Many of the points that my colleague answered I would agree with entirely. Redundancy and reconstitution are very vital, but the key thing to me about deterrence is the issue of the threat that the west—the United States—is going to make. Let's be blunt about it: This is about the United States; it's not about Canada. Yes, we signed on to the moratorium, but, of course, it was cost-free because we weren't going to do that anyway. It's virtual signalling by the government.
The key things are how and on what conditions you threaten your adversary to change their calculations. It's been a long debate within the deterrence literature that goes back to the 1950s. You might try to create a clear, certain environment by saying, “If you do A, we will do B, and we have the ability to do it”. Hence, our adversary knows exactly what's going to happen. Others say that it's better to leave it as uncertain. Vague is the way you need to deal with this, and it will affect the calculation of the adversary differently.
The problem is particularly when we get away from the physical side. Interestingly, when we talk about physical destruction and the orbit destruction of satellites, we talk about killing them with anti-satellite weapons when the real, bigger threat—and it's still a major threat—is the signals themselves. How do you protect them? When there are circumstances, what do you threaten to deter adversaries from going after them, degrading the signals, capturing a satellite through cyber-attack—all those types of things? That's extremely difficult, because no government has made clear, with satellites nationally flagged and particularly dedicated military satellites, under what circumstances this would be considered an act of war. That's in a very grey zone. For credible deterrence on the part of the west—the United States—they need to come to some clear understanding and ability to communicate, at least tacitly, with the Chinese, the Russians and India. We're not trying to deter India, but India has to be brought into this equation because it is a major space player.
That's the way I think we need to strengthen our deterrence capability. We already have the intercept capabilities; those already exist. Even though we talk about weaponizing in orbit, they all exist. Missile defence capabilities, ICBMs and SLBMs can all strike at space assets. They just have to be programmed differently.