http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/nation/nationalsecurity/A58813-2001Jan28.html
Space Is Playing Field For Newest War Game
Air Force Exercise Shows Shift in Focus
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 29, 2001; Page A01
SCHRIEVER AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. -- Last week, the possibility of war in space
moved from pure science fiction created in Hollywood to realistic planning done
here by the Air Force.
Spurred by the increased reliance of the U.S. military and the U.S. economy on
satellites, and facing a new secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, who is
more focused on space than his predecessors were, the Air Force's Space Warfare
Center here staged the military's first major war game to focus on space as the
primary theater of operations, rather than just a supporting arena for combat on
earth. The scenario was growing tension between the United States and China in
2017.
"We never really play space," Maj. Gen. William R. Looney III said. "The purpose
of this game was to focus on how we really would act in space."
The unprecedented game, involving 250 participants playing for five days on an
isolated, super-secure base on the high plains east of Colorado Springs, was the
most visible manifestation of a little-noticed but major shift in the armed
forces over the last decade.
The Gulf War showed the U.S. military for the first time how important space
could be to its combat operations -- for communications, for the transmission of
imagery and even for using global positioning satellites to tell ground troops
where they are. The end of the Cold War allowed many satellites to be shifted
from being used primarily for monitoring Soviet nuclear facilities to supporting
the field operations of the U.S. military.
But military thinkers began to worry that this new reliance on space was
creating new vulnerabilities. Suddenly, one of the best ways to disrupt a U.S.
offensive against Iraq, for example, appeared to be jamming the satellites on
which the Americans relied or blowing up the ground station back in the United
States that controlled the satellites transmitting targeting data.
In response, the Air Force over the last year focused more on space -- not just
how to operate there, but how to protect operations and attack others in space.
It established a new "space operations directorate" at Air Force headquarters,
started a new Space Warfare School and activated two new units: the 76th Space
Control Squadron, whose name is really a euphemism for fighting in space, and
the 527th Space Aggressor Squadron, whose mission is to probe the U.S. military
for new vulnerabilities.
All those steps come as Rumsfeld, who just finished leading a congressional
commission on space and national security issues, takes over the top job at the
Pentagon. Among other things, his commission's report hinted that if the Air
Force doesn't get more serious about space, the Pentagon should consider
establishing a new "Space Corps."
So, perhaps to show that it is giving space its due, the Air Force held its
first space war game here, and even invited reporters inside for a few hours.
The players worked in a huge building behind two sets of security checkpoints,
the second of which features two motion detectors, four surveillance cameras and
a double-fenced gate with a "vehicle entrapment area."
Yet officials were notably jumpy about discussing specifics with the reporters
they brought in. "We're doing something a little unprecedented, bringing press
into the middle of a classified war game," said Col. Robert E. Ryals, deputy
commander of the Space Warfare Center here.
The U.S. military has a long tradition of conducting war games, not so much to
predict whether a war will occur, but to figure out how to use new weapons, how
to best organize the military and how political considerations might shape the
conduct of war.
After World War II, Adm. Chester W. Nimitz commented that the war in the Pacific
had been gamed so frequently at the Naval War College during the 1930s that
"nothing that happened during the war was a surprise -- absolutely nothing
except the kamikaze tactics towards the end of the war. We had not visualized
these."
Last week's space war game was set in 2017, with country "Red" massing its
forces for a possible attack on its small neighbor, "Brown," which then asked
"Blue" for help. Officials described "Red" only as a "near-peer competitor," but
participants said Red was China and Blue was the United States. When asked
directly about this, Lt. Col. Donald Miles, an Air Force spokesman, said, "We
don't talk about countries."
Going with the conventional wisdom in the U.S. military, the game assumed that
the heavens will be full of weapons by 2017. Both Red and Blue possessed
microsatellites that can maneuver against other satellites, blocking their view,
jamming their transmissions or even frying their electronics with radiation.
Both also had ground-based lasers that could
