Global Space Infrastructure and U.S. Grand Strategy

Summary:
Drawing from archival work in a half dozen countries, Professor Aaron Bateman will discuss how the United States has leveraged allies since the Cold War to secure access to vital real estate abroad that enables it to project power through space. In analyses of space competition, scholars and policy experts have focused on activities in orbit and neglected the global terrestrial infrastructure necessary for military and civilian space operations. Access to overseas territories for basing space infrastructure has long been a source of comparative U.S. advantage and has important implications for U.S. - China competition today.

Bio:
Aaron Bateman is an assistant professor of history and international affairs. Trained as a historian of science and technology, he studies how technology shaped U.S. foreign relations, Western alliance dynamics, defense strategy, and superpower competition during the Cold War. He explores these themes in the context of two distinct research agendas. The first focuses on the history of national security activities in outer space. The second investigates the politics and security dimensions of global information infrastructures. His work draws from archives in Australia, Europe, New Zealand, the former Soviet Union, and the United States. He has been awarded grants from the Stanton Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation.

Aaron’s first book, Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative, is an international history of Ronald Reagan’s controversial Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), more popularly known as “Star Wars.” His second book project uses an infrastructural lens to explore how the nuclear age shaped U.S. global information networks that served as the “connective tissue” of American power. He details both the technological and political challenges associated with developing and maintaining information networks stretching from under the ocean and into outer space.

Aaron’s peer-reviewed work has been published, or is forthcoming, in the Journal of Strategic Studies, International History Review, Diplomacy & Statecraft, Intelligence and National Security, the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, and Science & Diplomacy. His policy commentary has been published in Foreign Affairs, Engelsberg Ideas, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Physics Today, and War on the Rocks.

Aaron received his PhD in history of science from Johns Hopkins University. While in graduate school he held a Guggenheim predoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Prior to his doctoral studies, Aaron served as a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer.