Comment by remarkEon

If I look back on how the Ukraine War progressed, it's a little more nuanced than that. Basically, your advanced weapons, of which supply is limited or constrained in some manner, are all on the clock and have an unknown expiration date. This means that your plans need to assume this, and it makes sense at the strategic level to try to take time off of the enemy's clock, if that makes sense.

In practice I think this would look something like immediate launch of satellite interceptor spacecraft after a formal war kicks off, so the clock in this case is probably measured in days. If we already have these kinds of interceptors, and I think there's good reason to believe that the Americans have at least a few, then the clock probably has only 48-72 hours after launch on it before the enemy satellite network starts to see noticeable degradation. Returning this point to the original comment of mine in this thread, you would likely have only a few days to a week where you could continuously "pilot" these kinds of aircraft with a human operator before you'd need a fully autonomous system to at least supplement if not fully replace decision-making. Hope that makes sense, first time I've actually thought through how I would plan this if I was doing so in real life. I'm making a ton of assumptions here ... one of which is that the Americans, in this hypothetical, would have a highly accurate map of enemy satellite networks and their orbits (there's good reason to think this is true). Another is that the interceptor spacecraft are a) available (defined as either already in orbit or able to be quickly mated with a launch rocket), b) numerous enough that they can make an impact on a time horizon that matters, and c) that the enemy lacks the means to either intercept the interceptor spacecraft or maneuver their own satellites to make the interception itself difficult (or impossible, if you get the interceptor to burn enough DV that it can't continue mission).