“For whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.” - Sir Walter Raleigh

The ocean and space are remarkably similar environments. Both are vast, isolated, and only navigable with specialized equipment. Both contain tremendous wealth: trillion-dollar fish, oil, gas, and mining markets in the ocean; and the promise of space mining, abundant energy, exotic zero-gravity products, and electromagnetic resources above our atmosphere. Oceans have supported the most expansive and valuable trade routes for millennia, while space is emerging as a venue for point-to-point transport for people and goods, potentially connecting any two locations on Earth with a 45-minute journey. But their shared qualities are most consequential from a military perspective. 

Navies seek “Sea Control.” Sea control is what it sounds like. To “control” the sea is to have the freedom to operate without enemy interference, and the ability to interfere with those enemies. To obtain Sea Control, nations must cultivate Sea Power — in the form of superior naval vessels and strategy. Nations seek Sea Control to protect their sovereign economic activity, their territorial integrity, and their ability to wage war in far-away places: places beyond the seas.

In March 2025, General Chance “Salty” Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations, gave remarks redefining the mission of the United States Space Force: Space Control.

“It is now our job to contest and control the space domain. To fight and win so that we assure freedom of action for our forces while denying the same to our adversaries.” 

General Chance Saltzman, Chief of Space of Operations 

For the U.S. Navy, Sea Control includes blockading enemy fleets in their ports while protecting supply lines and providing services for ground forces. Space Control will include maintaining communications, sensing, and power constellations to support terrestrial forces, and blockading spaceports (i.e., intercepting adversary launch vehicles in their boost stage) when vehicles that seek to challenge that constellation. 

Submarines and Satellites: Brothers in the Void

Submarines have revolutionized maritime combat. As the Australian Navy noted in a briefing justifying high submarine costs: "Submarines can attack surface fleets, submarines and merchant shipping employing torpedoes, missiles or mines... Their effectiveness in operations is enhanced by the difficulty in detecting and tracking them." A single torpedo can take out an aircraft carrier, and it only needs to happen once in a 50-year carrier service life ($13.5 billion) to justify the submarine's ($2.8 billion) existence. 

Oceans and space are difficult and expensive to access. This creates inherent size, weight, and power (“SWaP”) constraints for both submarines and satellites. Designers must make trade-offs to meet requirements. A submarine needs to be loaded with enough supplies to last for a six-month mission during which it will not return to the surface. Mass is cheap to move on the surface of the ocean; it is more expensive below. In spacecraft, mass is orders of magnitude more expensive, costing thousands of dollars per kilogram to lift into orbit.

Satellites and submarines need to be difficult to detect. Their attacks can cause catastrophic, cascading damage, causing destruction with a single hit. They can operate with extremely limited communications from a central command. They can loiter for extended periods in their environment. They are relatively-fragile craft, optimized for non-detection and speed rather than raw power. And both operate in domains where accuracy in sensing is paramount — and more difficult than on the surface of the Earth.

Given their shared constraints and advantages, we can expect to see convergent evolution in the design between modern spacecraft, and submarines. Environment informs vehicle design, which determines tactics, which generates strategy, and informs the meta competition that unfolds.

If space is about to become contested, then satellites need to survive and continue to operate under attack. The “Survivability Onion” shows the different strategies available to avoid getting eliminated and maintaining effectiveness. 

This reality shapes what military strategists call the "survivability onion.” The outer layers of this concentric model are about avoiding detection; the middle is being hard to hit if detected; the inner layers are about how to survive getting hit and maintaining operations.

This may seem simplistic – but for SWaP constrained submarines and satellites, there are tradeoffs between optimizing for non-detection and survival during an attack. Heavy armor plating to withstand attacks is expensive. In optimizing for non-detection alone, designers can take advantage of the natural hazards of their environments, and turn them into benefits. Not being detected at all means never having to rely on expensive armor or countermeasures. This fact drives both submarines and satellites toward stealth as the primary survival strategy. 

“In a SWaP constrained environment, not being identified and acquired are the most cost effective ways of defending yourself. Conversely, In a SWaP constrained environment, attacking or threatening to attack stealthily in ambush tactics is the most cost effective way of imposing costs on the enemy forces.”

The Stealth Gambit

Submarines have proven to be a cost-effective way to impose massive costs upon enemies, because of the massive tactical benefit of stealth. Stealth allows engagements to be taken on the submarine's terms and increases survivability during normal transit or when escaping after an attack. Stealth also creates a powerful psychological effect: an enemy you can't see could effectively be anywhere, and therefore functionally seems to be everywhere. The fear of submarines was particularly acute in the 20th century — both in actual militaries, and in national cultures (see: “The Hunt for Red October”). This forces the adversary to deploy sophisticated and widespread detection systems, which have massive technological and political costs.

In the emerging orbital battlespace, stealth is becoming the dominant design priority, too. For satellites, stealth could involve polymorphic designs whereby satellites change their visual, thermal, or radar profiles, hiding in electromagnetic "eddies" —anomalies where instruments behave unpredictably. They may deploy structures to alter their appearance.

The US Navy describes the most valuable missions for stealth vehicles: "They can insert special teams into hostile target areas, launch guided or ballistic missiles, take out enemy vessels, and perform reconnaissance and rescue missions." We can imagine future satellites taking similar  missions in the space domain, where stealth satellites might deploy counterspace weapons, conduct intelligence operations, or defend high-value space-faring assets (like larger transport or cargo vehicles, analogous to carriers and other large ships).

As stealth capabilities advance in space we can expect detection capabilities to advance in tandem. Again, we look at submarines. When submarines first emerged as effective weapons platforms, surface navies developed sonobuoys, which are small disposable “sonic buoys” that can listen for submarines and transmit signals back to the aircraft from which they were dropped. The Soviet SOKS system was a multi-spectrum, multi-phenomenology sensor suite for submarine detection. It could measure radioactive isotopes and other changes in the water in a submarine’s wake. The United States deployed ocean-floor acoustic arrays like the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) to hunt for Soviet submarines in the Atlantic.

"System Obnarujenia Kilvaternovo Sleda" or "wake object detection system."

In response to all of this, submarine designers responded with quieter propulsion systems, anechoic coatings, and advanced hull designs to evade these new forms of detection. 

As nations deploy more sophisticated space situational awareness systems, satellite designers are developing counter-detection technologies. This includes multi-phenomenology quieting (reducing signatures across visual, infrared, radar, and other spectra), improved propulsion for evasive maneuvers, and deception techniques to mask a satellite's true capabilities or intentions. Expect to have optics, infrared sensors, and ion detectors everywhere in space (all passive sensors). 

The Current Space Environment

Space is on the cusp of becoming a warfighting domain. Advances in propulsion are enabling navigation in space as opposed to merely "floating adrift" in orbital regimes. This has revealed a hierarchy of more and less favorable "routes," starting a game-theoretic contest that space forces are responding to. Decreasing launch costs in the last five years have made it worthwhile to invest in propulsion, resulting in interesting experiments like Matryoshka-doll satellites (satellites that deploy smaller satellites) and inspector satellites.

Anti-satellite weapons (ASATs), space-based situational awareness sensors, docking demonstrations, and de-orbit demonstrations all showcase the capacity of the US, Russia, and China to interfere with satellites if motivated to do so. Each of these space powers currently struggles with maintaining complete information about what's happening in orbit, and each is investing to improve coverage and resolution of resident space objects.

Stealth satellites have been contemplated since at least the 1970s. Some deceptive operations have already been observed, like satellites reported "lost" that later begin maneuvering or the true capabilities of Matryoshka systems being concealed. If stealth strategies prove as cost-effective in space as they have underwater, we can expect continued investment in both stealth-producing and stealth-defeating technologies.

The Command and Control Challenge and other Predictions

Attribution — correctly identifying what or whom was responsible for an event — in space, as underwater, is extraordinarily difficult. Submarines are called the "silent service" partly because sometimes sailors do not return; navies struggle to determine why submarines sank. The operating environment is so uncertain and hazardous that a submarine might implode due to a manufacturing defect, a collision with undersea terrain, or a long-forgotten mine. Satellites are lost in similar fashion, with ambiguous failure modes. 

Sometimes, satellites drop out of orbit without clear causation.

As the sensor-stealth arms race progresses and sensors mature, both sides develop a clearer understanding of natural environmental hazards, and attribution difficulties gradually diminish. Sensors and stealth technologies of sufficient sophistication become increasingly difficult to defeat, with improvements yielding diminishing returns in strategic outcomes. As equipment capabilities advance, the focal points of vulnerability shift, and the most effective approach to neutralizing satellites becomes targeting their support systems. The psycho-political frameworks that evolved for managing submarine espionage will become equally relevant for spacecraft operations. Intelligence activities with proven effectiveness in the submarine realm—bribing technicians, sabotage, exploiting security lapses, and traditional espionage—have a long history of success and will inevitably intensify across satellite manufacturing, operations, and support personnel. The strategic value of such intelligence will drive an expansion of these activities throughout the space industrial base. 

Faster Than You Think

The opacity of military space operations limits contractors' visibility into actual operational needs. Nevertheless, certain capability improvements consistently provide value to warfighters and their missions. These include reducing costs and manufacturing lead times, developing higher-power systems, miniaturizing subsystems critical for kill-chain participation, and enhancing quieting technologies across visual, radar, electric, and infrared domains. As these capabilities mature, they create a foundation for the stealth-centered space competition that appears increasingly inevitable.

If satellite stealth continues to be better than their sensing counterparts, we should expect to see a concentration of nuclear-arsenal critical aspects in the space domain, because space will be the easiest place to hide anything. If launch costs decrease substantially, armor will increase, triggering a penetration/armor competition and stealth will fall by the wayside. If solutions to the Kessler syndrome (catastrophic cascading orbital debris) emerge, one major incentive to avoid space-to-space conflict diminishes, and we might see more brazen physical attacks between satellites.

Each of these technology trends, motivated by military competition, has potential commercial benefits. Sensor and stealth technologies can improve our understanding of electromagnetic weather, protecting electronics from solar flares. Increased mass-to-orbit capabilities could allow heavy industry to move beyond our fragile biosphere and reduce the dangers of human space habitation.

How fast will all this happen? It depends on investment from governments, private sources, or industry. The annual value of US shipping trade reached more than $14 trillion as of 2019. Defense spending typically lags behind the value generated by the asset or domain it protects. For navies and ocean benefit, the US spends at roughly a 2:1 benefit-to-defense ratio. Given the current space industry size, growth projections, and the technology costs of building patrol and hunter-seeker spacecraft, we might expect significant achievements in these capabilities within the next five years.

Technology changes, but humans mostly do not. The psycho-sociological calculations between dispersion and concentration of mass and firepower that we have seen in submarine warfare history are fated to repeat in spacecraft warfare futures. Like submarines, satellites will compete in a stealth war, with a sensor arms race; deception, concealment will be the primary operational strategies. The future of orbital warfare may be closer than we think, and it will follow patterns established deep beneath the waves.