WARGAMING RELIANCE ON COMMERCIAL SPACE PARTNERS: A DETERMINATION OF GUIDING PRINCIPLES AND APPLICATIONS

Abstract

The 2010s saw a revolution in the space industry leading to the commercial proliferation of space technologies once reserved for national space programs and militaries, dubbed by many as Space 2.0. This rapid rebalancing of capabilities from traditional state actors to commercial entities contributed to a reevaluation of U.S. space institutions and practices resulting in an increased U.S. military reliance on commercial entities to build space capability, capacity, and resilience. To that end, there is renewed interest in discerning the impacts of this expanded commercial space reliance on current U.S. military doctrine, thus placing new demands on the practice of wargaming among the U.S. military services. Specifically, wargaming must now account for this increased reliance by establishing guiding principles and wargaming methodologies to properly account for this revolution in space-based capabilities. This thesis addresses this problem by sampling the scope of commercial space capabilities, evaluating governing policy and doctrine, and examining a representative sample of the U.S. military's reliance on commercial space. The unique qualities of commercial space are evaluated to identify a list of guiding principles for wargaming applications. Then, wargaming methodologies that encompass these guiding principles are identified and proposed. Finally, these principles are applied to the USMC’s Assassin’s Mace wargame to demonstrate and evaluate their utility and application.