When strategic thinkers were trying to name what eventually would become AirSea Battle, there was discussion of naming it AirSeaSpace Battle. That makes for a very bad acronym, but in a way it’s probably more accurate.
At its core, AirSea Battle (ASB) is about maintaining the U.S. military’s freedom of operation in the face of increasingly advanced anti-access, area-denial (A2/AD) technologies. Despite its name, the Pentagon’s AirSea Battle Office has emphasized repeatedly that this imperative extends across all five operational domains, including space. Indeed the ASB Office’s May 2013 concept outline described space as “increasingly important and contested” and “integral to such military capabilities as communications, surveillance, and positioning.” ASB assumes that potential adversaries will contest space, which is why the ASB Office warned that essential space-based capabilities “are vulnerable to adversary capabilities with a low barrier to entry such as computer network attack and electronic jamming.”