Notes
Orbital Warfare
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Orbital Warfare is the era — 2060 to 2070 in the future-of-war essay's timeline — when space is fully militarized and the orbital compute constellation becomes the most strategically important asset on Earth or off it. It follows the invisible war of swarms and nanoweapons, and precedes the post-soldier era, because what gets contested in orbit is the cognitive machinery that makes machine-vs-machine war possible.
From data centers to high ground
The path to orbit runs through compute hunger. By the early 2050s, the exponential demand for AI processing has exhausted terrestrial data center capacity, and the solution is orbital: vast constellations of interconnected computing nodes, powered by uninterrupted solar energy, cooled by the vacuum of space, networked at light speed. A nation with orbital compute superiority can run more simulations, design more weapons iterations, process more battlefield intelligence, and react faster than any ground-based adversary. The essay's formulation: controlling orbital compute infrastructure becomes as strategically important as controlling oil fields was in the 20th century.
The cognitive infrastructure of war
These constellations are not passive satellites. They are the cognitive infrastructure of entire military establishments — running a fully automated cycle of scientific discovery that makes the history of human science look like a slow prologue, and producing weapons beyond human comprehension. A general in 2055 may authorize a system whose operating principles she cannot explain, designed by an AI whose architecture she cannot understand, manufactured by a process no human engineer supervised.
That is what makes orbit the decisive theater by the mid-2060s. Destroying an enemy's orbital compute capacity would be the 21st-century equivalent of destroying their officer corps, intelligence apparatus, and weapons-design capability simultaneously — the single most devastating act of war imaginable, and therefore both the most tempting target and the most heavily defended asset. Control of orbital space becomes the prerequisite for control of every other domain.
What fighting there looks like
The essay's account of space combat is unforgiving physics. Orbital mechanics constrains where you can go and when; maneuver costs delta-v, and delta-v requires propellant launched from somewhere; a spacecraft that fires a weapon changes its own trajectory in ways observable from light-seconds away. Stealth in space is largely an illusion against any peer adversary with a competent surveillance network. The strategic result resembles undersea warfare more than aerial combat: you cannot easily hide, you can only fight from positions prepared in advance, and every engagement reveals capabilities you would rather have kept secret.
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- Updated:
- 2026-06-12