Posted on: Sunday, June 5, 2005
COMMENTARY
Space weaponry costly, outdated defense plan
By Frances FitzGerald
For some time now the Air Force has been pressing the White House for a new national-security directive that would permit the deployment of space weaponry. A decision could come within weeks.
Most space-to-ground weapons remain futuristic, but previous presidents and Congresses have chosen not to deploy anti-satellite weapons, fearing that doing so would set off an arms race and endanger the information systems the United States relies on. The new directive, if approved, would constitute a historic change in policy as radical as President Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive war.
Yet the idea of putting weapons in space has its roots in American national mythology and in a strain of 19th-century strategic thinking that, curiously enough, seems quite close to that of the Bush administration.
In January 2001 the National Space Commission, which had been led by Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense designate, warned the incoming President Bush of the potential for a "space Pearl Harbor." The bumper-sticker phrase dramatized a real concern for American defense planners.
Over the years the military has become more and more dependent on satellites for navigation, targeting, command-and-control and other essential functions, yet satellites are highly vulnerable. They can be shot down with guided missiles, their ground transmitters can be attacked and the communication links between the two can be jammed.
The space policy of the Clinton administration emphasized defensive measures and arms control to deal with these threats, but the Rumsfeld commission called for "the option to deploy weapons in space" and a new policy to guide their development.
In 2002 Bush withdrew from the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty, which banned space-based missile defenses, and ordered a policy review. Since then the Air Force and other military commands have called for deploying weapons that could cripple other countries' orbiters, a space-based missile defense system and other weapons that could rapidly attack targets anywhere on earth.
The strategic advantage of some of these systems, however, is difficult to discern. A space-based ground attack system would require dozens of satellites and cost 50 to 100 times as much as ballistic missiles that can do the same job. As for antisatellite weapons, they would do nothing to defend our satellites.
Whatever utility such weapons might have, the problem with all of them is that spacecraft in orbit are vulnerable to relatively low-tech countermeasures. And if other countries, particularly Russia or China, were faced with a space weapon that could cripple their communications or strike them without warning, they might react just as the United States would under similar circumstances.
Air Force reports speak of establishing "space control" or "space superiority," defining both as "freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack" in space. The metaphors that surround these assertions tend to come from old-fashioned conventional warfare. "The first principle that should guide air and space professionals is the imperative to control the high ground," a policy paper, "Counterspace Operations," tells us.
Yet space is not so much a high ground as it as a highway — and in some orbits it is as crowded as the New Jersey Turnpike, mostly with commercial satellites and space debris. Any space-based weapon would have to join this procession and roll along with the rest of the traffic.
How putting more or better weapons in orbit would end their vulnerability Air Force officials have yet to explain. But clearly they have faith that technology will find a way.
"Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny," Gen. Lance Lord, chief of the Air Force Space Command, said at an Air Force conference last September. "Simply put, it's the American way of fighting," he told Congress recently.
The Air Force's enthusiasm for space weaponry accords with the Bush administration's preference for military superiority over arms control and with Rumsfeld's view that the United States should fight with high-tech weaponry and as few troops as possible.
As Lord's rhetoric suggests, these approaches are hardly novel. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Midwestern Republicans, among them Sen. Albert Beveridge of Indiana and Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio, promoted similar strategies.
They were isolationists in regard to Europe, which they considered the corrupt Old World, but they rivaled Theodore Roosevelt in their enthusiasm for American imperial adventures to the south and the west.
They therefore became advocates of a powerful navy, for it could defend American shores against European powers and extend American reach through the Caribbean and into the Pacific. Later they resisted plans for enlarging the Army because the only function of a large army, as they saw it, would be to intervene in European conflicts. With the advent of the airplane, they championed the air force as a substitute for boots on the ground.
In effect their strategy was to project power while remaining isolated: in terms of the national mythology, they wanted America to pursue its God-given mission abroad while remaining the virgin land. While the Democrats would fight land wars, compromise and negotiate, Midwestern Republicans would preach the American way of life and command the world from the heights of the air and the distances of the sea. Their ideal would surely have been space weaponry.
But the record of the last century suggests that, like long-range bombers and aircraft carriers, killer satellites will not save the United States from the messy realities of international engagement.
Frances FitzGerald, author of "Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War," wrote this commentary for the New York Times.
