Future War’s First Shots Fired in Space

RED FLAG 13-2

Editor’s note: The following story was written by Saku. This piece is a featured entry from the Art of Future Warfare project’s “Great War” war-art challenge that called for a fictional front-page style dispatch from the outbreak of the next major global conflict.

 

Updated From Correspondents and Pool Reporters: 12/27/22

VANDENBERG AFB – The “shot heard ’round the world,” which triggered the Pacific war, destroyed its target in total silence two mornings ago 23,000 miles above the Pacific Ocean in the vacuum of space. A single point of light reached up into the heavens from central China and rendezvoused with a celestial object – an American communication satellite, snuffing it out in a spray of metallic debris over the Pacific and signaling a new period of global darkness.

The COMSAT’s destruction, the first of almost a dozen US and allied high- and low-earth orbit satellites destroyed or disrupted in the last two days, was the culmination of a week of rapidly increasing combat as each side reacted to tit-for-tat escalations, all played out live on global TV.

 

Read the full story at the Art of Future Warfare site…

 

Photo credit: U.S. Air Force