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Robo Warriors and Millennial Weapons Posted Feb. 25, 2002 By J. Michael Waller Imagine new defense technologies that would allow the Pentagon to decrease drastically its nuclear arsenal, slash the size of the U.S. armed forces and reduce the number of military bases abroad. The new technologies would enhance the safety of U.S. servicemen and women, kill fewer of the enemy and result in less collateral damage that harms and kills innocent civilians abroad. All the while, they practically ensure quick military victories and protect Americans from harm at home. These technologies are real. Some, as shown recently in Afghanistan, are operational. More are on the way. Surprisingly, they are running into opposition not only among the "Axis of Evil" and potential future adversaries, but by U.S. allies and even activists and politicians in this country. Imagine if a terrorist such as Osama bin Laden had no time to hide while the U.S. massed land, naval and air forces against him. Instead, within 30 minutes of an order from the president, the terrorist chief and his lieutenants would be eliminated by a sudden bolt from the sky. That technology doesn't exist. But it could in the not-too-distant future, thanks to the proved successes of space-based systems now crucial to the U.S. military. Space technology helped make possible the awesome precision attacks against terrorists in Afghanistan as they fled in their Toyota pickup trucks, hid in mud huts and caves and used Red Cross buildings as weapons depots. These attacks were, of course, supported by the networking of U.S. Special Operations Forces on the ground with their commanders far afield, bomber pilots in the sky and even robotic drones armed with Hellfire missiles. The new space technologies have revolutionized the way the United States, the world's lone superpower, wages war. But the more dependent the United States becomes on space, the more vulnerable it becomes to other forms of attack. It's no longer sufficient to dominate the sea and sky, according to senior Pentagon officials. The United States will maintain its ability to fight swift, decisive victories with few casualties only as long as it has unchallenged control of space beyond the atmosphere. Terrorists got away in Afghanistan partly because of the time it took for U.S. and British forces to bomb them once they were sighted. Jet aircraft and cruise missiles flying from Pakistan, the Arabian Sea or Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean took two to eight hours to reach their marks and drop ordnance on individual terrorists sighted at certain targets. The United States had to bomb at night when the terrorists were sleeping. To shorten response time between sighting and striking, U.S. forces ultimately flew flights to loiter in the skies above Afghanistan in search of what Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld calls targets of "opportunity." Space-based weapons, advocates say, would have done the job more quickly. Though still in the developmental stage, such orbiting weapons could deliver ordnance to their targets anywhere on Earth in less than 30 minutes, proponents say. With spaceborne lasers and other directed-energy weapons still at least two decades away from deployment, the Pentagon is considering more near-term solutions. One project under development is a constellation of orbiting satellites armed with neither lasers nor explosives but simple tungsten rods. These rods, fired like arrows from space, enter the atmosphere like meteorites and survive re-entry, precision-striking targets on Earth at a hypervelocity of 6 kilometers (3.72 miles) per second. "The seismic shock of the tungsten rod would collapse the entire building," says a U.S. military source familiar with the project. Though more controversial among U.S. critics than nuclear weapons, such satellite-based arms — which the U.S. Space Command (SPACECOM) calls "space-based Earth-strike weapons" — theoretically could allow the United States to destroy any enemy at any time with a minimum of troop, ship or aircraft movement and without threatening a holocaust with weapons of mass destruction. And that has foreign governments apoplectic, because it obliterates Cold War deterrence theories of mutual-assured destruction (MAD) and arms control, leaving the United States in effective military control of the world. SPACECOM is one of nine unified commands of the U.S. military that is responsible for combining Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force operations under its area of jurisdiction. The U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) is responsible for U.S. military activity in central and southern Asia, for instance, and it and other commands combine land, sea and air assets in a geographic region. But, according to a command spokesman, SPACECOM integrates "space forces and space-derived information with land, sea and air forces." SPACECOM isn't new. However, events since the Sept. 11 attacks on New York City and Washington have begun to wrench the military from the air, land and sea mind-set of the previous century and toward a new orientation based on exo-atmospheric space. Rumsfeld was well-versed in the opportunities this paradigm shift affords before President George W. Bush was elected and named him to lead the Pentagon. During the last years of the Clinton administration, a worried Congress chafed at the White House's refusal to spend appropriated monies on missile defense and other military space programs, as well as line-item-vetoed funding of a promising military space plane that could reach any point in the world within 45 minutes of takeoff. Lawmakers commissioned Rumsfeld to chair a bipartisan Commission on National Security Space Management and Organization. Known as the Space Commission for short, the group issued its findings a year ago, at about the time newly elected president Bush tapped Rumsfeld for the Pentagon job. The conclusion: The U.S. military must maintain unchallenged control of space in order to protect the national economy and the critical information-based infrastructure on which modern society had come to depend, and to ensure the ability to fight and defeat any foe by controlling space-based communications. Rumsfeld was as well-informed as any policymaker on the military revolution in space and took office with a mission firmly in mind. The new Pentagon chief soon took the first steps to develop that mission, heading up a Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) to, in his words, "establish a new strategy for America's defense that would embrace uncertainty and contend with surprise, a strategy premised on the idea that to be effective abroad America must be safe at home. It sought to set the conditions to extend America's influence and preserve America's security." Completed in late summer 2001 and released Sept. 30, the QDR stated, "Space and information operations have become the backbone of networked, highly distributed commercial civilian and military capabilities. This opens up the possibility that space control — the exploitation of space and the denial of the use of space to adversaries — will become a key objective in future military competition." The QDR added, "A key objective for [military] transformation … is not only to ensure the U.S. ability to exploit space for military purposes, but also as required to deny an adversary's ability to do so." Soon, things began to change. In December, the Air Force issued standards, missions and an acquisition time line to revive the military space plane to deliver military payloads to space quickly and cheaply, place them in orbit and project U.S. power both into space and back to the ground. The broad transformation of the U.S. armed forces to face new threats radically will change the face of the military (see "Command Performance," March 4). Huge standing armies may become obsolete. And as the U.S. military shrinks in size, it becomes increasingly dependent on more assets in space, according to the Federation of American Scientists' Space Policy Project. This ultimately may disturb anti-U.S. forces around the world, as the notion of "global security" likewise requires more satellites in space to measure, monitor, warn and enforce as more and more countries become space powers. Meanwhile, the war against terrorism is straining the already-huge capabilities of SPACECOM. Satnews, a space-industry news service, reports that the United States had to divert satellites that monitor radio and mobile phones in Axis of Evil states such as Iraq and North Korea in order to track terrorists in Afghanistan. The system wasn't necessarily overloaded, according to Satnews, but a wider war might severely strain it. That system includes satellites that are used to conduct a wide variety of reconnaissance activities. These capabilities embrace remote sensing, signals intelligence, imagery intelligence, measurement and signature intelligence, wide area and ocean surveillance, reconnaissance, weather forecasting as an aid in battle planning, pinpoint navigation, precision bombing, bomb-damage assessments and detections of missile launches. Then network commanders and combatants in-theater and around the world can respond, enabling transmissions of real-time audio, video and virtual communications. One of the crucial tools of increasing value is the Global Positioning System (GPS), an orbiting network of 24 satellites that provide latitude, longitude and altitude. GPS is more vital than ever to the new military, aiding in the coordination of special operations on the ground and enabling planes flying at high altitudes to drop precision-guided munitions invisibly and silently on their targets below. It helps guide cruise missiles and the new unmanned-aerial-vehicle robot planes, such as the CIA's Predator, that collect imagery of the battlefield and even hunt down and kill terrorists in their vehicles. It also provides exact coordinates for air, land and sea navigation. High-tech soldiers in the field, each equipped with a GPS receiver to plot their locations, have their own Internet provider or e-mail address through which they can send and receive voice and digital messages and imagery via a wireless antenna attached to their gear. Thanks to these communications devices and small portable computers, combatants can see the battle space just as their commanders do and can transmit imagery of their situations around the world to Washington in real-time. Then there is the role of space in defending America, its citizens and its allies against incoming ballistic missiles. Antiballistic-missile capability also can be used to protect against attacks on U.S. space assets. Intelligence experts tell Insight that a minor power such as Iran or North Korea, with the expected ability to fire an intercontinental ballistic missile or launch a satellite into orbit, could destroy the world's low-altitude satellites by firing a nuclear warhead into space to explode in what is called an exo-atmospheric nuclear detonation. The blast would create artificial belts of radioactivity in the orbits of most satellites, destroying the circuitry of all but those hardened against nuclear attack. Some activists have been opposing space-based weapons for years. As early as 1985 the left-wing Union of Concerned Scientists issued an "Appeal by American Scientists to Ban Space Weapons." A statement signed by 700 members of the National Academy of Sciences declared, "Outer space must remain free of any weapons. It should be preserved as an arena for nonthreatening uses: peaceful cooperation, exploration and scientific discovery among all nations." The campaign languished along with a parallel Soviet "active-measures" operation until the United States drew closer to developing effective space-based components of a missile-defense system. The People's Republic of China then revived this propaganda issue at the world level. In February 2000, Beijing formally proposed a global treaty to ban the testing, deployment or use of space weapons. Moscow immediately seconded the motion. Several months later, at the 2000 Millennium Summit of the United Nations in New York City, Russian President Vladimir Putin called for a U.N. conference on "preventing the militarization of space." China followed again with a call for a U.N. ban on the "weaponization of space," which the Kremlin immediately embraced. Before Sept. 11, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) announced his intention to prohibit the Pentagon from deploying weapons in space. "The time has come to ban the further weaponization of space," Kucinich announced in a July 26, 2001, statement. "We must work toward the elimination of all nuclear weapons, and an end to policies which cause this country to move toward the weaponization of space." In January, even after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, Kucinich introduced HR 3616, the Space Preservation Act of 2002, that would "implement a ban on space-based weapons of the United States" and "immediately order the termination of research and development, testing, manufacturing, production and deployment of all space-based weapons of the United States." Kucinich aide Doug Gordon tells Insight the process is just "getting rolling." Never mind that space-based weapons, and the ability to destroy threats to commercial satellites on which the U.S. economy depends, are the next logical step in the American tradition, according to retired Air Force Lt. Col. Richard Earl Hansen, in a paper for Maxwell Air Force Base. "Such expectations would parallel our ocean naval forces providing protection for our merchantmen, tankers and fishing fleets, or as the cavalry in our early West escorted and defended the prairie schooners venturing into our unpopulated frontiers." In a possible era when adversaries of the United States can bring down its information infrastructure by easy-to-launch and hard-to-detect space mines, jam space-to-earth communications and even hijack orbiting space assets, Hansen makes clear, the United States must achieve early space dominance "to guarantee freedom of passage." J. Michael Waller is a senior writer for Insight magazine. |
