Space – FAS Redefines the Threat

This year could finally see a public debate about whether the United States should weaponize space. Concern has been growing about the wisdom of — or need for — breaking the long-standing U.S. and world tradition that space be used for peaceful uses only. In the president’s first term, controversy over mis­sile defense took the limelight from the drive toward weaponization — by vehicles aimed to hit other vehicles in space, in-orbit explosions, space-based directed energy beams, and other means. Now the issue may come into its own. Less well known programs like these may receive sharper scrutiny as the $5 billion monthly cost of our military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan puts more pressure for cuts in the overall $400 million defense budget.

Ensuring America’s Space Security, the report of the FAS Panel on Weapons in Space, should be a major contribution to any debate over U.S. military space activities. It is one of the few analyses laying out feasible alternative responses to threats to U.S. space assets, including threats said to require space weapons in response.

The FAS convened the panel in 2002, react­ing to stepped-up pressure to fund space weapons. First a blue ribbon group known as the Rumsfeld Commission on Space, in a January 11, 2001 report, laid out the rationales for weapons in space to protect U.S. satellites. Soon after, when its chair Donald Rumsfeld became defense secretary, he echoed these statements as official policy. In February 2001, for example, Rumsfeld announced to Congress that space would be one of “six key transformational goals around which we will focus our defense strategy and develop our force.” The U.S. goal is “to maintain unhindered access to space — and protect U.S. space capabilities from enemy attack,” he said. “Protection” in this and other statements included defending U.S. civilian and military space assets from space.

The door opened further to weaponization when the administration withdrew from the 1972 ABM Treaty. This move freed us from the treaty’s ban on testing weapons in space as part of a ballistic missile defense system. Several missile defense (MD) programs touted by the administration planned to test weapons in space and eventually deploy anti-missile “shooters” there. Four years on, several of these have suffered technical difficulties and overruns, and Congress has cut back even the diminished Pentagon requests for them. Among those that are still controversial is a test from a planned Nfire satellite, which would release a “kill vehicle” that would intercept (or fly close by) a test-fired ballistic missile. Partly due to concerns that the test was tantamount to weaponization, it has been officially put off from 2004 to 2006, although MD and weaponization advocates in Congress are pushing for it, almost as a matter of principle.

Beyond claiming that weapons could be needed in space to defend U.S. assets, some Air Force officials now assert an offensive role for space weapons. That service’s 2004 Flight Transformation Plan listed several possible weapons—such as “hypervelocity rod bundles” dropped from a spacecraft to targets below, which the press quickly dubbed “rods of God.” A new Air Force Counterspace Operations Doctrine issued last August envisions preemptive actions against satellite systems used by others. Meanwhile, the threats to U.S. satellites outlined in 2001 have failed to materialize.

Reviewing each of eight supposed threats to space assets, the FAS panel found alter­native responses to be more effective, cheaper, and more technologically certain. As outlined in the report draft (Public Interest Report Summer 2004, Vol. 57 No. 3, page 11), useful steps include hardening of some satellites, ready quick launch of replacement satellites, and recalibrating models that claim that satellites could be knocked out by nuclear explosions in their orbital path.

Ensuring America’s Space Security lays out an alternative course for the United States in space and answers concerns about threats, at least in the near term. Most of our pro­posed alternatives will add to international and U.S. security (such as data-sharing with some other nations to improve space moni­toring). On the other hand, unilateral U.S. weaponization seems not only needless militarily but will destabilize security by daring our adversaries to attack us in space once we have ended the peaceful-uses policy for them.

Given available, more practical alternatives, one must ask why some in the Air Force and Congress insist that the United States weaponize space. Possibly proponents want to add to U.S. military dominance and, by doing so, to increase U.S geopolitical clout. One could view this determination as similar to unilateral policies followed elsewhere. If there is no public debate soon, this form of U.S. dominance may soon extend from Earth into a newly weaponized space.