Fight for the Final Frontier: Irregular Warfare in Space

Winner of the Air Force Historical Foundation’s Space History Book Award

Selected for the US Space Com 2024 Commander’s Reading List

Selected for USSF’s National Security Space Institute 2024 Space Professional Reading List

Fight for the Final Frontier uses the concepts associated with irregular warfare to offer new insights for understanding the nature of strategic competition in space. Today’s most pressing security concerns are best considered using an irregular warfare lens because incidents and points of potential conflict fall outside the definition of armed conflict. While some universal rules of combat apply across all domains, conflict in space up-ends and flips those assumed standards of understanding.

John Klein provides a solution to reckoning with the many malicious, nefarious, and irresponsible behaviors in the space domain by using the irregular warfare framework. This offers a new paradigm through which one can view and study conflict, outside traditional combat, involving state and non-state actors. A ＂war＂ in space will be utterly unlike any that have happened on Earth, though scholars can provide lessons from past conflict to understand the flashpoints in the heavens.

Providing the needed foundational understanding, Fight for the Final Frontier makes the case that irregular warfare in the space domain is shaped by the fundamental nature of all warfare, along with universal principles of strategy and the essential unity of all strategic experience. Going one step further, John Klein outlines the new arenas for battle, new areas of conflict and competition, and the necessary concepts for operating in this bold new frontier.

Dr. John J. Klein is a senior fellow and strategist with Falcon Research, Inc., and also instructs space policy and strategy courses in the Washington, D.C. area at the undergraduate, graduate, and doctorate levels. He writes on space policy, strategy, and deterrence. Dr. Klein is a retired U.S. Navy commander.