A Certain Idea of Space: How Leaders Shape Military Space Posture in Europe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Why do regional powers facing similar external constraints adopt different approaches to the military uses of space? The history of Western European space actors, from the Cold War through the present, demonstrates variation in how states and their leaders perceive the space domain and its utility for military purposes, national security, and political ends. We can expect these states to adopt similar capabilities in a tenuous regional security environment and common alliance context. However, Western European states differed in their views on space and the degree of autonomy from the United States they sought, including in terms of military space capabilities. This dissertation investigates the development of military space posture in Western Europe from the Cold War to 2000. I focus on France, Germany, and the United Kingdom because they are Europe's most powerful political, economic, and military actors and faced similar external constraints during the Cold War. I argue national leaders and heads of government refract inputs from the international system through their unique strategic outlooks to produce distinct military space posture outcomes. Domestic factors, including budget constraints and industry incentives, further shape national leaders' decisions about military space posture and affect the state's ability to implement military space programs in response to systemic shifts. Using qualitative analysis, archival documents, interviews, and process tracing, I assess my hypotheses through detailed historical case studies on the development of military space posture outcomes in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Understanding how leaders shape military space posture adds value to current debates about space security in the New Space Age and heightened great power competition. Additionally, this dissertation makes a modest contribution to the history of military space programs in Europe.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".