This week’s Midnight Oil guest is Joan Johnson-Freese, professor of national security affairs at the Navy War College. Professor Johnson-Freese studies space security, military education, and gender and security, and her most recent book is “Women, Peace and Security: An Introduction.”

I work on space security issues, a field that requires juggling technical, physical, military, and political considerations to understand how states approach the challenges of managing threats and opportunities in outer space. For example, when discussing missile defense systems we need to understand whether proposed technologies will actually work given the physics of outer space, whether the costs of development and testing are politically feasible, whether countermeasures can cheaply and quickly developed by other countries and how the military could actually incorporate it into operations. Considerations around proposed space weapons systems are at least as complex. Yet, it is not unusual to see statements made by politicians, military officials and, perhaps not surprisingly, aerospace officials about proposed gee-whiz capabilities that seem implausible in one or more ways. So I worry that taxpayer money is being spent on capabilities or approaches that won’t achieve the stated goals, but will prove counterproductive by being provocative to other countries, potentially escalating a space arms race or even triggering a use-it-or-lose-it mentality leading to a space war. War games indicate that space wars have high potential for escalation, including to the nuclear level.

I’m a political scientist, so the technology issues aren’t my area. Luckily for me, the space community is relatively small and most people in it are very friendly.  So when I have technical questions, I can contact someone with the right expertise to help me with what I need to know. I’ve had solar-terrestrial physics explained to me over lunch. That doesn’t make me an expert, but it helps me understand the scientific parameters of questions in that area. Organizations can be very helpful as well. Individuals at organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists have worked for years trying to provide analysts and decision-makers with information on the physics of space security. The Secure World Foundation provides “just the facts” analysis through in-house expertise and makes it all available to those who seek it. Perhaps the scariest part of my work is that it sometimes appears that accurate information is not what is being sought — that capabilities and approaches pursued by policymakers are being driven by politics and money rather than sound analysis.