I WROTE A COLUMN on space warfare a few weeks ago, and now DefenseTech notes that the Pentagon is increasingly worried about satellite vulnerabilities:

Aviation Week quotes a “nightmare” that the country’s top military space officer sometimes shares with his colleagues: “A phone call from the White House asking, ‘What happened to our satellite? And what are you doing about it?’ With few exceptions, today’s response will be the same as a former Cincspace [Command-in-Chief of Space Operations] gave the Vice President several years ago: ‘We don’t know, and there’s not much we can do.”‘

Everyone agrees that the first step to satellite defense is to get some sort of sense of what’s happening in orbit. But the job of setting up this “Space Situational Awareness” has been bogged down in the bureaucratic muck.

This is the kind of thing — important, but with no deadline — that tends to get insufficient attention until it’s too late. I hope it gets more attention.