Struggling towards space doctrine: U.S. military space plans, programs, and perspectives during the Cold War

This study examines the evolution of U.S. military thinking about how outer space might contribute to U.S. national security during the cold war era. It divides the cold war era into four periods: 1945-Sputnik I, Sputnik I-1963, 1964-1978, and 1979-1989. The study develops a comprehensive definition of the concept of doctrine and a model for doctrine development. Parts of the model for this study were derived from theoretical insights on doctrine found in Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine and David E. Lupton, On Space Warfare. The model of doctrine development is used to derive hypotheses concerning the evolution of U.S. military space doctrine. The model, together with these hypotheses, forms a comparative framework for evaluating how U.S. military space doctrine evolved. Four research questions guide this study: (1) Were national security considerations or organizational behavior inputs more important in the development of U.S. military space doctrine during the cold war? (2) What were the most prominent U.S. military doctrinal beliefs during each period of the cold war and how did these doctrinal beliefs relate to overall U.S. space policy at these times? (3) What were the specific interrelationships between individual U.S. military space organizations and particular military space doctrine beliefs? and (4) Did the developmental path for spacepower during the cold war era follow a course similar to the airpower developmental path which led to the creation of an independent Air Force in 1947? The comparative framework and these research questions guide an analysis of developments in various issue-areas during the four periods of the cold war era. Primary sources include the U.S. Military Uses of Space, 1945-1991 microfiche document set and the space-related NSC documents at the National Archives.;The major findings of this study indicate: national security considerations generally were more important than organizational behavior inputs in conditioning military space doctrine outcomes during the cold war; doctrinal issues conditioned the creation and preferences of military space organizations in significant ways; and the airpower development historical analogy is not very appropriate for describing the actual evolution of spacepower development during the cold war era.