From Drones to the Moon: George Friedman on the Warfare Frontier Nobody Sees

The Artemis II crew is speeding back to Earth after orbiting the moon, and the world is watching with wonder. But George Friedman, chairman of Geopolitical Futures, sees something far less romantic unfolding. In this episode of Talking Geopolitics, Friedman argues that space has already become the decisive domain of warfare - satellites guided Ukrainian forces against a larger Russian army, drones in the Iran conflict are targeted from orbit, and any future US-China war would begin with both sides trying to blind each other in space. The moon, he says, is not a destination for dreamers but a future fortress - a place to shelter sensors and wage war when low Earth orbit becomes too dangerous. From Admiral Mahan's command of the seas to command of space, the logic of geopolitics has not changed. Only the altitude has.

Christian Smith: Hello and welcome to this podcast from Geopolitical Futures. I am Christian Smith. The return of humans to the moon has yet again captured the hearts and minds of many around the world. Yet while space travel manages to capture imaginations, the geopolitics of space is something much less well understood. From satellites to mining on the moon, the Artemis program is very much the start of a new frontier in geopolitics - a frontier that has actually been going on for quite a while. So as the Orion capsule and its four astronauts speed their way back to Earth, this week on the podcast Geopolitical Futures chairman and founder George Friedman is with me as we discuss the geopolitics of space. George, hello. First question - is there a geopolitics of space?

Astropolitics: Why Space is the New High Ground of Warfare

George Friedman: There is. It is called astropolitics. And it was a cooler word, I suppose. But it is called astropolitics because right now space is one of the main arenas of warfare. It is something that is influencing wars on Earth. There is therefore the possibility of wars in space as well, and some are emerging with anti-satellite systems. So at this point the most important thing in warfare are drones and missiles. And those drones and missiles have to be targeted. And they are being targeted for the most part from space. So when you look at the Ukraine war and you look at the war in Iran, both of them were fought to some extent from space.

Christian Smith: And still are, of course. Let us start with that - with how these wars are being fought and these satellites. Anybody who may have listened to our podcast last week on what is going on in Iran will be familiar with some of this, and let us bounce off that. If you did not listen, then I encourage you to go back and check it out. With these recent wars, particularly Ukraine and Iran, the importance of satellites - from anything like GPS to the internet - has been pivotal. We have seen recently what has been going on with the lack of Starlink for Russians in Ukraine. Can you just explain how much war is now fought dependent on what is going on in space?

George Friedman: Well, the virtue of space is the high ground. In a war you want to hold the high ground. One of the reasons is that you can look down and see things. At this point the sensors on satellites are so good that they can read a license plate from outer space, tell you what the license plate is. Therefore, if they can transmit that information to troops on the ground, these troops have tremendous intelligence as to what is going on. So American satellites as well as European satellites in Ukraine could see where the Russians are massing troops. They could then take the much smaller army of the Ukrainians and suggest to them where to send blocking forces. They could also, as they got drones and such, identify large masses of troops and target them, give them the information - in some cases directly to the weapons - to where to go.

So at this point in Iran, for example, we are looking at wars that are primarily fought with drones. The Straits of Hormuz - they talk about opening it. Ten years ago, twenty years ago, opening it with landing Marines, having a land fight, kicking away the enemy, forcing them out twenty miles on each side of the strait - it would be opened. At this point, with satellite intelligence, you can easily see a trawler coming through the straits. You can transmit that information directly to the drone, fire the drone from five hundred miles away, and knock out that ship. So the fundamental issue here is that where wars used to be fought with infantry, armor, artillery, they are now being fought more by long-range weapons. Opening the Straits of Hormuz by landing Marines is not going to solve the problem, because hundreds of miles away - maybe even a thousand - there are missiles and drones being prepared that once they have a target, they can take them out in a very short period of time.

Christian Smith: Of course, as much as anything, war is about intelligence. Do you expect that these satellites - and a lot of this is talked about as being low Earth orbits - do you think that they are going to become a potential battlefield soon? Striking satellites from one side or the other, striking satellites to take out their intelligence?

George Friedman: They already are war-fighting systems in the sense that in order to transmit information to the Earth you have to use some sort of beam - some sort of electrical or light or something. Interfering with that light, blocking it, disrupting it - all that makes the satellite useless. And there is a lot of things like that going on. The Starlinks were not hurt as satellites, but the downlinks were severely affected, and therefore the GPS systems and so on could not transmit to Earth. So those wars are already going on. There are also anti-satellites in orbit that are designed to either directly hit another satellite or to send some energy beams at the satellite to try to destroy it. So certainly this is becoming a central feature of warfare. It has not yet evolved to the point that mass battles are carried out. But it is true - given the nature of intelligence, he who is in low Earth orbit, the lowest orbit outside the atmosphere, has the ability to see, locate, transmit the information to troops on the ground and carry out warfare. It has become the essential dimension of warfare.

Satellite Intelligence: The Invisible Force Deciding the War in Ukraine

Christian Smith: Let us just say for a moment that Ukraine did not have access to the satellite information that the US and Europe and others have been providing it. Would it have been able to fight the war - not just in the way it has done, but at all really? Is this completely essential now, or you lose?

George Friedman: Well, given the fact that the Ukrainians had a smaller military, given the fact that the Russians were not using satellites nearly as effectively as the Ukrainians were - this is intelligence being given by the Americans and the European satellites, by the way - they are able to know where the attack is coming, mass their smaller troops in the path of it and block the Russian advance. So if you do not know where they are coming from, you have to have a large front of troops dug in and ready to take the battle. Ukrainians did not really have that, particularly at the beginning and the middle of the war. And so they can put their forces where they need to be.

The satellites are so accurate now that even if you are engaged in a small fight in a little woods outside of a village, you can see enemy soldiers creeping up on you. You can see weapons. You can transmit information about that to the troops. And even on a smaller level, you are fighting no longer in the dark but with information.

The Ukrainians have put this to very good use. The Russians, who really do have excellent satellites as well, have not seemed to have integrated that very well with the troops. They may be sending it to the high command, but the high command takes too long to figure it out and send it down to the troops in combat. The ability to transmit that and have it intercepted directly by officers on the ground gives the Ukrainians a significant advantage.

Christian Smith: In many ways, what we have not seen for a long time - but if we were to see a war between two major satellite powers, in particular let us say Russia and the US, or the US and China - how likely do you think it would be that you would have these two sides firing missiles into space to knock out these satellites?

George Friedman: I think that would be one way to knock out the satellites. Another way would be to maneuver your own satellites into either a blocking position or, as I said, crashing into the satellite that you wanted to destroy. So there are sensor satellites built with what we will call telescopes that peer closely at the Earth and see very small things. And those have to be destroyed. So I would argue that if the United States and China went to war, the first phase of that war would be carried out in space. If you blind the enemy in space, well then the only things that can be seen are aircraft - which can be shot down - or the troops themselves, waiting as they have for millennia for the enemy to show up. So really the center of gravity of war is always intelligence - knowing where the enemy is and what he is doing and what he has. And that intelligence no longer comes from commandos creeping up closer to them. It comes from the satellites. So if the United States and China went to war, and I strongly suspect both have anti-satellite systems available in space, the first battle would be blinding the other side.

Christian Smith: That makes me think of two questions. One would be - will we therefore see an escalation in the defense of these satellites, in terms of whether that might be missiles designed to strike down other missiles, or some form of missile-related base in space?

George Friedman: Well, the first thing you do is create redundancy. The reason there are so many satellites in orbit now - in low Earth orbit, and there are thousands - is redundancy. You take out one satellite, another satellite you can use. Secondly, I think we are developing maneuverable satellites - satellites using AI that sense something coming in their direction and maneuver. I suspect there are satellites in space that have laser beams that they can use to shoot the other guy. So it is hard to tell precisely what is happening in space, because this is some of the most classified material that you can imagine. You want that to be a surprise. At the same time, in basic principle we understand what is going on - which is that low Earth orbit, LEO as it is called, is the area just above the Von Karman point, which is the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and the vacuum of space. It is about sixty miles up. And from sixty miles up you can see an awful lot.

Christian Smith: The other question that flows from that - what happens if you have the start of the war as you say, both sides attacking in space. There surely must be contingencies or plans where the next war is actually fought without any satellites or facilities in space because they have been knocked out?

George Friedman: Well, that is the battle. If one side has satellites and the other side does not, then the side that has the satellites knows a great amount more about the enemy - his location, his capabilities - and has a tremendous advantage. Knowing what the enemy is doing fifty miles away, getting ready for an attack or something like that. Being able to identify drones that are being fired at you and use anti-drone systems to destroy them. All these things require at this point satellite information.

So when you get down to it, at very close quarters perhaps the satellites are not as useful, because you do not have the time to get the intelligence. But anywhere at this point, wars are conducted at a distance. It used to be that clearing the Straits of Hormuz would be a naval problem, with two naval ships within a couple of miles of each other at most, engaging each other in warfare. At this point the attack would probably come from a land base if we tried to force our way into the Straits of Hormuz.

It is said that Russian intelligence is providing satellite intelligence to the Iranians. I do not know if that is true. There have been accusations that the Chinese are doing that. I do not think that is true - that is something the Russians said they were doing. But there was a whole argument over who is giving them the intelligence. At any rate, they seem to have some intelligence. They are able to block our own missiles coming in sometimes. And they are able to target us, and vice versa. So if they did not have these capabilities and we had them, or vice versa, the one with satellite intelligence would have a massive advantage in the war.

Christian Smith: Anybody who has looked into how these satellites work knows there is already a bit of an issue with low orbit and where satellites are. It is getting a bit busy up there. There are incidents and potential for satellite collisions and that sort of thing. You would think that should some form of battle happen up there, bits of satellite flying around may impact other ones as well. I guess the question I want to ask is really part of a wider question - like geopolitics on Earth, there are rules, not necessarily in terms of laws, but also rules in terms of what you might describe as the laws of the jungle and just ways things work in geopolitics. Space as a new frontier seems unprecedented in a literal sense. Are you getting, George, a sense of how the competition is being run between nations in space? Are there rules emerging?

George Friedman: I think there are understandings. There are no rules. So if, for example in the case of the United States, the Chinese began attacking our satellites, disrupting them, we would probably know that it was the Chinese doing it. We would then think there is a reason they are doing this. And if they blinded us, we would at least be certain that they had a reason for doing so - and that reason might have been to open a war with the United States.

So as in all things, the combat can be seen even if you just lost control of your satellites. And if you suddenly have your sensor satellites - the ones that watch the Earth - flick off the screen, and four hundred of them were taken out at the same time or very close time, you would be very suspicious of what is going on. The satellites you had in orbit, some of them viewing other satellites in orbit, would be identifying them. But losing control of the satellites, losing access to them, puts you in a position where you know you are under attack. You are not quite certain - I think you are certain pretty much who is attacking, but you are not quite certain what to do in response. And that means you are going to be shooting in the blind.

And one thing that will happen in the case of a war is the instruments on Earth, the troops on Earth, the weapons on Earth will be agile. They will be constantly moving so that if you take out the satellites, the enemy will not know where they are. So the wars are won and lost on Earth in the sense that they must destroy the other side's capabilities on Earth. But with the satellites, the ability to do this has become extremely great at this point.

Mutually Assured Destruction: How Space Satellites Prevented Nuclear War

And over the past twenty years they have merged. In fact, the first reason we went into space was not the excitement - because it was a hard thing to do rather than an easy thing to do, as Kennedy said. We went into space based on the principle of mutually assured destruction.

The reason there was never a nuclear war is that both sides had radar systems far enough away from the attack that they would have at least ten, fifteen, twenty minutes of warning. In that period of time - usually say half hour at best if possible - you could launch your own missiles. The United States at the Russians, the Russians at the United States. This was why the wars were never fought.

Mutually assured destruction was based on the ability to see what the other side is doing, detect the missiles before you lost the ability to counter them. What happened was this was being carried out by radar. Radar systems can be jammed, of course, and they are very vulnerable to attack as well. So during the period when we started launching satellites, interestingly enough, the first Russian satellite and the first American satellite were launched within a few weeks of each other. So suddenly both of them had satellites. I have always wondered whether there was a collaboration to keep mutually assured destruction in place.

Now you could sense a launch from space. You could see them. You could give that information to Cheyenne Mountain in the United States, which is the base we do have, and launch a counterattack. So as radar became less reliable, space became the alternative. And space even now is an instrument in detecting nuclear warfare - seeing the missiles coming from a distance.

And we have never had a nuclear war because of the principle of mutually assured destruction. It is a terrible thing to say - that the ability of both sides to destroy each other kept us from doing it. And when we launched those satellites - the Russians and the Americans - they were not yet sensor satellites. They could not see the Earth, but with the principle of being able to put satellites into space, very quickly thereafter we launched a series called Corona, which were able to send data back to Earth.

So when we ask the question - how come there was never a nuclear war in spite of all the tension, hostility and danger? The United States and Russia, where you would have expected them to go to war given the tensions. Well, neither side could afford a nuclear war. They fought by proxies in Vietnam and the Congo and everywhere else in the world, but they never engaged each other. So in a certain odd way, these satellites, mutually assured destruction - first the radar systems, then the satellite systems - was what kept us from nuclear war.

The Strategic Race for the Moon: Why Artemis is More Than Exploration

Christian Smith: Now, we have spoken a lot so far on this podcast about how space will impact warfare and the geopolitics of that. But there is more to it than that as well, isn't there? Let us look at the moon. Obviously the Artemis crew are on their way back from the moon now. But the idea of the Artemis program is to send people back to the moon again and potentially with a long-term strategic goal of having a permanent base on the moon. Why is the moon so interesting?

George Friedman: Well, at a certain point in the not too distant future, low Earth orbit will be too dangerous. First, there is a lot of junk in space - tremendous amount of junk from failed satellites, fragments, and satellites that are no longer useful. And the possibility of losing one of your satellites or many of them by fast-moving debris is high. Secondly, as anti-satellite systems come out, the probability that we will start any sort of war without first trying to knock out the other side's satellites is high. Low Earth orbit is very crowded with satellites. And increasingly - no one has tried it yet - it is going to be the first area in which combat takes place.

Now you have a choice in combat. Either disperse your forces - you cannot do that in low Earth orbit, you cannot disperse them, they would be useless, and also the energy it takes. You can be agile, you can maneuver constantly - well, that can be done, but you get out of orbit and while you are maneuvering you cannot sense the Earth. Or you can take cover. Now it is hard to take cover in space. But given the nature of warfare, it is not difficult to take cover on the moon. That would be the place to take cover.

So when you take a look at low Earth orbit, middle Earth orbit, and stationary orbit - stationary orbit means it maintains the same place on Earth as it rotates - there are all different sorts of satellites there, and these would also be vulnerable. As well, the United States and China are both developing space planes. In the distance between the Earth and the moon is what is called cislunar space. I do not know why it is called cislunar, but that is what it is called. And in that space we have got fighter planes who will be battling each other and so on.

So at this point we are not quite there yet. But we are at the point where cislunar space - the space between the Earth and the Moon - is not becoming a safe haven for these satellites. Putting them on the moon makes them more protected. On the other hand, from the moon you only see one side of the Earth at a time, only one half of it. And this brings in more complex issues of having satellites in use at various very high orbits and so forth. It is not a simple matter.

But at the same point, on the moon there are what are called lunar tubes that are not as frigid as the moon's surface, with fairly high temperatures, and seem to be airtight, so you can pump them full of oxygen. And there is oxygen on the moon in the soil and you can free it. So you can do all these things.

And the first question is - how do people respond to living on the moon, where there is no outdoors, where the gravity is minuscule, and the human body is built to live with Earth's gravity? These are all things that we do not know and we will try to find out. But one of the reasons to do this, and one of the reasons why the Chinese are looking at it, and one of the reasons why the Russians used to be looking at it and do not seem to be doing it now, is that if you want to conduct warfare from sensors such as satellites to see what is going on, the moon is a place where you might do that and survive. Which then means there will be wars on the moon between the various countries that want to knock out the others. And so it becomes a new dimension of warfare.

But this is not different from, for example, why the Europeans discovered North America - or South America, I should say. The Portuguese and the Spanish were fighting a war with each other, and the key was access to India, because India's wealth was being transferred. The Portuguese had access, the Spanish did not. But the Spanish had a theory that the Earth was round, and this is what funded Columbus when he went to visit the queen to try to get money. He happened to bump into South America - the Caribbean, actually - and discovered that. And that rapidly became an arena of war as well, between the Spanish and the Portuguese. And so the history of mankind is the history of discovery and then fighting over the discoveries, and using the discoveries for national power. It is not a pretty picture, but it is a reality.

Christian Smith: There are a lot of parallels here between the European conquest of parts of America, even thinking of the Seven Years War, for example, and the fact that it was fought partly away from the UK and France. I actually cannot get the image out of my head of the Austin Powers film where Dr. Evil sets up a moon base. That is my image personally for what this moon base will look like. The moon is not just a strategic asset though, is it? There are suggestions that it will have a lot of energy and minerals that countries increasingly want.

George Friedman: Well, there is that thought. I do not think we have really explored the moon very much. If you land in Texas you will not find what is available in Russia, for example. It is a large area, it has not been explored. But it seems to have water at the South Pole, a great deal of it, but also in the soil. Oxygen, hydrogen and other minerals. So it has the minerals, they can be utilized, they can be used to live on the moon. So it appears. The wealth of the moon is unknown. It may well have tremendous wealth. Who expected North America and South America to be as wealthy in terms of minerals and everything else and agriculture as it turned out to be? So we really do not know the moon. We have explored it in the sense of landing there and knowing that a human being can survive for a few days on the moon. But we do not know much more about that.

And so Artemis is going to be showing that we can get to the moon and get back to Earth, but also that we can put small colonies on the moon and leave them there for a period of time and see how that works out. So rather than rushing as Columbus did - the new world was discovered and it took many decades for the rest of the Europeans to get interested in it. In the same way, it is a step-by-step thing. And Artemis is unique in that it is intended to land humans on the moon for extended periods of time.

Christian Smith: Obviously a lot of this sounds quite literally like science fiction. How far away do you think we are from something like this, George - from establishing a permanent base on the moon, for example, and for these sorts of space-linked wars taking place?

George Friedman: I would say decades, but not too many. Remember, human beings engage in warfare. And in warfare everything is at stake. And as low Earth orbit becomes untenable and other dimensions between the Earth and the moon become untenable, we will go there. There is nothing that causes invention faster than war. So why do we have nuclear weapons? The United States was desperate to find a solution other than invading Japan. And scientists came up with that. So one of the tragedies and realities of the human condition is that war can be the most creative period that you find. Extraordinary things come out of it. We are not at war, but we have been ever since the invention of nuclear weapons constantly in fear of war. And therefore Artemis and others - not urgent, but not spending any time that we do not need to.

The Evolution of Global Power: From Command of the Seas to Command of Space

Christian Smith: Absolutely. We have talked about what could happen. We have not talked so much about the players - or we have touched on them. The obvious ones I suppose here are the US, China and Russia. But there are many other countries as well which are involved with space. They might have satellites, or they might have had astronauts go to space. There is a Canadian on the Artemis mission right now. How do you see this competition playing out? And I suppose, wider than that - is this a fundamental change in the nature of geopolitics? Is space where the great game of the twenty-first or twenty-second century will take place?

George Friedman: Well, it is already taking place. The Iranians are said to have a satellite in space - not clear who launched it. They are said to have it. The Russians, allied with them, clearly have satellites and appear to be giving the Iranians that sort of data. Any number of nations have put up satellites. India has put up a good many, and it has nuclear weapons. The Israelis have nuclear weapons and satellites. So a number of nations have done this. This is no longer just the superpowers - these are other powers as well.

And given the fact that war on Earth is historically a commonplace thing - it is not some amazing thing that came out of nowhere. Even smaller states that have the ability, that have some capability of doing this, are putting satellites into space and linking them to this. And therefore, what happens is - in the same way that the Western Hemisphere became a sphere of warfare after it was discovered - war is going to be fought from space. There are tremendous advantages from the intelligence given. And then there will be a battle for who controls space. And so this is the logic of the human condition. There are people who say they would like it not to be this way and that it is evil that it is. Well, then it is evil. But it is that way and it is going to stay that way.

Christian Smith: And building on that - do you see this as just an extension, a big one but an extension, of the way geopolitics works, much like finding a new continent? Or do you think this will fundamentally change how geopolitics works?

George Friedman: When we humans discovered from the Eastern Hemisphere that there was a Western Hemisphere, warfare fundamentally changed. For the United States, the command of the sea was by far the most important thing. As the Europeans started to discover India and trade with India, naval warfare became critical. Where wars had previously among the Romans primarily taken place on land, suddenly the seas and control of the seas became very important and have remained important for centuries.

The same thing with space. From space you can reach many places, attack many places, defend many places in many different ways. And so for the United States, for example, the foundation of our national strategy was Admiral Mahan, who in the nineteenth century said command of the oceans was the most important thing for American security. We live between the Atlantic, this vast ocean, the Pacific, another vast ocean. We have the Canadians to the north, the Mexicans to the south - they are not going to invade us. So as long as we command the sea, we are safe.

And remember, we only went into the First World War when the German U-boats started sinking ships at sea. We only went into World War Two when it seemed like it was dangerous to be there because of Pearl Harbor. They tried to knock us out of the Pacific.

So when you take a look at how warfare evolved in the sixteenth century, we will say it evolved into ocean warfare. And you cannot survive in the ocean just walking around and having a good drink. It is a hostile environment. This is also a hostile environment - there is no water, there is no air. But we have a unique and not necessarily appetizing ability to adjust to bad circumstances in times of war. So yes, space - which also has a geography, because there are many planets out there - will become a domain of warfare. Just as ground warfare remains important, naval warfare is critical, air warfare is critical - space warfare is. So it goes on.

Christian Smith: A new theater, then. George, as always, thanks very much for your time. Thank you out there for listening as well. We will be back again next week with another podcast. But until then, you take care and goodbye.