Abstract
During his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Forces Committee, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke of “bringing the American military successfully into the twenty-first century.” Of course. Any defense secretary-designate would have used that phrase.
But on the same day–January 11–the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization (the “Space Commission”) issued its glossy, 152-page, four-color report.
Rumsfeld chaired the group, and the report offers a tantalizing and unsettling glimpse into what the new defense secretary meant by his “twenty-first century” bromide.
Apparently, Rumsfeld will push vigorously for the weap-onization of space, sooner rather than later.
The health of the U.S. economy as well as the effectiveness of its military forces, says the Space Commission report, are vitally linked to the continued functioning of a vast array of space-based “assets”–communication, weather, global positioning, spy, surveillance, and scientific satellites.
Although the United States is without peer among “space-faring” nations, the report notes, its commanding lead also makes the country vulnerable to “state and non-state actors hostile to the United States and its interests.” The economy would be disastrously disrupted and the ability to fight high-tech wars terminally compromised if a significant number of these space assets were disabled or destroyed in a “Space Pearl Harbor.”
Commission members were unanimous in finding that the United States has “an urgent interest in promoting and protecting the peaceful use of space and in developing the technologies and operational capabilities that its objectives in space require.”
The latter part of that sentence provides the report's focus. To protect the U.S. economy as well as the economies of its friends and allies, the U.S. military must evolve into a ground, sea, air, and space force. It must be prepared to fight in all four mediums; it must be willing to weaponize space.
“The commissioners appreciate the sensitivity that surrounds the notion of weapons in space for offensive or defensive purposes. They also believe, however, that to ignore the issue would be a disservice to the nation.” The president should “have the option to deploy weapons in space to deter threats to, and if necessary, defend against attacks on U.S. interests.”
If Defense Secretary Rumsfeld succeeds in putting arms in space, it would overturn more than 40 years of national policy dating back to the Eisenhower years.
Eisenhower was repeatedly pressed in the late 1950s by military men and think-tank warriors to counter what they believed was the space-power threat from the post-Sputnik Soviet Union. The president, they said, should get on with the task of putting weapons on the moon and perhaps in orbit. Instead, he declared that the moon and space itself should be kept weapon-free.
But Eisenhower did not bar the secret introduction of a host of military-oriented satellites, particularly spy satellites, into near-Earth space. Such instruments, he believed, were defensive in character, allowing the United States to more reliably understand what the hyper-secretive Soviet Union was up to.
U.S. space policy has had a schizophrenic quality since then. Although the United States and the Soviet Union declared throughout the Cold War in every conceivable forum that space should be dedicated to peaceful purposes, both nations deployed military intelligence-gathering and communication satellites.
In 1985, the United States established U.S. Space Command, a joint air force, army, navy, and marines operation based in Colorado Springs. The command was charged with the task of coordinating existing military operations in space and developing theory and plans for the future.
In 1998, Space Command issued a long-range conceptual plan outlining how the United States should aim to someday control space, thus achieving “full spectrum dominance of the battlespace” (the “battlespace” being Earth).
The plan envisioned a space-based anti-ballistic missile system, land- and space-based anti-satellite systems, and a variety of orbiting weapons that could strike terrestrial targets. These weapons were described as extending deterrence into space; thus, they would be “non-aggressive.”
Nevertheless, as Space Command ritually notes, the National Command Authority of the United States–chiefly, the president–has never authorized placing weapons in space.
Sen. Bob Smith, a New Hampshire Republican, has repeatedly complained that the air force, whose officers dominate the Space Command hierarchy, speaks loudly about its “aerospace mission” but carries a small stick.
Despite their rhetoric, says Smith, too many air force officers have been content to limit the role of space to “force enhancement.” When push comes to shove, the air force still loves its air-breathing craft.
In November 1998 Smith said in a policy speech that “even the air force's Space Warfare Center and Space Battlelab are focused primarily on figuring out how to use space systems to put information into the cockpit in order to drop bombs from aircraft more accurately. This is not space warfare.”
Then, in 1999, Smith, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and chairman of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee, pushed through legislation establishing the Space Commission.
“The annual [Defense] budgets repeatedly short-change space programs,” Smith said in December at a roundtable sponsored by the Center for Security Policy. “The annual realignment of funds at the end of each fiscal year disproportionately takes money from space programs to fund other service priorities; people without space background are promoted ahead of space officers; and treaties have negotiated away our space advantage.”
That is why, he said, he established the Space Commission. His choice for chairman: Donald Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld was an obvious choice. Widely regarded by Republicans and many Democrats as bright, energetic, tenacious, and savvy, Rumsfeld had been a member of Congress, ambassador to nato, White House chief of staff in the Ford administration, and Ford's second secretary of defense.
After leaving Washington to work in private industry, he remained involved in national security matters, most notably as chairman of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States.
That commission's findings were released in July 1998 in a document universally referred to as the “Rumsfeld report.” The commission suggested that North Korea or Iran could–not would–build crude and inaccurate missiles capable of reaching the U.S. mainland within five years after making a decision to do so.
A month later, North Korea launched a three-stage rocket over Japanese territory in a failed attempt to insert a satellite into orbit. Failed or not, the attempt induced yet another round of hysteria over the North Korean “threat” and made Rumsfeld seem exceptionally prescient.
Although the report did not comment on the wisdom of building a national missile defense system (that question was beyond its mandate), it fulfilled its purpose by providing a healthy supply of ammunition for the proponents of the system.
Rumsfeld II–the report issued by the Space Commission–offers only a handful of somewhat ambiguous formal recommendations. But it is stuffed with concrete scenarios, guidelines, and suggestions. Among them, the United States should:
• Develop and test a variety of anti-satellite systems. “The senior political and military leadership needs to test these capabilities in exercises on a regular basis, both to keep the armed forces proficient in their use and to bolster their deterrent value.”
By “test,” the commissioners mean computer simulations and war games, of course. But they also want “live-fire events,” requiring “testing ranges in space and procedures for their use that protect the on-orbit assets of the United States and other space-faring nations.”
• Greatly improve the U.S. ability to launch many satellites quickly–that is, build a “surge” capacity sufficient to handle a national emergency.
• Modernize and expand the space surveillance network to be able to track ever-smaller objects in space. The United States should also build systems that could observe earth-bound objects–tanks, ships, aircraft and the like–on a near realtime basis, 24 hours a day.
• In the area of “homeland defense,” the report turns exceedingly cagey, perhaps because a space-based national missile defense system would clearly violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The report merely says (in full):
“Some believe the ballistic missile defense mission is best performed when both sensors and interceptors are deployed in space. Effective sensors make countermea-sures more difficult, and interceptors make it possible to destroy a missile shortly after launch, before either warhead or counter-measures are released.”
• Develop the capability to project power from space. “Many think of space only as a place for passive collection of images or signals or a switchboard that can quickly pass information back and forth over long distances.
“It is also possible to project power through and from space in response to events anywhere in the world. Unlike weapons from aircraft, land forces, or ships, space missions initiated from earth or space could be carried out with little transit, information, or weather delay.
“Having this capability would give the United States a much stronger deterrent and, in a conflict, an extraordinary military advantage.”
The report also outlines a flock of measures designed to strengthen space-based intelligence capabilities, including the greater use of commercial imagery, which would free up government satellites “for more challenging, point-target reconnaissance.”
The report suggests a host of possibilities for restructuring the management of military-space activities. Restructuring would help “create and sustain a cadre of space professionals”–ready, willing, and able to fight for resources against their counterparts in the army, navy, and air-breathing air force. In fact, the bulk of the report is devoted to ways in which the military and bureaucratic space infrastructure could be redesigned and rationalized.
But the heart of the report lies in the bald assertion that it is time to weaponize space. “There is,” the report says, “no blanket prohibition in international law on placing or using weapons in space, applying force from space to earth, or conducting military operations in and through space.”
The commission is right. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 bans weapons of mass destruction only, not other types of weapons.
The commissioners realized, however, that a U.S. decision to weaponize space would stir international concern. But that concern would be misplaced, they said, because U.S. space weapons would be created solely for “defensive” and “non-aggressive” purposes.
“To counter U.S. advantages in space, other states and international organizations have sought agreements that would restrict the use of space. For example, nearly every year, the U.N. General Assembly passes a resolution calling for the prevention of ‘an arms race in outer space’ by prohibiting all space weapons….
“The United States should seek to preserve the space weapons regime established by the Outer Space Treaty, particularly the traditional interpretation of the treaty's ‘peaceful purposes’ language to mean that both self-defense and non-aggressive military use of space are allowed.”
The report fails to mention that each year the United States blocks any substantive discussion at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva on a new treaty to ban all weapons in space.