Don’t Let China Turn Space Into the New South China Sea
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By A. Bowen Ballard
August 05, 2021
It is urgent that Congress make changes to the Unified Command Plan, expanding the roles and missions of the U.S. Space Command. This is imperative not only to emphasize deterring and defending American and allied space systems from hostile attack — including military, civil, and commercial space systems — but also to provide law enforcement in the space domain.
The tasking needs to include support for developing a larger body of international law, ensuring that it enshrines freedom of action in space for all lawful and non-hostile actors. This must include putting mechanisms into place to detect violations of the law, creating strong enforcement procedures that can stop illegal behavior while collecting evidence, and establishing international courts with sufficient jurisdiction to provide legal remedies to malevolent behavior.
Why? China’s behavior in the South China Sea and elsewhere is so egregious, and their contempt for international law and human rights so atrocious, that such behavior must not be allowed to extend into space. China poses a serious threat to the rest of the world in space, which remains largely ungoverned, unregulated, and thus lawless and impossible to hold China, or anyone else, accountable for bad behavior.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2021/08/05/dont_let_china_turn_space_into_the_new_south_china_sea_788695.html
