperity, and all the ways that everybody uses space every day, there was a recognition that we needed to do more in terms of protecting our nation's interest in space. And then the third element, of course, is the political will. And I don't think you had that before President Trump. And so while I can't speak to why he decided to champion this issue, once he did wake up and say, I want to do something about this national security space problem, all three of those factors fell into line and you had this window for policy change.

So, not long after Trump’s unexpected Space Force announcement in front of those Marines in San Diego, Trump decided to publicly double down and make it all official.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: We must have American dominance in space. So important. Very importantly, I'm hereby directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces. That's a big statement.

Audrey Schaffer: And I do remember watching that event and thinking, 'Oh my God, I can't believe he just said that.' I can't believe this is real. As a career space policy professional, I had pretty strongly held views at the time that you know that had just developed over a career working on these issues. I felt pretty strongly that the creation of the Space Force was a good idea, and so it was sort of unfortunate everyone assumed that, you know, it was a stupid idea, because it really wasn't a stupid idea.

[MUSIC SHIFTS, FADES]

James Smith: I was probably about 18 or 20 years in the Air Force before I spent time on a base with a runway.

That's U.S. Space Force Brigadier General James Smith. He helps run operations for America's newest service branch. Like most Space Force officers, he came up in the U.S. Air Force. He graduated top of his class at the U.S. Air Force Academy. But instead of trying to wrangle his way into the cockpit of an F-16, Smith headed to Boston for graduate school at MIT. There, he wrote a 400-page masters thesis on how to keep constellations of satellites in orbit. And then he put that knowledge to work on a bunch of satellites that are probably beaming signals into your pocket right now.

James Smith: I started on the global positioning system. So this is the system that provides you the navigation data on your phone, when you pull up any map application, it shows that blue dot and this is where you are.

And these days, the agency responsible for operating GPS is… the United States Space Force. The system is a global public service. One of those government resources like interstate highways or mail delivery that's such a ubiquitous part of everyday life that it's easy to forget that it's there.

James Smith: And I was an engineer on that program, and we would manage if a satellite broke something happened in space, we would look at the details and we would figure out, ‘Okay, what went wrong? How could we maybe fix it?’ But interestingly as we were doing that, we never had even the thought that maybe somebody had nefariously caused something to go wrong with our satellite. It just wasn't the nature of the domain at the time.

It was a more innocent time. That would have been back in the early 2000s, before the Chinese anti-satellite shoot-down I mentioned earlier. Back then the U.S. Air Force handled most space jobs, and any talk of a Space Force in the Pentagon was just talk. Before he joined the Space Force, you could say Brigadier General Smith spent his career in the Air Force getting ready. Because pretty much everything he worked on flew at higher speeds, and higher altitudes than any fighter jet.

James Smith: I had done space throughout my career. I had an opportunity to fly some satellites. I had an opportunity to launch some rockets, had opportunity to help build and buy some satellites. So,

Peter Bergen: You've done everything.

James Smith: I wouldn't say everything. I'm still learning a lot day to day. [PETER LAUGHS] But my career had been in space missions, and so, uh,

Peter Bergen: And what did you make of the mockery that greeted the Space Force, at least initially? Which, by the way, seems to have completely subsided.

James Smith: I don't know if it's completely, but, uh… [PETER LAUGHS] Mockery in some sense I thought was good in that it got the message out there. I mean, any news is good news in some sense, right? Or any publicity. I think we still have a lot of work to do as a service to communicate our mission. And so that's why I'm glad we have this opportunity to talk today.

Peter Bergen: Yeah. If you're talking to my about-to-be-12-year-old son, how would you put the mission to him because he would be fascinated to meet you. And he's very excited about the kinds of things you do.

James Smith: Yeah. And I also have the same conversation with my mother as I try to describe to her, what it is I do, but it's simply, we provide some capabilities from space that allows our day-to-day life happen the way we expect it to happen every day. We provide capabilities from space that allow our military to defend our interests around the world.

Space Force is the first new U.S. military branch created in this century. And its culture is still a work in progress.

James Smith: We're coming up on our fourth birthday here in December of 2023 and I would describe the first couple of years a little bit of like a start-up company.

Peter Bergen: Do you see the Space Force having, uh, developing a very specific culture that, you know, 20 years from now, you'll, you'll know a Guardian because a Guardian has this particular vibe or?

James Smith: I do see that coming in 20 years. I don't think we're there yet. While we've been doing this mission, in the Air Force for decades, as you create a new service, there's portions that you need to do to establish a new culture. That's new uniforms. I'm wearing one today.

Peter Bergen: Yeah, as I'm looking at it, it has a tiny bit of Star Trek in it...

James Smith: Uh, perhaps and I think maybe where that connection often comes is there's a symbol called the delta. If you trace back to Air Force Space Command heritage, that symbol, the delta, has been part of that heritage for many years. We do have the angled zipper on this jacket that I’m wearing. If you see our service coat it’s got an angle with the buttons on it and that’s to represent the delta which is that heritage that we’re trying to tie in back to. Interesting in that it's similar to some of the symbols you see in Star Trek. So I think that's where sometimes we get the connection.

Peter Bergen: So what people, facilities, equipment actually make up Space Force?

James Smith: Yes, on the people side, we're the smallest of the services. There’s about between 14 and 15,000.

Most of the U.S. Space Force’s current personnel started their careers holding similar space-related jobs in the U.S. Air Force. And when they switched into the new service, it didn’t leave much of a dent in the Air Force’s more than 300,000 active duty service members.

Peter Bergen: Give us a profile of a typical Guardian, if there is one.

James Smith: I'm not sure there is a typical Guardian.

Peter Bergen: Well, I imagine a bunch of fairly nerdy people, but I mean, maybe that's a cliche.

James Smith: We are probably more nerdy than, uh, some services. [PETER LAUGHS] I don't know, but obviously, it's a very technical career field.

Peter Bergen: Yeah.

James Smith: It's interesting that space is the only domain that we don't really have people in. So it's a domain we're operating in, but other than a few astronauts, there's no people up there. I got into this business because I wanted to be an astronaut, so I wish we were all in space, but, uh, we're not. Most Guardians go day to day, uh, to an operations center, our main locations are Colorado, Florida, and California.

So there aren't any Guardians whose job is to put on a space suit, pick up a space gun, and float off to space war. Space Force jobs look a lot like the fighting done by people in the U.S. Air Force missile command, or in the drone program.

The work may be global in scope and importance — but it's mostly done by rooms full of people sitting quietly at computers. The inside of a base looks a little like an office in corporate finance — tons of screens on every desk, big screens on the walls — it’s just in this office, everyone is wearing military uniforms.

Guardians keep satellites in orbit and keep them sending their essential signals. They also monitor an early warning system for ballistic missile launches against the U.S. or its military. And Guardians also provide communications, weather, and navigation information to U.S. military forces deployed in the field.

James Smith: So the way we communicate or talk to our systems in the domain is through the electromagnetic spectrum or cyber. And so we need some smart cyber individuals that can help defend the domain and make sure that portion of the mission is being accomplished. And then we have intel professionals. And I think as we talk about a new service, this is one of the areas where we've made the most progress.

Peter Bergen: How reliant is the American military on, on space based assets? And how are American rivals really focusing on this issue?

James Smith: I think what you hit on there is the reason we have a Space Force. The Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq, precision weapons —those all relied on capabilities from space to some extent. However, there was no real threats in the domain.

But Smith says that’s changed as American rivals have taken note of how reliant the U.S. military has become on space.

James Smith: We fly drones around the world. They saw that during the war on terror. They see our ability to deploy rapidly. They see our ability to conduct precision strikes. They also noted the system and the architecture, kind of the foundation that we had built our warfighting capability on, was a space foundation layer that was relatively unprotected. And so, the natural thing to do is to develop some way to threaten that layer.

Peter Bergen: So what keeps you up at night?

James Smith: It's the vulnerability-dependency mismatch that we currently have. We're significantly dependent on these capabilities and we still have vulnerabilities. The Chinese and the Russians have acknowledged that they see space as an area upon which we rely. And they realize that if we were to get into a shooting war, that was an area that they may need to attack.

About that shooting war. If much actual shooting goes on in space, there's another big risk that goes beyond the technology that you and I need to function down here on Earth. There's also a risk to space itself, at least the part of space where we park our satellites.

James Smith: It is in no one's interest, no nation's interest for a war to start in space.

Smith isn't just making a plea for peace. He's alluding to a space nightmare scenario that’s sometimes described as the Kessler Effect, or Kessler Syndrome. It's named for a NASA scientist named Donald Kessler who first proposed it back in the late 1970s. Kessler modeled a scenario he described as "collisional cascading."

[SOUND EFFECTS OF COLLISIONS, SPEEDING DEBRIS]

Picture some country launching a missile that crashes into a satellite. On impact, the two objects disintegrate into tens of thousands of smaller objects. These are chunks of debris ranging in size from paint chips to baseballs to the occasional flying refrigerator door. All of this junk is hurtling around the earth at 18,000 miles per hour. Until it hits another satellite, and then another, and another. And so they explode into zillions of pieces — causing a cascading chain reaction that could eventually leave everything orbiting the earth destroyed.

James Smith: A war that has kinetic effects or destruction in space, uh, has the high possibility of making the domain space unusable.

Peter Bergen: So no more manned missions to Mars or no more launching satellites because it would become impossible?

James Smith: Yeah, and while the manned mission to Mars would be regrettable, I think more importantly is that the impacts to our life here on Earth would be substantial.

Peter Bergen: Well, and describe those. I mean, I, obviously I got here because of GPS to this interview. I'm not sure I can read a map anymore. I'm old enough to remember when it was necessary, but how dependent is the civilian population on all this, and then how dependent is the military on all these assets?

James Smith: Excellent question. And I think both in the military and in our public life, I don't think we understand how reliant we are on it. On the civilian side, you talk about GPS or navigation. I lived in D.C. back in the days when I had to have a big book, and as I was driving from street to street had to flip through the books.

Peter Bergen: And D.C. is pretty confusing.

James Smith: It is. [PETER LAUGHS] And uh, there were multiple times I got lost. But yesterday I went to a new place in D.C. and I just put it in and, uh, through the help of our satellite constellation, that we provide as a public service to the world, I was able to get there pretty easily. So yeah, I think navigation and mapping is one area that maybe most Americans are most familiar with, but, really, just about everything you do from the moment you wake up has some connection to space. You turn on the TV or the radio, that signal's probably routed through space in some fashion. You make a phone call, that's probably routed through space in some fashion. You get the weather forecast, that's coming from satellites that are, uh, viewing the Earth and getting an understanding of what's going on in the world. If you go pay for gas at a gas pump with your credit card, that timing that allows those financial transactions to occur is a direct result of the timing signal that is provided from space.

So the possibility of an attack on U.S. satellites — especially the one that ends up wrecking the whole world's ability to use space for any purpose — that's not something we want to live through before we figure out how to guard against it. And there are plenty of risks like that: lightning, lung cancer, getting hit by a bus. You imagine potentially bad scenarios so you can avoid having to live through them. Which is why maybe it's fitting we started this episode about a real-world problem by hearing from Peter Singer, a writer of fiction.

Peter Singer: We call our concept useful fiction, and what it is, is a combination of nonfiction research and analysis, but wrapped within narrative. So, Ghost Fleet is a novel. It's a story of what might happen if the U.S. went to war with China and Russia, but it's a way of sharing real-world research on everything from cyber threats to what the first battles in space might actually look like. It's a bit like what I do to my kids in the morning. I sneak fruit and veggies into their smoothie. Just in this case, the kale is a policy paper about the growing importance of space.

Peter Bergen: Can you talk us through, I mean, you have some specifics about, the kinds of targets the Chinese knock out in the beginning of this space war, and what would the effects look like and feel like on the ground?

Peter Singer: In many ways, a successful space side of the war would throw those on the ground back in time. So, it would take you back to a period where you would not have access to all the information that's been at your fingertips. If you're in the U.S. military, you've grown accustomed to satellite imagery, down to literally the feet of where this enemy ship is, where this enemy tank is, where this literally person is. All that goes away. So, let's use a scenario of something that you're familiar with, Peter Bergen, and think about the bin Laden raid. Well, why are they going in to get bin Laden? In part because we've had satellite imagery of not just the overall city of Abbottabad, not just the neighborhood, but here's the exact building here down to, you know, This is what the door looks like. We can use it to build an exact replica of it for our planning. Okay. You'll remember the famous picture of president Obama and his team. And they're watching the live video of the operation. Now imagine we've got no satellite communication. All that goes away.

And the effects would ripple even further in the civilian world.

Peter Singer: The stock market, financial networks would stop functioning. That Amazon delivery, that grocery delivery that we've all grown comfortable and accustomed to, that would go away. We would probably see some communications difficulties, whether it's on your phone and chat side, to your computer network side. So it would hit in a manner that would not only be incredibly catastrophic for the economy, but also think about the psychological shock of this. Think about how people would go about their day in a day without space. Basically, it throws people back to the way it was, you know, whether it's in 1980 or even 1945. They would want to complain to someone, but they wouldn't even be able to reach them!

And if you take seriously what the writer Peter Singer, the policy expert Audrey Schaffer, and the brigadier general, James Smith, just told us… it seems like a war in space isn't the sort of fight where you can afford to lose a few rounds until you figure out how to get it right. It's the sort of scenario where we want people guarding against the thing happening at all. The sort of job that calls for… a guardian. We use that word for people who watch over kids, where losing even one is necessarily unthinkable. It makes me think calling Space Force members “Guardians” — and starting up a space force in the first place — wasn’t a silly idea at all.

Audrey Schaffer: No. It's not. It was an idea whose time had finally come, and personally, I was really proud to be part of the team that made it a reality.

Peter Bergen: We came into this episode with a pretty simple core question. Was Space Force a good idea? What would you say?

James Smith: Absolutely.

Peter Bergen:[PETER LAUGHS] I'm not surprised.

James Smith: The core answer from my perspective, is our American way of war, our American way of life hinges on our space capabilities, and we've got to have a service dedicated to ensuring those capabilities are protected to preserve that way of life.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: So think of that! Space Force!

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If you'd like to learn some more about the issues and stories in this episode, I recommend Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War, by Peter W. Singer and August Cole. It's available on Audible… and it goes down way more smoothly than a policy paper. You'll barely taste the kale.

CREDITS:

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA

This episode was produced by Erik German with help from Luke Cregan.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes Alexandra Salomon, Laura Tillman, Holly DeMuth, Sandy Melara,. and JP Swenson.

Our theme music is by Joel Pickard

Our Executive Producers for Fresh Produce Media are Colin Moore, Jason Ross and Joe Killian.

Our Head of Development is Julian Ambler.

Our Head of Production is Elena Bawiec.

Eliza Lambert is our Supervising Producer.