This scenario seems highly likely in a major 21st-century conflict: An adversary destroys some of the commercial space satellites on which the U.S. military relies.

Will the U.S. government pick up the bill to replace those satellites, given their vital roles in national security? Will each company with such assets in orbit be treated the same by an across-the-board federal policy or a new law? Or will individual firms negotiate with the Pentagon their own terms of financial protection and wartime reimbursement, depending on how badly the government needs the specific capability that only they can provide?

Those questions are a priority right now inside the Defense Department and in the C-suites of leading American defense companies. In many ways, they represent a uniquely American problem. The thin lines between government and industry in communist China, for example, erase any uncertainty about who is ultimately responsible for defense-related assets in space.

But for the U.S., it’s a much more nuanced proposition. And it’s on track to become infinitely more complicated in the years to come, when the U.S. Space Force by its own estimation could rely heavily on privately owned and operated satellites for everything from command and control to surveillance and reconnaissance and from navigation to communications.

“It’s obviously a question that’s been under debate a lot. It’s a slippery slope,” Air Force Secretary Troy E. Meink told The Washington Times recently.

Mr. Meink said similar questions are at play in other arenas, such as undersea cables that transmit data across the world and are typically owned by leading telecommunications companies, big tech firms or other private actors.

Uncertainty about targets

But nowhere will the questions be more prevalent in space, given both the rapidly expanding importance of the domain to virtually everything else that the U.S. military does and the relatively small number of companies capable of doing the complex and expensive work to launch, operate and maintain cutting-edge satellites.

“The challenge has always been trying to go in and specifically underwrite or front any commercial services. It kind of just opens up that can of worms,” Mr. Meink said during a media roundtable at the recent Spacepower 2025 conference in Orlando, Florida.

“Do you have to do that for every commercial service the government uses? That’s untenable at some point,” the secretary said in response to questions from The Times. “But that doesn’t mean there’s not something that should be done and something that can be done. But that’s a very tricky, kind of policy-infused … question that we have to work our way through.”

For war planners, one of the most difficult aspects is figuring out exactly what could become a target, as analysts say that a wide swath of space-related infrastructure could be viewed as de facto pieces of the American war machine, especially by an enemy.

“In a future conflict, other U.S. space operators may find themselves in an adversary’s crosshairs because of the possibility that they might provide service to the U.S. government, even if they were not currently doing so,” Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in a recent in-depth analysis of how the U.S. government can protect commercial satellites.

The threats to those private satellites are no longer theoretical.

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