-Caveat Lector- Space MUST be demilitarized. Or we ALL will suffer the consequences. --- Joshua2 =================================================== Militarizing Space http://www.insightmag.com/archive/200103200.shtml By J. Michael Waller [EMAIL PROTECTED] The nation with military control of space will have the capability to control international communications and access to land, sea and air. If the U.S. should lose its present control of space, it will mark the end of its status as a global superpower. Sen. Robert Smith, R-N.H., was grimly serious. “Whoever controls space will control the destiny of the Earth,” he declared. “And when you look at the options out there, I would ask you, who do you want it to be? Iran? Russia? Iraq? China?” Smith was raising those tough questions at a recent seminar on space power at the prestigious Center for Security Policy in Washington. Not given to flamboyant rhetoric, the plainspoken New Hampshireman continued, “To those who say we can’t militarize space, I must say, ‘Do you want somebody else to do it?’ ” China and Russia want to. So do likely or incipient nuclear powers Pakistan, India, Iraq and North Korea. And it isn’t just those with military ambitions, say leading defense authorities. Now, thanks to commercialization of many space technologies, any individual or group with the cash can buy the hardware and software to cause havoc for U.S. security interests in space. Space holds the key to U.S. communications — not only for the military, but for every single citizen whose news and entertainment, telephone calls, Internet surfing, banking and financial services depend on satellites. Vulnerable to attack is the entire communications system on which the U.S. economy now depends. Equally vulnerable is the U.S. mainland itself. Any defense against incoming ballistic missiles — be they short-range or strategic rockets with nuclear warheads — must rely heavily on space-based sensors and, in some cases, space-based weapons to shoot down the missiles or warheads before they land. In military terms, control of space means much more than missile defense. “The United States’ unimpeded access to space is vital to national interests — the word ‘vital’ meaning that we are willing to do whatever it takes to maintain that access,” according to Air Force Maj. Gen. Brian Arnold. Virtually every facet of modern war-fighting makes use of space, he says, “from intelligence to reconnaissance, surveillance to warning to timing [and] getting over the target, to our precision-guidance weapons that you saw used so well in Operation Allied Force to limit the collateral damage, to put a single weapon on a single target, to the weather, to accessing the battle damage after the fight, to the communications … and going even further to computer-network defense and computer-network attack, which uses a lot of space assets.” Polls show most Americans agree that, when threatened, the U.S. military should be used to ensure full access to Middle Eastern oil, and Americans overwhelmingly supported the use of force to free oil supplies in Kuwait. But what about an Operation Desert Storm in space? The issue is seldom discussed. “The importance of space control and space superiority will continue to grow as our economy becomes more reliant on space,” according to Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, commander in chief of the U.S. Space Command, known as SPACECOM. “As space becomes more integral — and critical — to military land, sea and air operations, the U.S. must devote more attention to the sensitive issues of space control and superiority.” What does that mean? “The space systems we have today provide remote sensing, navigation, communications and other support services to all of our land, air and sea forces,” Sen. Smith explains. The United States, he emphasized at the Center for Security Policy panel, must have “information superiority” to prevail in a conflict. And that’s not all. Smith said there are two other types of programs that are missing if we are to achieve true space power: “Number one, we have lacked space-control technology and capabilities. We don’t have space-control capability, in my view,” Smith said. “If we intend to maintain our information superiority, we need a strong space-control program to protect our assets and to deny our adversaries the use of their own systems.” Secondly, he says, the United States lacks a flexible power-projection capability that would allow U.S. forces to use space to project their military power elsewhere on Earth. Rather than take out land targets with troops and aircraft, proponents say, the United States could accomplish the same goals with space-based lasers capable of attacking targets on the ground, at sea and in the air. Concerned about the Clinton/Gore administration’s lack of attention to this problem, Smith introduced legislation that established a Commission on National Security Space Management and Organization, known as the Space Commission, a panel of 13 world-class space experts headed by Donald Rumsfeld, now President George W. Bush’s secretary of defense. The Space Commission recommended that the Department of Defense reorganize its entire space-management structure, focusing more resources on space-based defenses. The report, released Jan. 11, concluded that just as air and sea were theaters of battle in the 20th century, space will be a theater of battle in the 21st. The United States, however, has not prepared itself in this respect for next-generation warfare. The Rumsfeld report says: “Having shown the world the utility of space systems, it would be pretty naïve to think that our adversaries are just going to be sitting around idly and not developing their own space-based information capabilities and the tools and techniques to counter the current U.S. space advantage.” How can the United States stop maverick regimes in Iran or Iraq, or potentially hostile ones such as Russia or China, from using their satellites to harm U.S. interests on the ground or disabling or destroying U.S. satellites in space? The simplest way is to deploy weapons to take out dangerous satellites. The Kinetic Energy Anti-Satellite Weapon (KE-ASAT) is an inexpensive, quickly deployable device the United States could build to deny the use of space to any potential adversary. This country has spent $350 million on the KE-ASAT since 1993, but antidefense elements in the Clinton administration tried to make sure the funds never reached the programs Congress intended. “Without an antisatellite capability,” says Smith, “today’s foreign- and commercial-surveillance satellites could easily detect our now-famous dogleg in the desert that allowed the United States to quickly end the Desert Storm operation with very few casualties. Without KE-ASAT, this nation will not have the satellite-negation capability to deter satellite operators from sharing or selling our adversaries sensitive intelligence of the U.S. military, resulting in longer wars and more lives lost.” Commercialization of space has made it possible for Third World regimes and even nonstate entities to use space for military and political purposes, defense experts tell Insight. Today, a terrorist group such as that of Osama bin Laden could rival the big space powers simply by buying commercial space products and services, which include: High-resolution imagery — once a U.S. monopoly — affords detailed overhead photographs of military targets, allows anyone in the world to run reconnaissance against U.S. and allied forces, permits foreign intelligence services for the first time to train their personnel in detailed imagery analysis and allows adversaries to improve their denial and deception capabilities to conceal themselves and defeat other forms of reconnaissance against them. Global encrypted communications, which U.S. intelligence cannot crack, raise a further problem. Precise navigation aids, using the commercially available channels of the U.S. Air Force-run Global Positioning System (GPS), can guide missiles and other weapons with deadly accuracy against U.S. targets. Space-object surveillance and identification devices, electronic jammers and low-power lasers are for sale on the open market, enabling states and nonstate actors to jump-start a military space program. But the Air Force, which has primary responsibility for military space issues, has not made space security a priority. Some defense experts believe it is time for an entirely new military service, perhaps called the Space Force, to handle defense matters in space, much as the Air Force was carved out of the Army after World War II. “Maybe that’s a little premature,” says Smith, “but let’s get it on the table. Let’s talk about it. A solution as draconian as breaking off a separate space force may be necessary to overcome the ingrained bias that we see right now against space, and it may be the only way to ensure that funds that have been allocated for space are spent for just that and not just ignored or buried somewhere in the budget or put somewhere else.” Russia is ahead of the United States on meeting the new challenge. On Jan. 25, the Kremlin created a new military service for space warfare. It did so by splitting the Strategic Rocket Forces, Russia’s military service in charge of intercontinental ballistic missiles, pulling out its two main components responsible for military space activity: the Space Missile Force and the Rocket and Space Defense Forces. The former is in charge of Russian-military satellite programs, while the latter administers the space-based components of Moscow’s early-warning system. The new service will assume the name of one of its components, the Space Missile Force. Less than three weeks later, on Feb. 13, a Chinese state-run information agency published a statement advocating preparation for space warfare. Official government propaganda warning of a “dangerous arms race in space” has been increasing in frequency and pitch in recent months, made more shrill by January war games at the U.S. Space Warfare Center in Colorado, which reportedly envisioned a conflict with China in the year 2017. Russia’s ongoing economic crisis has curtailed the advanced military-space programs it inherited from the Soviet Union, but the Center for Security Policy roundtable on space power found that Moscow “remains among the world’s most advanced and comprehensive counterspace capabilities, including the doctrine for its employment. They [the Russians] understand the idea.” The People’s Republic of China is aggressively pursuing a military space program and is acutely aware of the importance of space dominance. Beijing “could emerge over the next 15 years as a leading threat to U.S. space operations,” according to a Center for Security Policy paper on threats to U.S. space access. “China is making an enormous investment in space-launch vehicles, satellites and manned space systems,” the policy paper asserts. “Chinese military theorists have written a great deal about the U.S. use of space during the Gulf War, and China’s air-force academy recently increased the number of courses offered in space war theory. … China understands space power and is rapidly developing both the infrastructure and wherewithal to challenge America’s current space-information dominance.” Beijing is building a global ground-based space-tracking network, with new facilities in its sphere of influence and on the island of Tarawa in the South Pacific and in Namibia, as well as aboard China’s growing naval fleet and its massive merchant marine. One of China’s newest space weapons is a microsatellite, which Beijing calls a “parasite satellite,” designed to attach itself to target satellites like a limpet and to damage or disable the target satellite on command. The United States has deployed no defenses against them. While the Russians, Chinese and others have forged ahead with space-based weapons, the Clinton/Gore administration deliberately sought to deny the United States access to that high military frontier. Clinton line-item vetoed congressionally mandated funding for the military space plane, a low-cost craft that could launch and reach anywhere on the planet in 45 minutes or less; for the KE-ASAT; and for the Clementine, a lunar-exploration probe that doubled as a component of a missile-defense system. China gets the bulk of its technology from Russia — and its financing from the West. “An emerging dimension of China’s ability to militarize space and challenge our assets there is that of finance or the funding side,” says Roger Robinson, a key National Security Council official in the Reagan administration who is chairman of the William J. Casey Institute at the Center for Security Policy. “We have been looking at China in this regard — that is, the national-security dimensions of their use of our capital markets and our bond markets over the past four years, in what we call a capital-markets transparency initiative, and have come up with some troubling findings. There are firms, state-owned firms, in particular, that are very close to the Chinese PLA [People’s Liberation Army], as well as their military-intelligence capability, that are attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in our markets” (see “China Cashes In,” Feb. 24, 2000). “At the national level, this country needs a national vision on space,” says Gen. Arnold. “We need a very smart group of people at the very top that can direct civil, commercial, international, DoD [Department of Defense] and intelligence communities on exactly what this country wants to do.” Right now, the United States doesn’t have one. The White House National Security Council staffer responsible for space policy is a newly minted graduate student fresh from the Bush presidential campaign. Failure to continue to dominate space, warns James Schlesinger, former CIA chief and secretary of defense, will mean the downfall of the United States as a world power. “Our position depends upon space, space sensors, space communications, space intelligence and, also, guiding our weapons accurately from space. All of this is a marvelous achievement, but it creates for us a potential vulnerability — and that is if we are somehow or other cut off, or our ability to utilize space is reduced, we are going to be engaged around the world in ways that the U.S. public will not particularly tolerate, in that we are likely to come home with large numbers of bodies in bags. The consequence,” says Schlesinger, “is that the public will be turned off. So our international role might come crashing down. And the moral of the story is that we have to protect the usage of space.” <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html <A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of [EMAIL PROTECTED]</A> http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
